Overrepresented whites, Chinese, Indians, etc. would be in the race blind pool, while underrepresented blacks, Latinos, Vietnamese, etc. would be in the race-conscious pool (until they too are “overrepresented” in the university, after which point they would be placed in the race-blind pool).  In this way, positive affirmative action can continue, while quotas for Asians will be forced to end.  Furthermore, Asians will no longer be usable as rhetorical weaponry by the political right, as it could no longer be claimed that Asians are disadvantaged relative to whites by affirmative action.

The drop in black admissions and rise in Asian admissions at schools that ban affirmative action are due to two distinct factors: the ending of negative action for Asians and the ending of positive action for blacks. You can end the former without ending the latter, despite what the political left might believe.

From a “white/Asian” opponent of Asian quotas who poses some “practical questions”:

How should school admissions decide who is Asian? Should it be based purely on self-identification, or should we institute compulsory genetic testing or perhaps an “eyeball” test, just in case some try to pass as white? If an Asian person identifies as white in order to avoid discrimination, would that be morally wrong? In the case of a biracial (Black-Asian) candidate, should they be discriminated against? Or should we put them at the very top of our list?

That email reminds me of the following passage from Malcolm Gladwell’s “Getting In,” a superb essay on the history of college admissions:

In the nineteen-twenties, when Harvard tried to figure out how many Jews they had on campus, the admissions office scoured student records and assigned each suspected Jew the designation j1 (for someone who was “conclusively Jewish”), j2 (where the “preponderance of evidence” pointed to Jewishness), or j3 (where Jewishness was a “possibility”).

An Asian American critic of AA looks ahead to a lawsuit:

Now that the model minority myth is of no political use to the liberal elites who actually want to promote affirmative action, Asian American “over representation” is now considered a problem rather than a promise. We are now an invasive species that only affirmative action can help manage.

(Ironically, it is a discriminatory immigration policy that fuels the overrepresentation: Asians with highly developed skills or a promise to invest capital to hire U.S. citizens are pushed to the front of the line. We do well because it takes doing well just for us to get here.)

So it’s no wonder that Edward Blum, of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has seemingly taken Asian American issues to heart and has filed lawsuits on our behalf to halt or defeat the race-tinkering of the liberal elite. [CB note: Blum also encouraged Abigail Fisher to sue the University of Texas, resulting in the current Fisher case before the Court, and he’s also behind the current Evenwel v. Abbott, which, according to Garrett Epps in a recent piece for us, “would limit representation to eligible voters—favoring wealthier, whiter, and more conservative citizens.”] Asian American students are understandably apprehensive about his intentions, even if he is advocating for their immediate interests.

From a Reuters profile of Blum:

“It took a Jewish white guy to start this case,” said James Chen, who runs a San Francisco-based company called Asian Advantage College Consulting. The firm advises students to underplay their ancestry as one strategy for maximizing their chances of getting into a top school. Among some recent immigrants he has worked with, Chen said, “there is a tendency to keep their head down.” [...]

Because Harvard reveals few details about its admissions process, Blum’s lawsuit relies mostly on data provided by outsiders. One example is a 2009 report co-written by Princeton University sociology professor Thomas Espenshade. The study contends that Asian Americans needed SAT scores 140 points higher than whites, all other variables being equal, to get into elite schools. Blum also cited research by professors he used in the Fisher case. In its court filing, Harvard denied that it discriminates and said it lacked information about the studies to specifically respond to them.

As always, hit up hello@theatlantic.com to join the debate. Update from a reader:

Some readers have previously suggested that “Asian Americans should [not] view affirmative action as being a competitive process only between minorities” and that “Admissions officers could simply place applicants into either a race-blind or race-conscious pool depending on the representation of that applicant’s race at the university relative to the overall population of the country (easily available from census data).”

This is a wonderful idea, but it is nearly impossible given the legal realities of affirmative action in America. A university's ability to employ affirmative action at all is heavily predicated on its ability to justify how such policies are consistent with furthering its educational mission. Beyond general hand-waving about the value of diversity, this requires universities to espouse some metric for determining when they have “enough” diversity. After all, without such a metric, who's to say they aren’t already diverse enough? Not the university, certainly; this was the central holding of Fisher I. And not only must they have such a metric, it must also be consistent and non-arbitrary, lest they open themselves up to attack from the likes of Fisher.

Most universities solve this problem by loosely employing a “proportion of the population” approach, wherein representation at the university should model representation in the population at large, which works very well for underrepresented minorities. But, under such a framework, overrepresented minorities necessarily get the short end of the proverbial stick, because their over-representation means that some other group must be underrepresented and is therefore a problem.

