Preferences As A Zero-Sum Game

It really shouldn’t surprise anyone (though it still does) that giving preferences to some applicants based on their race places a burden on other applicants because of their race. Nor at this late date should it surprise anyone (though it still does) that the primary beneficiaries of eliminating preferences to minorities are not whites but another minority group, Asian-Americans.

Asian-American enrollment at Berkeley has increased since California voters banned affirmative action in college admissions. Berkeley accepted 4,122 Asian-American applicants for this fall’s freshman class — nearly 42% of the total admitted. That is up from 2,925 in 1997, or 34.6%, the last year before the ban took effect. Similarly, Asian-American undergraduate enrollment at the University of Washington rose to 25.4% in 2004 from 22.1% in 1998, when voters in that state prohibited affirmative action in college admissions.

The University of Michigan may be poised for a similar leap in Asian-American enrollment, now that voters in that state have banned affirmative action. The Center for Equal Opportunity study found that, among applicants with a 1240 SAT score and 3.2 grade point average in 2005, the university admitted 10% of Asian-Americans, 14% of whites, 88% of Hispanics and 92% of blacks. Asian applicants to the university’s medical school also faced a higher admissions bar than any other group

Now, as Dan Golden reports in front-page article in the Wall Street Journal, discrimination against Asians is coming under increased scrutiny. A Chinese-American student has filed a complaint against Princeton, and the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education has agreed to investigate.

UPDATE [14 November]

Anonymous, in the comment below, is right; the article in the Daily Princetonian is thorough, and definitely worth reading. I believe, however, that it exaggerates the novelty of a minority person challenging a system of preferences designed to help some minorities.

“Li’s minority status adds a new twist to the story,” the article asserts, “since previous complaints about universities’ racial preference policies have been filed by white students alleging bias.”

In Li’s case, however, “you have a minority candidate, but a minority candidate from a category that is not regarded by the [court] as an underrepresented category,” University politics professor and noted constitutional scholar Robert George said. “This is a minority candidate who is saying, ‘I don’t want my race to be counted for me or against me, but for my race not to be counted against me, it is important that no race be counted in any way that reduces my chances of admission.’”

“So you have two different categories of minority whose interests are allegedly in conflict.”

Professor George is correct (he usually is), but the Daily Princetonian is wrong to argue that it is “a new twist” for a minority to challenge racial and ethnic preferences. For example, as I mentioned a number of times (such as here), the student, Daniel Podberesky, who complained, successfully, about a scholarship at the University of Maryland that was available only to blacks is Hispanic.

In addition, consider Ho v. San Francisco Unified School District, a case brought by the Asian American Legal Foundation on behalf of Chinese students in San Francisco who complained that city’s racial school assignment policy. Here is a brief summary from a law review note:

In San Francisco Unified School District, the voluntary integration policy divided students into thirteen racial/ethnic categories: “American; American Indian; Chinese; Filipino; Hispanic/Latino; Japanese; Korean; White; Arabic; Samoan; Southeast Asian ; Middle Easterner; and Other Non-White.” The policy mandated that “[n]o school shall have fewer than four racial/ethnic groups represented in its student body [and] [n]o racial/ethnic group shall constitute more than 45% of the student enrollment at any regular school, nor more than 40% at any alternative school.” Chinese Americans had become the largest identifiable ethnic group in San Francisco, and they were disproportionately burdened under the policy. In some heavily Chinese neighborhoods, young children were forced to attend schools far from their homes to satisfy the 45% requirement. The greatest controversy erupted at one of the district’s “alternative” high schools. Lowell High School, one of the best high schools in the country, admitted students through a competitive magnet admissions policy. Under the 40% cap, this policy became a quota for students of Chinese descent. This led the Ho plaintiffs, Chinese-American students that were turned away from their schools of choice, to challenge the policy. The litigation spanned five years until, on interlocutory appeal to the Ninth Circuit, the court placed the burden on the school district to prove a remedial interest. With the courts unwilling to recognize diversity as a compelling interest, the school district settled on the first day of trial, eliminating the use of race in student placement.

The Princeton study cited in the article apparently found that eliminating preferences would have little effect on whites but would significantly reduce the number of blacks and increase the number of Asians. This may well be true, but it is worth noting, as I did here, that that was not the case in the University of California system when preferences were eliminated. There, the proportion of Asians admitted rose significantly, but the proportion of whites fell significantly. The proportion of blacks also fell, but not by as much as is generally thought. As I wrote in the post just linked:

For a graphic depiction of the freshman enrollment by race in the University of California and the California State University systems from 1997 (the last year before Prop. 209 took effect) through 2005, take a look at the graphs here.

As you will see, the racial group most affected by the ending of race preferences in [the University of California system] is whites: their proportion of entering freshmen fell from 40% in 1997 to 34% in 2005. Two minority groups saw their proportion of entering freshmen increase: Asians, whose proportion rose from 37% in 1997 to 41% in 2005; and Latinos, who rose from 13% to 16%. The proportion of blacks fell from 4% in 1997 to 3% in 2005.

The experience at the University of Texas during the several years it was barred from using racial preferences was similar to the experience in California, as reported in this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003:

In 1997, the year after a federal appeals court precluded the University of Texas at Austin from using race-conscious admissions, the university accepted 81 percent of its Asian applicants, up from 68 percent the year before. Supporters of affirmative action challenge such figures, and contend that Asian enrollments have risen little at selective public colleges in other states, such as California, which no longer considers race and ethnicity in admissions.

As we have seen, the argument of “supporters of affirmative action” noted above is incorrect.

UPDATE II

InsideHigherEd also has a long discussion of this case. The tone of the article, and the substance of a number of comments there so far, follow this rather snide observation in the lede:

Jian Li, who despite his top grades and perfect SAT scores was one of this year’s rejects, ended up at Yale University. But he has set off a federal investigation of whether Princeton’s affirmative action policies discriminate against Asian American applicants.

The implication here is that Li is a whiner, that it doesn’t really matter whether or not Princeton discriminated against him since he wasn’t really harmed. But what if instead of Yale he had landed at, say, Michigan? Or Michigan State? Another implication that comes through the article and many comments is that there really coudn’t be any discrimination agains Li because Princeton did admit many Chinese and Chinese-American students. This is another version of the view that racial preferences to blacks and Hispanics don’t discriminate against whites and Asians since so many of them are accepted anyway.