Reported today in The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscriber site) under the misleading headline “Dropping Affirmative Action Would Harm Black and Hispanic Applicants but Help Asian Applicants, Study Finds”:
Disregarding race in college admissions would cause sharp drops in the number of black and Hispanic students enrolled at elite institutions, according to a new study by two researchers at Princeton University.
The study, described in an article published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, also found that eliminating affirmative action would significantly raise the number of Asian-American students, while having little effect on white students.
Note that phrase “at elite colleges”; that’s key. Advocates for ending racial preferences have always said that minority enrollment would initially decline at the top colleges, but would be recaptured by minority enrollment increases in the lower-tier institutions, as students would be better matched with institutions according to their abilities. For that reason, we’ve argued that graduation rates for minorities would improve. The results in California after Proposition 209 bear that prediction out.
One other thing ? I think NAS President Stephen H. Balch’s comments in the article bear quotation: “That it’s Asian students who bear the brunt of affirmative-action policies at elite institutions strikes me as an interesting finding in and of itself. One of the dirty little secrets in all of this is that one of the chief losers is a minority group.”
