I have posted so much here on Texas’s Top 10% plan (searching“Top 10%,” “Top X%,” and “percent plans” will find most of them) that I decided to give a pass to this recent article in the New York Times that provided a platform for many of the criticisms of that approach. I had nothing to say about it that I hadn’t already said, usually several times.
But now comes Ilya Somin, of Volokh Conspiracy fame (or at least renown), riding in on the horse of that NYT article, to argue that
the ten percent plan has negative side-effects and perverse incentives that are considerably worse than those of traditional affirmative action, including racial quotas.
Of course the problem with racial quotas is not their “side effects” but their very essence. To worry about the “side effects” of racial quotas is like, well, worrying about the “side effects” of segregation or slavery.
Somin then proceeds to list various of these “side effects” of the Top 10% plan that he finds objectionable, the most serious of which is that it lowers the overall quality of the student body more than the de facto racial norming of race preferences does. In this he and the NYT article he cites echo the points made early and often by the New Republic’s Jeffrey Rosen, whose arguments I’ve discussed and criticized several times, especially here and here. For example, in “How I Learned To Love Quotas,” Rosen’s article that was the occasion for my criticism in the first “here” linked above, he wrote:
I became convinced that selective universities can’t achieve colorblindness, diversity and high admission standards at the same time. They can achieve only two out of the three goals. For the most part, schools would prefer to choose standards and diversity, using racial preferences to create a diverse class while keeping standards relatively high. But if the courts order colorblindness, America’s finest public and private universities won’t hesitate for a moment in choosing diversity as the second goal, allowing rigorous admissions standards to go out the window.
….
If the Supreme Court bans affirmative action throughout America (as it could, in effect, if it rules broadly against Michigan), even the best private universities that receive public funds, like Harvard and Yale, will feel similar pressure to de-emphasize objective predictors of academic performance, like grades and test scores, in favor of softer proxies for racial diversity.
I then concluded (quoting in part another of Rosen’s writings on this subject):
Thus, oddly, Rosen has now become a quota-mongering preference pusher precisely because he is a meritocrat. Since most elite institutions would abandon standards before abandoning diversity, Rosen believes that a racial double standard, requiring less from blacks and Hispanics than from whites and Asians, will do less damage overall to high standards than holding everyone to the same standard. His stance thus eerily mirrors that of elitist Southern conservatives fifty years ago. They too responded to a demand for racial equality, in Brown, by asserting that it was “not really a practical option,” that racism and segregation were “so entrenched” that enforcing colorblindness would destroy educational standards. They were willing to bend a little and accept token integration as a gesture of compliance, just as Rosen favors a racial double standard as doing less damage to standards than a vigorous enforcement of the anti-discrimination principle would do.
Much of this criticism, it seems to me, also applies to Somin’s post.
Somin makes another point that many preference critics have also offered, and that deserves a more pointed reply than I’ve given in the past. Here’s Somin:
Some … would argue that the ten percent plan is still preferable to traditional affirmative action because racial preferences are intrinsically wrong, regardless of consequences. Perhaps they are. But if it is morally wrong to aim for a given racial balance in a state university student body by using explicit racial preferences, why is it not equally wrong to intentionally try to achieve the same effect through indirect, facially “neutral” means? In the days of Jim Crow, southern states often used facially neutral policies such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and peonage laws to disadvantage blacks. Few today would argue that these policies were somehow morally superior to those Jim Crow laws that discriminated against blacks through explicit racial classifications. If, as critics of affirmative action claim, explicit affirmative action preferences are morally wrong for the same reason that Jim Crow laws were wrong, then “facially neutral” affirmative action systems such as the Texas ten percent are wrong for the same reasons that the facially neutral means of propping up Jim Crow were.
Somin’s question misses the point. It is not “morally wrong to aim for a given racial balance.” What is wrong is the use of “explicit racial preferences,” i.e., of discriminating on the basis of race. There is nothing whatsoever objectionable about “racial balance”; what is objectionable is using racial discrimination to achieve it.
The analogy to literacy tests and poll taxes fails for the same reason. Those measures were indeed racially neutral on their face (no need for the quotes around neutral), but they were all clearly intended to discriminate against blacks, which they did. By contrast, neither the purpose nor the effect of the Top 10% plan is to discriminate against whites. It discriminates, if that is the right word, against bright students who are in such good schools that they do not make the top 10% of their class, but, as Somin himself points out, that group includes minorities as well as whites. I suppose one could make something of a “disparate impact” argument here, but “disparate impact” theories of discrimination have, fortunately, faded from favor in the courts.
None of which is to say that the Top 10% plan is sound educational policy. If the University of Texas believes that the plan lowers the quality of its students too much, it is perfectly free to modify it or abandon it. What it should not be free to do, however, is what Grutter, alas, allows, which is to engage in race norming camouflaged as “diversity.”
