"Even Liberals Should Be Skeptical of Racial Preferences in Higher Education"

Do racial preferences in higher education help black Americans?  This liberal emphatically says no:

Let’s begin by being clear on terminology. “Affirmative action” in higher education embraces many activities that the plaintiffs in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases are not challenging. Investing in educational pipelines to improve under-performing high schools, improving outreach to underrepresented students, improving admissions practices to better capture student ability—these all reflect the traditional meaning of “affirmative action,” and no one is questioning their legality.

The practices used by Harvard and UNC, and challenged by Students for Fair Admissions, are racial preferences—admitting some students with weak credentials, and rejecting other students with strong credentials, strictly based on which racial “box” they check...

This policy is carried out in a variety of ways, including giving negative weight to Asian applicant performance and having admissions officers give dramatically lower interview ratings to Asian-American applicants than Harvard’s own alumni give the same students in interviews. By Harvard’s own internal analysis, it’s clear that Asian-Americans would make up around 30 percent of the student body in a race-neutral process, but they are limited to around 18-20 percent of the student body. This is every bit as appalling and illiberal as the old Jewish quota.

Meanwhile, the corresponding racial preferences favoring Black applicants, if perhaps appealing to many liberals in principle, produce a cascade of terrible results.

At most elite universities and professional schools, preferences are so large as to produce huge gaps in student performance. Half of Black law students in American law schools have first-year GPAs that put them in the bottom 10 percent of the class—and their poor performance, it can be clearly shown, is entirely due to the large preferences the students receive.

Black students who receive no preference perform just as well as whites or Asian-Americans. But when a racial group is performing poorly by design, it has many awful effects. Black students will feel demoralized, stigmatized, and even discriminated-against (which of course they are, in a sense). Other students will form negative stereotypes about the poor-performing group—just the opposite of the intended beneficial effect of a “diverse” class...

Large preferences (racial or otherwise), we show, produce massive and heartbreaking declines in bar passage rates. Tens of thousands of Black law students have failed to become lawyers over the years because of misguided preference policies.

There are signs that these facts are starting to sink into the liberal establishment.

The Supreme Court will hear the Harvard/UNC case(s) tomorrow.