The end of race-based affirmative action and what comes next
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action was no longer allowed in college admissions. The ruling was widely expected and came as a surprise to almost no one. I haven’t read the relevant statute that was being argued over and I’m not a constitutional scholar so I can't say the decision was right or wrong based on either of those things. From an outcome standpoint, I think it was the right decision. Race-based affirmative action is an idea whose time has gone. It’s now time to move on to other, more effective and fair ways of achieving diversity of all kinds.
The reaction from many Democrats and those on the left was predictable. They almost all disagreed with the ruling and some were apoplectic. The last few days were good days to avoid being on social media. From listening to many on the left, you could be forgiven for thinking all is lost and everything’s awful. People really need to get a grip. The sky is hardly falling.
As emotional an issue as it is, race-based affirmative action in college admissions was never relevant for almost everyone. For those who don’t go to college, it had no relevance at all. Even for those who go to college, it was only used by the most selective schools. For the huge majority of college students, it never mattered either way.
The idea that college campuses are all going to look radically different soon is false. Some of the more elite schools may be less diverse, but others may be even more so. For example, applicants who don’t get into Harvard now may wind up going to other elite, but not as elite schools. If someone is applying to a place like Harvard, they’re almost certainly applying to other top notch places, too. They will get into somewhere good and will do well in life. Nobody is going to be living under a bridge because they couldn’t get into the most elite schools.
In the case of Harvard, there can be no denying that the policy in place was deliberately discriminatory against Asian applicants. Looking at how such applicants were treated, there is no other conclusion to draw. I don’t care how much anyone tries to claim otherwise, that is what was going on. It was grotesque, indefensible and a de facto quota system. That is not a valid way to achieve diversity.
Going forward, I would love to think that the Harvards of the world will use class-based affirmative action and expand their class sizes. It should go without saying that they need to eliminate legacy admissions. In the short-term, I’m not optimistic. Even before the ruling came out, places like Harvard were preparing for it and were trying to find ways to get around it. That is really what is going on with such schools dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission. I think legacy admissions will be done away with, but not without a fight and places like Harvard will only do it kicking and screaming.
If Harvard and similar institutions wanted to, they could not only enroll more lower-income students and expand their class size, they could give away some of their massive endowments. I think it would be a good idea to require university endowments above a specified amount, say, $5 billion, to have to give away a certain percentage of it each year to educational initiatives of some sort.
Places like Harvard and Yale could do wonders just by giving away a small fraction of their endowments. Both have endowments of more than $40 billion. New Haven is a poor city that hasn’t seen good days in a long time. A little of that money could potentially turn it into an economic powerhouse. A school like Columbia could give away some its endowment to schools in the New York City area that serve as engines of mass upward mobility such as CUNY. I’m not holding my breath on that happening, but that is because those schools have chosen not to do it. Nothing is preventing them from changing course.
Elite universities who claim to want to enroll more black and Hispanic students could walk the walk by trying to reach out to more of them. They could spend money on efforts to find such students in low-income areas and help them apply. They could go even further and start programs to reach those students at a younger age and help them with test preparation. Doing that, of course, would cost money and would mean they would have to give up some tuition dollars, which they aren’t eager to do.
Diversity is a good goal and should be strived for. The problem is that race-based affirmative action was, at best, a very imperfect way to do it. I mentioned in my last piece that it’s much cheaper for elite universities to have a class that is racially diverse, but economically well off. Race-based affirmative action allowed them to get away with that. What those universities were effectively saying is that they care more about how they look than what they were actually doing.
The good news is that there are success stories of places that have achieved diversity, both racially and economically, by using class-based metrics. I recommend reading this piece in the New York Times that was published over the weekend. It is about the UC-Davis Medical School and what it has achieved using class-based metrics. Not only has it achieved racial diversity, it has also enrolled a far larger number of students from low-income backgrounds than most other medical schools. I don’t know how replicable what they did is, but it is certainly something universities everywhere would be wise to look at.
Not only was race-based affirmative action never meant to last forever, it was also never meant to be the only policy solution. The reason there are so many disparities at the college level is because there are so many disparities at the K-12 level. Race-based affirmative action was a temporary band-aid for that, but it was not meant to substitute for fixing it. Addressing disparities between black and Hispanic students and white and Asian students is critical and needs to be tackled head-on.
Advocates of race-based affirmative action are right about those disparities at the K-12 level existing and being a major problem. They are wrong in relying on it to make up for those disparities. Not only is closing that gap important for those going to college, but it is arguably even more critical for those who don’t go to college, which is most people. That we had decades of race-based affirmative action in place and those disparities are still large is a major indictment of most everyone.
What is the best way to reduce those disparities? Unfortunately, I have no idea. Solving K-12 education has proven to be one of the hardest things there is. It seems like almost nothing anyone tries has worked, at least not on a large scale. I wish there was one neat trick you could do that would work everywhere and help everyone, but I doubt that exists. There may be people out there who could give a more satisfactory and confident answer about what to do, but I’m not one of them. Still, that is no excuse for not trying.
As much as I favor class-based affirmative action, it has limits. The number of slots available at the higher education level is fixed and it doesn’t address that. Universities have a role to play here. They could expand their enrollment. That may not be feasible for every one of them, but it absolutely is for plenty of them. One thing states can do is create more large, public universities. If that sounds outlandish, just know that UC-Irvine and UC-Santa Cruz have only been around since 1965. Both are outstanding schools and there is no reason such places can’t be created across the country.
Even doing all that is still not enough. Since most people don’t go to college, doing anything with higher education policy doesn’t address their needs. That is why college degree requirements should be loosened for virtually all jobs. Corporate America can do its part by getting rid of degree requirements for many of their positions. State and local governments can do the same and some already have.
