Does “Affirmative Action” Generate “Misunderstanding” Based On “Stereotypes”?

Critics of racial preferences often point out that admitting minority students with lower grades and test scores than their peers creates the perception that minorities students are less qualified. Moreover, we critics say, that “perception” is generally accurate at selective colleges; students admitted with lower grades and test scores, whatever their race, will tend to be less qualified than those with higher grades and test scores.

Today an article in the Michigan Daily, of all places, presents evidence supporting this criticism. Some of this evidence is of the familiar anecdotal variety, as when Michigan freshman Bradley Johnson “gets the impression from some of his classmates that they think he lacks the credentials to be at the University.” Johnson is convinced is that “the reason for this uneasiness is not that he lacks the qualifications, but rather the fact that he is black, making him a target of a stereotype that labels some minority college students as unworthy to attend the University.”

Now comes the funny part. How does the author, Michael Kan, a daily staff reporter for the Michigan Daily, treat this common discomfort? Like this:

Ironically, the underpinnings of the stereotyping Johnson faces appear to result from the University’s race-conscious admissions, the very policies that were meant in part to curb such preconceptions.

Since implementing its race-conscious admission policies, the University has been leading the charge to promote diversity in the country’s education system and affording educational opportunities to disadvantaged minority groups.

Yet for students like Johnson, the admissions policies have had an unspoken side effect — causing some nonminority students to believe minorities are getting a free pass into one of the nation’s top universities, regardless of their qualification.

That “ironically” is priceless. A much more apt term would be “predictably.”

But, as they say, wait! There’s more! Kan’s article referred to more than anecdotal evidence — specifically, to a study conducted by the National Research Center for College and University Admissions (Note: this study was not mentioned, or I couldn’t find it, on the NRCCUA site). That study, Kan writes, found that

78 percent of high school seniors nationwide said using race, ethnicity and religious background as admissions factors affects the way nonminority students feel about their minority classmates. The study also found 82 percent of students opposed race-conscious admissions, in spite of the 70 percent that also said attending a University with a diverse campus was important to them.

Put that “in spite of” aside, along with the earlier “ironically.” Preferentialists are, apparently, simply incapable of seeing that there is no inconsistency between liking “diversity” and opposing the racial discrimination that they think necessary to achieve it. (The One Florida plan is proving that diversity can be generated without racial preferences, but that’s for another post.)

The NRCCUA, however, seems as incapable of understanding its own evidence as is reporter Kan. Michael Fleischer, a spokesman for NRCCUA, is quoted as saying,

“This view of minorities unable to perform well at affirmative action universities is because a lot of (non-minority) students don’t understand it and have misconceptions about the term.”

….

Fleischer said the study did not directly quantify the pervasiveness of the stereotype, but he added that researchers found many students basing their responses on misconceptions of race-conscious admissions.

“Many students surveyed had that stereotype in mind, and now when they see minorities, they might think, ‘Did they take spots away from people who deserved to get in? Did they meet the same criteria as I did to get accepted?'”

At the same time, Fleischer said researchers noted that many of the students surveyed believe that race-conscious admissions are merely a quota system, whereas schools like the University only consider race as one of the many admission factors in a subjective process.

“Obviously, colleges aren’t doing a good job of communicating how they are creating a diverse student body,” he added.

“Don’t understand”? “Misconceptions”? “Stereotype”? It’s true that there’s a lot of misunderstanding here, but most of it is on the part of affirmative action’s defenders. Here is Kan again, trying to recognize some truth in the “stereotype”:

Other students say the stereotype does in fact reflect that many unqualified minority students are unjustly taking the spots of more-qualified nonminority students. Engineering freshman Stacey Young said she thought that the academic performance of her minority classmates has not been on par with many of the other students.

But note well: freshman Stacey Young did not say, at least as quoted here, that any of her minority classmates were “unqualified.” What she said is that they weren’t performing as well as the non-minority students. And indeed, the intelligent criticism of racial preferences is not that they allow for the admission of unqualified students but simply, but clearly, that those who are preferentially admitted, by definition (otherwise they wouldn’t need preferences), are less well qualified on the whole than those admitted without preferences.

One can imagine a theoretical college in a theoretical universe where that might not be true. Assume that Theoretical U. is looking for the most qualified students, judged by the traditional criteria of grades and test scores. Assume further that among its 20,000 applicants for a freshman class of 1000 are 2,000 applicants who have perfect (1600) SAT scores and 4.0 grade averages, and now assume that 200 of those 2,000 perfect scorers are “underrepresented” (that’s how they don’t count the Asians) minorities. If, to promote “diversity,” all 200 of those minority applicants were automatically admitted, it would not follow that they were less qualified than the 800 non-minorities selected from the remaining 1800 applicants.

But that is purely Theoretical. In the real world, at places like Michigan, it’s a far different story. Just how different has been revealed by studies conducted by the Center for Equal Opportunity. As quoted in my post here, Linda Chavez of CEO reported that when her organization studied admissions standards at the University of Michigan,

we discovered that the median SAT scores for black students who were admitted to the school were 230 points lower than for whites. What’s more, their high school grades lagged nearly a half point (on a four-point scale) behind those of whites. From the data we obtained under a Freedom of Information request, we calculated that the odds of being admitted if you were a black student with the same qualifications as a white applicant were 174-to-1.

It would appear that the students surveyed by NRCCUA suffer from much less “misunderstanding” of affirmative action than those doing the surveying, or reporting on the results.