A post about affirmative action in law school kind of chrystalized a strain of thought that’s been running around in my head for a few years now.

Even if we disregard the logical failings and moral reprehensibility of an equality of outcome measure like Affirmative Action, somehow rationalizing it as some form of justice that we revisit the sins of the father upon the son (and on me, a freaking immigrant), I believe that AA actively hurts its supposed beneficiaries.

If you happened to attend one of the so-called elite institutions in the past few years, you would have noticed an interesting dichotomy in the aptitudes, background knowledge, and success rates of students. The separation didn’t occur along gender lines, or chosen fields of study. It didn’t correlate all that well with race or income, but both were clearly involved in some way. There were smart and hard-working minorities tearing their way through school alongside their pigmentally-challenged compatriots. But it was almost too easy to point out the AA and legacy kids. Whether intermediate spanish or an upper-level genetics seminar, the students that struggled consistently tended to be from those admissions groups. Now, I’m not saying that every kid given non-merit-based preference was like that, just a good many.

The thing about colleges is that some expect more of you from the get go than others do. You can get an outstanding education from a state school that rivals what you get at any ivy, but you have to ask for it. No amount of melanin in the world can make up for the fact that you hadn’t read Hamlet or taken calculus before you got to college when it comes to the substantive parts of your education. It would be far more in your best interest to go to a school that’ll allow you to set your own pace and make up for some of the deficiencies that aren’t necessarily any fault of your own before you throw yourself into the deep end. As an analogy, I’m starting to row again, but I’m training on my own. Because I’m old, slow, achy, and simultaneously fatter and skinnier than I’ve ever been in my life. I would gain nothing by training with a competitive team again. Might even lose some confidence and conditioning due to the fact that I didn’t even have a shot in hell at keeping up. So I’ll work at my own pace and ready myself for the fall.

Several commissioners expressed concern, shared by myself, Prof. Lempert, and Professor Sander, that many “diversity” candidates have no idea regarding the extent of the preferences that they receive, or how this might affect their chances of successfully completing law school and passing the bar exam. Even Dean Smith acknowledged that it might be a good idea to make more information about the success rate of matriculants available to prospective students, if such data could be gathered accurately. There was significant support among the commissioners for a pending bill in Congress that would require universities to reveal far more about their admissions policies, especially with regard to preferences.

Sounds about like what I saw when I was in undergrad.

Another factor is that at elite institutions, these kids will be far more likely to be passed through regardless of aptitude, only to realize they weren’t prepared for licensing and/or the real world:

As I understood it, Professor Lempert was not at all confident that similar benefits accrue to the purported beneficiaries of preferences at lower-ranked law schools, which (as a emphasized in my testimony) have a much lower (and often disastrously low) rate of success in graduating such students and preparing them for the bar.
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(5) Several commissioners expressed grave concern about the extraordinarily high rate at which African American law students at non-elite law schools either fail out of law school or fail to pass the bar exam (over 50% at the bottom two-thirds of law schools), and about the fact that while the new standard requires law schools to pursue diversity in admissions, it says nothng about the need to ensure that admittees actually succeed in becoming attorneys.

Crucial factors in school rankings include retention and graduation rates. And the same schools that vie for the top of those rankings are usually the same ones that bang the diversity drum the loudest. At the undergrad level, we’ve seen their need to keep both high in the proliferation of “look at me, i’m a minority” studies like african-american, hispanic-american, and asian-american studies and an increased ratio of BS (and I don’t mean bachelors of science) classes compared to the hardcore social sciences and liberal arts. When it comes to professional schools, the institution might just keep passing you up, but you’re going to run into a brick wall when it comes time to take the USMLE, Bar exam, or what have you. Which can’t be very fun.

Institutions more localized in their pull and less ambitious in their goals actually have less incentive to keep the chaff around: The US News rankings have little bearing on schools like Oklahoma University Med School where I think 95% of my class is either Oklahoman or has a tie of some kind to Oklahoma. And where around 75% of us will stay in Oklahoma. Career goals are different for these kinds of places, and cachet is less important both to the school and to the student. Which is why these lower-ranked schools show such abysmal pass rates. With such strong ties to their communities and states, they have little incentive to bother playing that arbitrary numbers game. So long as their graduates yield them a good reputation with local laypeople, they’re doing their job. These lower-ranked schools thus offer the best indication of differences in achievement and preparedness in the applicant pool.

But a far more disturbing aspect of the matter is that racial preferences–particularly when less-than-qualified applicants have to be accepted to meet quotas–actually justify prejudicial thought: They actually make such stereotypes valid:

Various commissioners focused on the fact that the proposed standard’s official “interpretations” requires the ABA to consider not just law school diversity recruiting efforts, but also results. The ABA representative (Dean Steven Smith) had no good answer when asked how–given the unfortunately small pool of “qualified” African American applicants available to elite schools–a results-based standard could be met without resort to preferences.

AA often (usually) results in a student pool that is segregated along racial lines, with Asians being the most well-qualified applicants, whites next (expect that difference to disappear in a generation or so), and hispanics and blacks last. This racial stratification remains prominent in graduate testing and even licensing. As an example, there are *cough* certain race-based medical schools out there with slightly low average MCAT scores.

What this means is that at the population level the contention that minority graduates–despite possessing the same degrees and same qualifications as others–are of lower quality is valid. Not because they’re minorities, but because a minority could be a weaker job candidate, student, or applicant and still be accepted. A degree from an elite institution is supposed to mean a pattern of hard work from high school onward. It’s supposed to mean a high SAT score, a lot of in-depth and relatively advanced classes. And it’s supposed to mean that the kid really did get a better education. But when whites and asians are held to one standard, and ‘underrepresented minorities’ to another, this means that a diploma earned by a member of one race means an entirely different thing from a diploma earned by a member of a different race. Furthermore, with many of these AA kids going into joke majors, many are not going to find the career prospects they expected.

Affirmative Action makes a mockery of Dr. King’s words that a man should be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. By focusing our attention on race, AA exacerbates differences and fails to bring any real harmony. Resentment from whites and asians, failure for ill-prepared minorities it’s supposed to help. Not to mention the basic social injustice of making some races work harder than others to achieve the same thing, even when they have no causal connection to a practice that ended almost 150 years ago. Affirmative Action is racism, and it hurts everyone.