EFFECTS OF CURRENT RACIAL PREFERENCES ARE A MYSTERY

Saturday, February 28, 2004

When there's talk about banning racial preferences in college admissions, it's all about the consequences of giving them up. But why do we know so little about the consequences of having them, given that they have existed for decades?

The Colorado legislature will be considering a measure to ban such preferences. State Sen. Ed Jones, R-Colorado Springs, has introduced a bill that provides, "A public entity shall not discriminate against, or grant a preference to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."

This is not in conflict with the Supreme Court's decision in Grutter v Bollinger, the Michigan Law School case, which declared racial discrimination in college and university admissions constitutionally permissible, but certainly did not make it mandatory. Almost immediately efforts began to qualify an initiative for the Michigan ballot based on the California Civil Rights Initiative, which passed as Proposition 209 in 1996, and a similar measure that passed in Washington State in 1998.

Both in turn drew their language almost exactly from the 1964 Civil Rights Act, adding only a few words to make explicit that preferences for persons based on their race, ethnicity or gender and discrimination against them for the same reasons are equally prohibited. This should not have been necessary, because when the number of spaces is limited, as it usually is at a law school, the two are logically equivalent. Law professors, and university administrators in general, are presumably smart enough to figure that out -- they just preferred to overlook it in order to indulge their predilection for racial engineering. Voters had to set them straight.

Jones' bill uses similar language, and make no mistake, I think it should pass. The state and its various agencies should not have policies that treat citizens differently because of their race (or color or religion or other irrelevant personal characteristics).

In the public debate, one can be sure, there will be a lot of talk about motives even though people's motives for taking a particular position are irrelevant to the merits of their arguments. And there will be a lot of talk about consequences, mostly dire warnings about the dreadful effects of abandoning preferences. The dire warnings, as California has demonstrated, are mostly hyperbole.

But current policies have consequences, too. Why don't we know what they are?

After all, racial preferences are nothing new. When I was a college professor in the late '60s, and picked up the file folders for my freshman advisees in the fall, there were always a few who had noticeably weaker academic records than most of their peers. I could not fail to notice that many of them were minority students. (Most of the minority students who had comparable records had been skimmed off by richer or more prestigious institutions.)

Many of those students struggled, and many failed. No doubt culture shock was part of the reason, but minority students with strong academic records generally coped successfully with that, to the presumed benefit of themselves and their classmates, while weaker students did not.

That's a cost of preferences, and it is not often acknowledged. Indeed, it is not even calculated, because the data are not available.

Public colleges and universities should be required to make the data available. That should be straightforward in Colorado, because the state already requires institutions to use a grid to calculate an "index score" based on applicants' high school grades and their scores on the SAT or ACT. So the state should also require that for every entering class, for every cell in the grid, institutions report data disaggregated by race and ethnicity, including: how many in each category apply, how many are accepted, how many enroll, how many graduate in four years, how many graduate in six years, and the group's average GPA.

There is no invasion of individual privacy, because students may know what ethnic group another student belongs to, but they have no way of knowing what cell in the grid he or she occupies. But it is extremely valuable information for applicants, or potential applicants. If you're thinking of applying to a college, and you discover that people who occupy the same point on the grid as you do rarely graduate, you might want to consider a less challenging school where your chances are better. And if you apply anyway, and you get in, at least you've been warned, and that improves your chances too.

The information would be valuable, also, for legislators who want to debate Jones' bill on its merits rather than on its motives. The extent to which Colorado has preferences now is surely germane to the question of whether the state needs to prohibit them. The effect of preferences on minority college graduation rates, for better or worse, is also highly relevant.

Every state should require this information be made public. Because legislation is pending, Colorado needs it now.