RALEIGH – During a recent debate about proposed lobbying reforms in North Carolina, I heard several senators warn their colleagues about the “unintended consequences” of putting a cap of $100 on the value of personal gifts a lobbyist can give a legislator. While I didn’t buy the argument in this particular case – the consequences appeared to be benign, even if unintended – it was wonderful to hear policymakers suggest that good intentions do not necessarily make good law.

I wonder how many of them support racial preferences in the admissions process at the University of North Carolina. The unintended consequences in that case are, indeed, serious and harmful.

Attorney Marie Gryphon, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, provides a useful summary of such consequences in a recent paper entitled “The Affirmative Action Myth.” Using race, sex, and other personal characteristics as part of the admissions process is supposed to help redress the lingering injustices of discrimination, increase economic opportunity, and employ the tool of diversity to improve the educational experience for all students.

Are these goals being met? Gryphon provides persuasive evidence that the answer is, for the most part, “no.”

For example, it isn’t at all clear that racial preferences actually increase the number of minority students who attend college. Clearly, tipping the scales in their favor – Gryphon also rebuts the silly suggestion that race is a “plus” factor but not a deciding factor – leads some minority students to choose one university over another. For example, a student who might be well qualified to succeed at UNC-Greensboro is instead induced to enroll at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The problem is that the resulting mismatch of student and campus often turns out badly. Graduation rates are lower for students receiving the preference, while the expected benefits of inducing the transfer – such as increasing their lifetime earnings – do not materialize. In discussing this issue, Gryphon presents the work of scholars who have challenged William Bowen and Derek Bok’s often-cited work The Shape of the River, which purported to show that minorities admitted with preferences didn’t suffer at selective schools. For example, economists Audrey Light and Wayne Strayer constructed a more sophisticated model that better predicts university graduation than Bowen and Bok’s. “Our estimates reveal that the ‘match’ between student ability and college quality does have a causal effect on college completion,” they wrote.

I think it’s fair to say that the best evidence leans against Bowen and Bok’s thesis that lowering admissions standards for minorities has no adverse effect on their college performance, which has the additional disadvantage of being severely counterintuitive.

If preferential policies don’t produce the desired result, why do college administrators and state policymakers continue to promote them? Here’s where I think Gryphon really nails it. “Affirmative action programs are the primary way that college administrators offer an institutional apology for the exclusionary policies of decades past,” she writes, so it is “an expressive act as much as a policy decision.”

It is all about intention, in other words, and an intention that can scarcely be faulted given the racially charged history of UNC and state government in general. But good intentions don’t make good laws.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.