In general, there is too much credentialism. Whether it is by law or custom, way too many jobs require college degrees when they shouldn’t. Even jobs that should require a degree or some kind of training often go too far with it. I have written before about that problem in the medical field. The same is true for lawyers.
None of this means college is bad. There has been a huge turn against college in general by those on the right over the last few years. That’s very unhealthy and a gross overreaction to both real and imagined problems on college campuses. It’s one thing to say we emphasize college too much and for too many people. It’s quite another to say that college is bad. The US has the best universities in the world by far and students from all over the world want to study here. That is a huge asset and it’s regrettable that so many on the right think we should throw it away and emulate Hungary.
The politics of it
Being a political junkie, there is no way I can write about the end of race-based affirmative action without discussing what it means for elections next year and beyond. The short answer is that it is likely to have almost no effect on 2024. However, long-term, Democrats now have an opportunity to pivot towards class-based framing of issues rather than on race. Whether they will take it remains to be seen, but I’m cautiously optimistic about it.
The reality is race-based affirmative is gone and is not coming back. It was never especially popular and was defeated at the ballot box twice in California. It was yet another issue where professional activists don’t speak for voters. Virtually all non-white professional activists, including Asians, favored it. Non-white voters were a different story. Some supported it, but they were hardly unanimous in doing so.
It may take time for Democrats and the left to process those facts, but I think they will because they will have to. Until they do that, it’s best to just stay quiet about the matter, which many of them seem to have decided to do. There have been the usual calls from left-wing groups to do court packing, but Biden has rightfully said no to it.
Beyond the next election, if Democrats and the left can move on to supporting class-based affirmative action it would be good not only on policy, but on messaging as well. Anything to get them to move on from talking like professional activists and academics would be good.[i] Some Democrats and those on the left, particularly advocacy groups, have made many errors since 2016 in how they approach non-white voters. The root cause of that has been treating professional activists like they speak for everyone in their group, which was very problematic during the Trump years.
The fact is the group that is most receptive to race-based appeals is educated, white liberals. I have emphasized that point before, but can never emphasize it enough. For most everyone else, such messaging and rhetoric, at best, sounds completely foreign and otherwise is off-putting. So much of that messaging rests on stereotypes about what someone must think because they are part of a certain group. Not only can that be false, but even if someone agrees with it, it may not be something they care about that much compared to other concerns. For example, while support for reparations among black voters is high, it is not a big priority and is something professional activists and academics are much more focused on.
It would be good for Democrats and especially left-wing advocacy groups to start treating non-white voters like anyone else. No matter what group someone is a part of, everyone is affected by many of the same things. The cost of housing and healthcare affects everyone, as does the quality of infrastructure and education. Non-white groups are often disproportionately impacted by those things, but there are plenty of white people who are impacted, too. One of the worst things about race-based messaging is that it basically says to any struggling white person that there is nothing in it for them.
If Democrats and the left start to advocate for class-based policies and talk about them accordingly, it will be a very positive development. However, contrary to what some may think, it will not mean Republicans get vanquished. I think focusing on class will help Democrats at the margins and over time could pay some serious dividends, but it won’t turn places like West Virginia and Kentucky blue. White working-class voters are a reliable Republican constituency and that will remain true even if Democrats do everything right. That could change decades from now, but if that happens a large part of their current coalition will be voting Republican and will likely offset it.
Long-term, i.e., 10, 30, 50 years, both parties will win plenty of elections. Neither is likely to be dominant on the national level. That phenomenon is something I have been writing about a bit lately. I seldom make large-scale predictions about the future, but this is one area where I feel comfortable doing it. Neither party has been dominant since the 1960s and I don’t see anything going on now that would change that.
Even if Democrats (or Republicans) advocated for all the right policies, had perfect messaging and used all the right rhetoric, that is just the stuff they can control. Electoral outcomes are often determined by things beyond any party’s control. For example, if the economy crashes on a president’s watch he/she is almost certainly going to not be reelected. It would be nice if talking the right way and advocating for good policies ensured you didn’t have to worry about anything else, but that’s not how it works.
Making things worse is that people just get tired of the party in the White House after a while. Winning it more than twice in a row is extraordinarily difficult even if the economy is booming as it was in 2000. Midterm elections almost always go against the party in the White House even if things are going well. If people want to find something to be upset about, they will have no trouble doing that, just ask Republicans in 1986.
Although neither party is likely to be dominant nationally, the market for takes suggesting otherwise is never in short supply. I can understand why that is, but it’s wrong. Those who claim they have the key to one party becoming dominant aren’t scammers or liars, at least not all of them. They are, however, generally self-serving. The implicit message from someone claiming they know the secret formula is basically, “Say and do all the things I want you to say and do anyway and you’ll never lose an election again.”
Beyond the self-serving nature of claiming to have solved the unsolvable puzzle, it gets at a deeper desire we all have. That is the desire to feel like we’re in control of things. It’s very disconcerting to know that who gets elected president or to other any office can depend on things nobody controls. Hugely consequential things have happened because of that. The New Deal, for example, happened because Republicans were wiped out by a disaster they didn’t create and couldn’t have prevented.
I wish it was the case that everything was in our control. It would be great to know that if Democrats just listened to me on everything they would never have to worry about anything else. Economic downturns, natural and other disasters, policy errors, voter fatigue and any other kind of problem would never be a concern. Maybe on Earth 2 that’s how things work, but that’s not where we live.
[i] Democratic candidates, especially in swing states and districts, are generally good about not doing that. Advocacy groups are a different story. It wasn’t that long ago when they acted and spoke like normal humans and it would be nice to go back to that. The problem with advocacy groups living in a bubble is that they have a large microphone and can amplify bad ideas, i.e., defund the police.