Will The Sky Fall If Preferential Admissions End?

No, says the buried lede in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s article today, 3 Alternatives to Race-Conscious Admissions Won’t Do Much to Aid Diversity, Study Predicts.

That alternatives to race preferences are not as effective at admitting favored minorities is, I suppose, interesting and newsworthy, but in my view not nearly as interesting or newsworthy as other findings in the study that are also reported in the Chronicle article.

The article begins:

A hypothetical nationwide ban on race-conscious college-admissions policies would not have much effect on black and Hispanic students’ decisions about where to apply but would probably result in a 10-percent decline in their enrollments at the most selective institutions, according to a study published this month in the Journal of Labor Economics.

Only 10%? To listen to the preference pushers, abandoning race preferences would amount to instant “re-segregation,” or worse.

So, no sky falling, no re-segregation. But what would happen? According to the new study, a hypothetical national ban on race preferences

would have resulted in slight decreases in the share of black and Hispanic students receiving offers from several institutions and a slight increase in the share receiving no admissions offers at all.

Such students’ representation at the most selective colleges—those classified by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges as “most” or “highly” competitive — would decline by about 10 percent, from 3.04 percent of enrollment to 2.73 percent. The total number of black and Hispanic students enrolled at all four-year colleges would drop by about 2 percent.

In short, in order to prevent the percentage of black and Hispanic students at the nation’s most selective colleges from declining from 3.04 percent of enrollment to 2.73 percent, we have abandoned the formerly fundamental principle that everyone should be treated without regard to race and instituted a nationwide system of distributing benefits and burdens based on race.

What a deal.