RALEIGH — The debate over racial preferences in university admissions is going to heat up throughout the summer as proponents and opponents wait anxiously for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in a pivotal case involving the University of Michigan. The stakes couldn’t be higher — preserving and expanding educational opportunity, making the most of taxpayers’ investment in higher education, charting the future course of jurisprudence regarding race in every aspect of life. Expect to hear some passionate arguments about this, as well as some phony ones.
In my opinion, the suggestion that race-based admissions are necessary to avoid a return to segregation belongs in the latter category. It’s a phony argument because we already know what is likely to happen in states that get rid of officially sanctioned racial discrimination on campuses. As experience has shown in California, Texas, and Florida, the result is not resegregation but a sort of “reshuffling” of minority students whose academic qualifications prepare them best to succeed at schools other than the ones to which they were admitted with preferences.
It is easy for the unsuspecting or the mendacious to see such an effect as some sort of dimunition of educational opportunity. But it isn’t.
It doesn’t mean, for example, that students previously headed to UNC-Chapel Hill or N.C. State would instead be given only the choice of attending an historically black institution such as N.C. A&T or Fayetteville State (not that there’s anything wrong with either school). Such a result might actually create the resegregation the university types are warning about. What this really means is that in the absence of preferences, such students would likely be admitted to other regional universities in the UNC system, such as UNC-Charlotte or East Carolina, where they are demonstrably more likely to graduate (and thus justify their own expense as well as that of taxpayers).
As my colleague Jon Sanders discusses at length in a new Pope Center Inquiry paper on the subject, this is precisely the pattern seen in states without racial preferences. Indeed, while there may be a short-term drop in minority enrollment at the most competitive campuses, as the effects and expectations concerning racial quotas work themselves out of the system, over time the minority share begins to rise again. Students, all students, rise to the level of expectations we set for them. Maintaining high standards at our flagship universities, and their graduate schools, is actually the best way to improve educational attainment among minority students — and I mean real educational attainment, not just a trip through a statistical turnstile so a campus can claim to be pursuing diversity.
That setting higher standards is also the best way to improve educational attainment among non-minority students is, well, kind of the point.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.