“‘Percent Plans’ Don’t Add Up” … To What?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a loooong article today arguing (though it is a news article) that, you guessed it, “‘Percent Plans’ Don’t Add Up.” (Link requires subscription)

I’m not going to summarize it, even though you can’t read it online unless you have a subscription. Its basic point — in fact, about its only point — is that the top x% plan generally don’t produce as much “diversity,” i.e., representation of minority groups, as overt racial preferences. Well, duh! If you lower standards for some groups, obviously it’s easier for those groups to be represented in larger numbers. It should be no surprise that if you subsidize something, you get more of it.

The question, in my view, is not whether “diversity” is a good thing (I think it is, though overrated), but whether attempting to promote it by employing racial double standards does or does not violate basic principles of fairness and equality. One can agree, after all, that efficiency is important and that Mussolini made the trains run on time without agreeing that abandoning democracy was a worthwhile sacrifice to achieve timely trains.

The article laments that “minority groups continue to be underrepresented on public campuses, in comparison to their growing presence in California, Florida, and Texas high schools.” Does fairness require proportional representation? That is certainly the implication.

Of course, one of the problems with the “underrepresentation” of some groups is that wherever it occurs other groups are “overrepresented.” Sure enough, at the University of Texas at Austin

Asian students take a disproportionate share of the seats that top-10-percent students fill. Asian students represented 20.3 percent of the top students who enrolled on the campus in the fall of 2002, even though they were only 3.4 percent of Texas’ public high-school graduates in 2001. They also constitute a growing proportion of the university’s freshman classes. In 2002, 18.8 percent of freshmen were Asian, up from 15.4 percent in 1996.

Meanwhile, black students, who made up 4 percent of the top students in 2002, represented 3.5 percent of last fall’s freshman class, about one percentage point lower than in the fall of 1996.

Oh, dear! Too many Asians; too few blacks. I hate to introduce the dreaded Q-word, but if this is a problem, quotas would seem to be the solution.

It is also worth noting, again (see here and here for earlier discussions), that the article implies (by not discussing anything else) that the Top X% plans are the only race-neutral way to promote diversity. They are not. As the administration’s brief in one of the Michigan cases mentioned, if universities really regarded racial and ethnic diversity as being as important as they say it is, they could lower their grade/test requirements for everyone in order to promote it. They could even approach true proportionality by admitting randomly from high school graduates.

The article also discusses, but I will not, whether the Top X% plans themselves might run afoul of anti-discrimination laws. I don’t think they would, or should, as I’ve already discussed at some length — here, here, here, and here.