This is not the end of the story, though. Universities could adopt a different metric of representation. If they did so, overrepresented minorities could be fine. But to adopt a different metric would mean adopting that metric across the board: applying it only to some groups but not others would be deeply constitutionally suspicious. And this, in turn, could potentially harm underrepresented minorities, who just lost a very defensible argument for increased representation.

And operating in orbit around all of this is the ever-present threat of litigious anti-affirmative action groups who relish any opportunity to haul universities into court. This puts universities between a rock and a hard place, because they have to find some consistent, legally defensible way to argue that under-representation is both harmful (in the case of blacks, etc...) AND beneficial (in the case of whites) to their educational mission. I won’t go so far as to say it’s an intractable problem, but it’s certainly hard to find a happy ending for both over- and under-represented minorities.

The path of least resistance appears to be the proportion of the population approach, with the ensuing harm to over-represented minorities, at least until such time as it is ruled unconstitutional.

So an entirely new system of admissions was invented with emphasis on such things as character, leadership, personality, alumni parentage, athletic ability, geographical diversity. They started, for the first time, to do interviews. They introduced photos. A lot of things, which we take for granted today, in fact, were introduced in this period and have endured to the present.

[Robin D.] Schatz: What happened to Jewish admissions as a result?

Karabel: Well, at Harvard, the Jewish proportion of the freshmen class in 1925 had reached 28 percent and shortly thereafter, after a very protracted and bitter struggle, which lasted from 1922 really to 1926, Harvard imposed a 15 percent quota. At Yale, the proportion of Jews had reached toward 14 percent and in 1924, they imposed a 10 percent quota. At Princeton where the proportion of Jews had gotten only to 3.6 percent, they decided that that was excessive and they cut the proportion of Jews to 2 percent in 1924.

These days, colleges that are accused of limiting Asian students will deny the use of quotas, which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in Bakke, but a lot of people aren’t buying it. One of them is Glenn Harlan Reynolds:

[T]hough the numbers of highly qualified Asian applicants have grown dramatically, the number of Asians admitted stays pretty much the same every year.

Now the Asian students are suing. In a lawsuit against Harvard [last year], they are claiming that Harvard demands higher qualifications from Asian students than from others, and that it uses “racial classifications to engage in the same brand of invidious discrimination against Asian Americans that it formerly used to limit the number of Jewish students in its student body.”

These claims are almost certainly correct. Discrimination against Asian students — and not just by Harvard, but throughout higher education — has been an open secret for years. Asian students, we’re told, face a “bamboo ceiling” as a result.

Back to our reader:

The Atlantic already identified the way forward on affirmative action in Richard Kahlenberg’s article. We simply need to break away from the race-centric identity politics that pervades our political discourse and look at the class context of applicants. That would address the sense of injustice in making decisions explicitly based on race, where people feel they have been denied opportunity as a result of immutable characteristics.  

The emphasis must be structural fairness. In this sense, affirmative action at the collegiate level is years too late to provide the equality of opportunity that even opponents of affirmative action would likely affirm (at least publicly) as a desirable goal. That would require more fundamental restructuring of our education system (e.g. equitable school funding, abolishing private education)—intervention that is politically unrealistic, due in part to the complicity, as Adolph Reed has noted, between identity politics and neoliberalism.

So what do you think about the parallels between the Jewish Americans of the early 20th century and the Asian Americans of the early 21st century when it comes to college admissions? Any key differences worth accounting for?Email hello@theatlantic.com to chime in.

One, I went to grad school with an African American woman who came from a difficult, economically challenged neighborhood, rife with violence and drugs. She was a single mom at 17. But she worked her way to high school diploma, a college degree, and a masters. She had a very difficult time of it. But her grades were exceptional (I don’t mean exceptional for an African-American; I mean exceptional when compared to everyone). She didn’t need a leg up.

But everyone who met her initially condescended to her and assumed she was probably there because she was a minority woman. I don’t think it was fair to her. And what was she supposed to do, walk around with billboard on her head saying “I’m Mensa and I don’t need affirmative action”?

Second, I have since had a child and seen many younger cousins make their way to university and grad school. Affirmative action in action meant seeing very smart and hardworking young kids being declined by Ivys and other very good schools because they were Asian / Indian descent, and God knows we have too many of “them” already. (Meanwhile, their non-Asian minority classmates were accepted to the same schools with lower grades across the board—same high school, same everything, except skin color).

