In an appearance on ABC's This Week program, Barack Obama talked about race-based preferences in college and graduate school admissions. Obama seemed to prefer basing admissions on the extent to which an applicant has been "disadvantaged" rather than purely on race. He said, for example that when his two young daughters apply to college, they “should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged.” Obama added that, though “there are a lot of African-American kids who are still struggling,” we should also "take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and been brought up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.”

It is encouraging to hear a leading Democratic presidential candidate express less than full comfort with race-based prefernces. However, as Roger Clegg points out, Obama is poorly informed if he believes that the rationale for racial preferences in college admissions is essentially remedial, i.e., to help “struggling” African Americans “achieve racial equality in this society.” In reality, colleges abandoned this concept long ago in favor of the "diversity" rationale under which Obama's kids would receive preferential treatment solely because of their skin color.

Indeed, current systems of race-based preferences are skewed in favor of "advantaged" minorities. Colleges trying to admit enough minority group members to fulfill their vision of diversity are required to relax their standards, sometimes to an alarming degree, due to the huge gap between blacks and white average SAT scores (to cite the most obvious example of a gap). But by admitting well-off minority students who benefit from attending good schools, receiving tutoring for the SATs, etc, colleges can avoid relaxing standards even more, and thus avoid a certain amount of heat from those still concerned about merit and quality. This, I think, is the source of the ridiculous anecdotes that anyone with college age kids can recount -- e.g., Sephardic Jews, or children of wealthy South Americans, or even the adopted white-Anglo children of American latinos being admitted as Hispanics. For a college whose students average, say, 1450 on the SAT, it's quite tempting to prefer a hispanic whose life circumtances are virtually identical to those of a well-off white but whose score is 1410 to a hispanic from the inner city whose score is 1230.

Obama's apparent prescription, then, would result either in the admission of fewer minorities or in further dilution of the credentials of admitted minorities, coupled with an intensification of the problems that arise from admitting students for whom the odds are against success. I doubt that Obama is prepared to embrace the first of these two options.

Posted by Paul at 05:11 PM  |    |