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I was appointed to a committee with two admissions officers (and a bunch of others). We looked at university policies. It was the year prop 18x (whatever the number is) was taking effect.
The admissions folks were late in the process of reviewing applications. One, a woman, was upset. She kept a tally of different minorities and her numbers were down sharply even though they had all kinds of race/ethnicity-correlated factors worked into the process. They tried to find proxies for race/ethnicity, and apparently didn't realize that this would immediately result in whites and E Asians making use of the same proxies. Overcome obstacles? Sure. Bad school? Sure. Low SES? Sure.
The other officer laughed and said to be creative. To accidentically write down 39 as 93 on Luis Portillo's application and 97 as 79 on Heather Ericksen's, to swap the results for "Dakota Johnson" and "Malik Johnson," to leave out the second page of names in hopes that the higher ranking kids' absence won't be noticed, to not rank some high-achieving kids because information is missing so that they won't be in the first or second round of admits. Some involved "helping" minorities by altering the results to favor them because of skin color; some involved actively hurting the two dominant groups by lowering their scores or trying to prevent their being considered. They had admissions goals by race, and were going to achieve that, proposition or no proposition, whether that meant fudging things so that minority kids were above whites or E Asians in the ranking or by actively reducing the numbers for whites and E Asians.
That same year in defense of affirmative action the committee requested a report by some administrator. It was delayed. The dean said he wasn't happy with it. The committee insisted, the dean relented, and the poor administrator arrived. He had looked at graduation rates for men and women, broken down by ethnicity. He, of course, found that minorities dropped out more and the ranking given to them upon admission was meaningless. It was obviously racism. Then he showed the same group of students ranked by standardized test scores/high school GPA. He showed evidence that incoming GPA and test scores were fairly predictive of success in college to justify this ranking. His results? Minorities were overrepresented in the bottom quartile and were a majority of the bottom decile when ranked this way--the difference being unstated, but entirely affirmative action. Overall, men scored lower than women--with the difference in male and female averages being higher for minorities than for whites. The bottom quartile upon admission had a low graduation rate and low college GPAs. The bottom decile was very likely to fail out and was mostly male. The committee again suggested racism with a certain amount of outrage, but he was prepared.
He disaggregated the data for whites/E Asians so he could compare dropout rates for like cohorts. Minorities, whites, E Asians had essentially the same dropout rates when incoming test scores and GPA were controlled. Dropouts weren't very likely to return to school--too discouraged and too much debt. This is "Racism isn't the reason, part I". But he went further and compared the students between schools in the college system. He compared white students by entering GPA and standardized test scores and found that at lower-ranked in-system colleges white students that flunked out or graduated with low GPAs would probably graduate and have around a 2.5-3.0 GPA. Then he showed the same thing for minorities. He didn't state the inference; we all knew it. If a cohort of white students is predicted drop out because they have low entering GPAs and test scores but do well at "lesser" colleges, why wouldn't the black and Latino students predicted to drop out because they have low entering GPAs and test scores not also do well at lesser colleges? After a pause the administrator showed the evidence: Black and Latino students with entering GPAs and test scores in the bottom decile at "my" school almost always graduated at the other schools--at the same rates as whites.
The committee tried for some questions then icily dismissed the administrator. The report was never mentioned, although it had several implications. First, the policy of admitting whites and E Asians that were underqualified but met minimum standards--done largely because the school wanted to be able to boast that it wasn't elitist--caused some whites and E Asians to fail out because of institutional pride and image. Second, affirmative action by and large had the same effect, bringing in underqualified students and setting them up to fail. The school invariably reported the ethnic composition of the incoming class, embarrassed only because minority numbers were low. That the graduating class was far less "diverse" was left unstated and it was hard to find the demographics in public sources. The sole exception was that they railed against the lower black male drop-out rate as evidence of some kind of discrimination. (Which was actually predictable before the kids were even admitted, the administrator had shown and left unsaid.) Third, and a corollary to the first two: This school would do low-end white and minority students a favor by not admitting them but sending them to lower-ranked schools. Their attempts to correct a historical social injustice was perpetrating a current social injustice.
Now, affirmative action doesn't always commit such a blatant injustice. In this case, however, it did, and the administrators' conceit made them very, very upset with this administrator. Nobody could find fault with his numbers. They tried. Faced with evidence they were doing something bad both for the students they intentionally hurt as well as those they were so virtuously "helping," they decided to stick their fingers in their ears and sing "la-la-la." They were virtuous so how could they be hurting people?
AA programs need to be validated by measurements that really show their benefit. Too often parents or the public reads reports that show AA improves things, but often it's not by the standards they were told would be used or that they consider important. In other cases it's a belief that AA is good because, well, something must be done, and it's better to expend resources doing something--even if it's not particularly helpful for the "common good" or even any particular good to those allegedly being helped--than do nothing. Then the metric is that it's good as long as it doesn't hurt, or even it's good if it doesn't hurt a specific group too much.
I stand by my claim: Desegregation isn't a goal in itself, at least not by the standards most people hold dear. Moreover, affirmative action isn't always good and shouldn't be elevated to a fundamental of belief. It, too, is a tool, and has both negative and positive effects that need to be weighed whenever it's used.
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