When we talk at the group level, AA is about “blacks getting the same advantage whites always had,” but at an individual level, it means smart Asian kids getting shut out in favor of black or other underrepresented minority kids. Why or how is an Asian kid’s contribution to a largely white class not contributing a diverse viewpoint?

The retort to “do away with athlete and legacy quotas”—at what point do the needs of social justice trump a college’s agency to direct its admissions and its makeup of a student body? It is an erroneous assumption to think all white kids have wealth. That is definitely not true. Neither are all African American kids disadvantaged.

A reasonable person wanting to review or question the efficacy of affirmative action isn’t a racist. Perhaps there are ways to help out kids from all economic backgrounds while not penalizing kids from one or more particular ethnic group. Those policies cannot be debated or discussed in a climate where all questioners are labeled “racists.”

(I found the above screenshot in a Harvard Crimson op-ed by Kirin Gupta, Bernadette N. Lim, and Eva Shang, who criticized “the unsettling ‘Harvard Not Fair’ campaign that seeks to capitalize on the insecurities of rejected applicants based on race.”)

Contribute your own thoughts via hello@theatlantic.com.

At Duke University, economist Peter Arcidiacono, with Esteban Aucejo and Joseph Hotz, has shown that the “mismatch” lowers the number of black scientists. Black students at a school where teaching is faster and assumes more background than they have often leave the major in frustration, but would be less likely to have done so at a school prepared to instruct them more carefully.

UCLA law professor Richard Sander conclusively showed in 2004 that “mismatched” law students are much more likely to cluster in the bottom of their classes and, especially, to fail the bar exam. Meanwhile, Sander and Stuart Taylor’s book argues that the mismatch problem damages the performance of black and brown students in general.

There are scholars who dispute Sander and Taylor’s thesis about undergraduate school in general. However, when it comes to the more specific points about STEM subjects and law school, takedown arguments are harder to fashion because of the simple force of the facts.

The Atlantic published an excerpt from Sander and Taylor’s book when it came out three years ago. Here’s a portion that runs through some additional data:

Research on the mismatch problem was almost non-existent until the mid-1990s; it has developed rapidly in the past half-dozen years, especially among labor economists. To cite just a few examples of the findings:

• Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites.
• Blacks who start college interested in pursuing a doctorate and an academic career are twice as likely to be derailed from this path if they attend a school where they are mismatched.
• About half of black college students rank in the bottom 20 percent of their classes (and the bottom 10 percent in law school).
• Black law school graduates are four times as likely to fail bar exams as are whites; mismatch explains half of this gap.
• Interracial friendships are more likely to form among students with relatively similar levels of academic preparation; thus, blacks and Hispanics are more socially integrated on campuses where they are less academically mismatched.

In response to that excerpt, The Atlantic ran two other pieces. First, Jordan Weissman looked at the mismatch issue “like an economist”:

In 2005, Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Brown University’s Glenn Loury published a paper titled “Affirmative Action and Its Mythologies,” which serves as a wonderful roadmap for considering the costs and benefits of letting schools factor race into their selection criteria. [...] Loury and Fryer acknowledged that if this [mismatch] problem truly turns out to be severe, it should give everyone pause. But they wondered themselves: If some minorities fail, could an affirmative action program still be worth it?

Take, for instance, law schools. Sander’s research has suggested the black law students often underperform their white peers, and drop out at higher rates, because they tend to end at schools they’re ill-prepared to attend. But from society’s perspective, those casualties might be justified by the overall goal of producing more black lawyers. One might retort that making sure black students are in suitable schools will lead more to graduate and take the bar. In the end, it’s a very cold, cost-benefit analysis, but one that should still be made.

The other Atlantic response was from Sarah Garland, who spotlighted “the story of two students at UT-Austin showing how race-based admissions can go right.” One of those students was Jarius Sowells, who automatically got a slot at UT because he fell within the top 10 percent of his high school class:

“I don’t think my high school prepared me very well to begin learning at this institution,” Sowells says. “It was a culture shock. I was around people who didn’t look like me, didn’t talk like me.” He signed up for several tough classes his first semester -- microeconomics, business foundations, introduction to psychology, and rhetoric. Within weeks he was failing. “I psychologically broke down,” he says. “I felt I couldn’t handle it.” The following semester he dropped out and returned home.

He didn’t give up completely, however. The following fall he was readmitted on probation. He began to build up his GPA, which is now a 2.7. He dropped his aspirations of majoring in business and switched to African-American studies. His plan is to become a lawyer; he’s counting on getting a high LSAT score to make up for his low grades. [...] And if he struggled at UT-Austin, he says, it’s not because the school should never have let him in; it’s because it should have taken more responsibility for helping him succeed. [...]

Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University who submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in the 2003 case supporting affirmative action, believes the evidence on mismatch should be taken more seriously, but not to support an end to affirmative action. “It might mean that you do affirmative action differently, not that you don’t do it at all,” he said. At the same time, Arcidiacono said his research on minority students at Duke suggests that perhaps “colleges need to invest more to make sure they graduate.”

Today, the Facebook page for Jarius Sowells says he attended UT from 2009 to 2015 and stuck with African-American studies and is now living in Rio de Janeiro. I’ll reach out to him for more details. If you’d like to contribute your thoughts on academic mismatch or point me to some important scholarship I haven’t mentioned yet, drop me an email. Update from a reader with a gut reaction:

So if the educators running our most elite institutions can’t educate “mismatched” students, isn’t that a damning indictment of their capabilities? Or do they not think it’s their responsibility to do so? Because at the end of the day, this is about helping slightly challenged but otherwise bright students, and I simply can’t see why any institution would exempt themselves from that mission.

And as I said, I am not in favor of ending AA, because our college system is deeply unfair. I am certainly not happy that political will is being spent on AA—which will at best only lead to a marginal change in the lives of most minorities—instead of on massive spending on the awful, segregated K-12 system that ensures that so few black students make it to the top.

Also problematic is that there aren’t necessarily the systems in place in Ivy League schools to help students from disadvantaged neighborhoods (black or white) succeed. In my intro calculus class, I sat with students who had taken Calc BC or AP Calc in their own schools like me. And yet, some of my fellow classmates were just learning calc for the first time. How could they ever keep up? Or reach the A on our curved math and science tests? They couldn’t. By the time I had reached the end of my sophomore year, most of my best friends, who often came from underprivileged backgrounds, had dropped out of science all together.

I also felt that some of my college advisers discouraged me from achieving because they felt that I “didn’t need to work as hard because I had AA.” In one meeting, my adviser pulled out two different lists of applicants to graduate schools from my Ivy, one for white students and one for blacks. Needless to say, I no longer use her services.

AA definitively does have insidious effects, and I do think we need to discuss that. We can appreciate the struggles it took to give us AA, AA’s successes, such as the increase in enrollment of black students at colleges, but also talk intelligently about the ways in which AA falls short. Hopefully by doing both, we can successfully help uplift our community.

What we black students said at the time and I continue to hear, is that AA is just what white men have been getting throughout the history of this country and continue to get in every sphere of life.

Colleges have gone after certain groups from Day One. For centuries they went after white men exclusively. Interestingly, Harvard and Yale (among other early colleges) went after Indian students to train them to go back and domesticate (pacify) members of their tribes.

How long do we need AA in America? As long as we have racial hypocrites. You want to get rid of AA, then get rid of legacy, saving places for artists, athletes, students with rich parents, students from certain geographical areas.

Entrance exams? These tests have shown to be poor indicators of academic success. That’s why many schools no longer require them, or use them along with a broader array of indicators of academic competence and commitment. When people argue AA is wrong or no longer needed, they’re just saying this is a white man’s country and they want the law and practices to reflect that.

Last point: Look at the public, state-supported universities in America. Look at the black enrollment at these schools before and after affirmative action.

My freshman year in college—1969 to 1970—there were 70 blacks on campus, out of 22,000 students. The 70 of us were more Blacks than in the prior 140 year history of the university. My parents and grandparents paid taxes to support a university system they couldn’t attend. But AA and the brave people behind it enabled me to go.

Another reader looks beyond college:

The main scenario people use when discussing affirmative action involves a white student with a “higher-scoring” application than a black student. But on its face, this scenario is flawed because it doesn’t exist. In the workplace, applicants with less work experience and less education are hired over people with more all the time. Similarly, having a letter of recommendation from a prominent citizen (e.g. a Senator or CEO) or the right last name can propel a B student in front of an A student in K-12 private school admissions.

That’s the real world—and in the real world, those kinds of decisions are perfectly acceptable. It only becomes unacceptable when a person of color has a perceived advantage over a white person, an argument that seemingly ignores that by default white students will always have an advantage over people of color.

Join the debate via hello@theatlantic.com. Update from a reader:

This is in response to the reader who said “I have never known a black student who said they were shamed by AA. Never. If you find one you should videotape them and put it up on Youtube.”

I don’t personally agree with him, but Clarence Thomas (arguably the second most powerful black man on earth) is very vocal about disliking affirmative action for the exact reasons your anonymous Ivy League correspondent noted.

This reader invokes the only other African American justice in U.S. history:

For an enlightening hour, one should listen to the spoken opinions in the Bakke case, a full 50 minutes. Two things worth noting: i) the comity with which the Supreme Court operates, as compared to the current divisive and insulting manner of the Justices but especially ii) the final opinion, a dissent by Thurgood Marshall, who gives his brethren a history lesson that puts the injury to Bakke in proper perspective and applies equally to the current contrived Fisher case.   

I do believe that even without affirmative action, I, and many other smart black students, would have had a good chance of getting into a top school. Instead, affirmative action seemed to tarnish my achievements like a black mark. More than that, some students I went to school with underperformed because they “had AA” or were told to rely on “AA.” So I’d like to see AA go.

On the same hand, I do not want to see AA go. Why? Because our college system is not fair. At my Ivy, I met some very dumb people who were legacy admits (why should you go to school because your father or mother went there?), development admits (mom and dad gave the school money), prep students who play obscure sports (polo, squash, sailing, horseback riding, etc.) and mediocre sons of professors, famous people, or CEOs.

Yet there is no outcry over that. No one cries over precious school spots going to Bobby Goldberg from Andover who plays squash for Yale. But a black girl whose race was the tipping factor? Cue the cries of unfairness.

Email hello@theatlantic.com to join the discussion

As a result, they are largely forced to self-identify as White on college applications. The same Syrian refugees being banned by multiple governors, the same Muslims whom Donald Trump would like to ban, the same “rag heads” and “sand niggers” and “terrorists” who are widely distrusted and even hated, are also just White.

Is their experience not a valid one in a conversation about diversity? Do their voices not contribute anything valuable at an institution of higher learning? How can we entertain a notion that ostensibly encourages the amplification of minority voices while simultaneously silencing some of those voices that are most vilified? To claim that there is no distinction between a “White” student whose family owned plantations and a “White” student who is a first generation Middle Eastern American is an extremely limiting perspective, and one that cannot be overlooked in this national conversation about diversity.

Another reader is on the same page:

Somehow Jews, Italians, Irish, and English and Argentinians can all be considered white. I’m not sure how such disparate groups can be all grouped together, and even with those “groups,” there is so much diversity and difference. I understand the concerns with not seeing race, but has the pendulum perhaps swung too far, where race is the dominant focus in all interactions—be it policing, college admissions, job interviews, incarceration rates, and many others? Are we really saying race is the causal factor in all these disparities and results?

And if we are, what do we mean by race? Skin color? And if so, what gradient qualifies one for one race or another? Gender, socioeconomic factors, family history, mental health history, migration patterns, economic patterns … are we excluding all these factors or just using race as a shorthand for those factors? If it is a shorthand reference, then it seems less useful as something to base policy decisions on.

I say this as someone from a mixed family, and as someone who has lived overseas for many years in countries where I was a minority. At times, it is dispiriting to see the great wrongs committed in this country and then the opportunities to right these wrongs turned into echo chambers of talking points.

I realize I will catch flak for this. I think our conversations about race have become too simplistic and reactive. I don’t think anyone ends up persuading anyone anymore. There is no room to be wrong on either side. And that makes it harder to find out what is right.

Contribute your own thoughts via hello@theatlantic.com.

I for one believe that there are institutional effects of centuries of racism, and that this can create a structure that long outlives the de jure manifestations. So I do not reject the basic premise. You cannot easily erase the racism of four centuries in four decades. After all, we had a (sometimes brutal) form of affirmative action for European Americans for generations, informally and formally. The present social structure didn’t just “happen.”

That being said, no bone is broken forever. Therefore, no crutch is needed forever. I have yet to see any definite goals with regards to when AA will no longer be needed, and plans on how to make those goals come to fruition. An affirmative action that is billed as mere retribution for past wrongs, or one that is simply indefinite, will do nothing but breed resentment. And rightfully so. You will always have those folks who get agitated at the sight of anything deemed to celebrate/help minorities, from MLK Day on down. But that doesn’t change the fact that you can’t have AA forever. And how you do AA while it does exist matters. Proponents often fail on both counts.

Another reader:

Racial discrimination in admissions is morally wrong because it is based on nothing but the color of one’s skin. Class-based preferences help students who have additional obstacles in their way that other students do not. It makes absolutely no sense to discriminate against anyone by race, but it makes even less sense to discriminate against a disadvantaged White or Asian student in favor of a Black or Latino child of wealth and privilege, as the system does now.

What do you think? Email hello@theatlantic.com.