The blacks were doing very well economically until gomen intervened snd introduced affirmative action.
The biggest change since
Grutter, though, has nothing to do with Court membership. It is the mounting empirical evidence that race preferences are doing more harm than good — even for their supposed beneficiaries. If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF MISMATCH
How could such a miscalculation about the effects of affirmative action occur? As University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Richard Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor, Jr., describe in their important, recently released book,
Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It, one consequence of widespread race-preferential policies is that minority students tend to enroll in colleges and universities where their entering academic credentials put them toward the bottom of the class. While academically gifted under-represented minority students are hardly rare, there are not enough to satisfy the demand of top schools. When the most prestigious schools relax their admissions policies in order to admit more minority students, they start a chain reaction, resulting in a substantial credentials gap at nearly all selective schools.
For example, according to data released by the University of Texas in connection with
Fisher, the mean SAT scores (out of 2400) and mean high-school grade-point averages (on a 4.0 scale) varied widely by race for the entering class of 2009. For Asians, the numbers were 1991 and 3.07; whites were at 1914 and 3.04; Hispanics at 1794 and 2.83; and African-Americans at 1524 and 2.57. The SAT scores for the Asian students placed them in the 93rd percentile of 2009 SAT-takers nationwide; the African-American students, meanwhile, were at the 52nd percentile.
This has the predictable effect of lowering the college or professional-school grades the average minority student earns. And the reason is simple: While some students will outperform their entering credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students perform in the range that their entering credentials suggest.
No serious supporter of race-preferential admissions denies this. In their highly influential defense of affirmative action,
The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (discussed later in more detail), former Ivy League university presidents William Bowen and Derek Bok candidly admitted that low college grades for affirmative-action beneficiaries present a "sobering picture." This is an understatement: The average African-American first-year law student has a grade-point average in the bottom 10% of his or her class. And while undergraduate GPAs for affirmative-action beneficiaries aren't quite as disappointing, that is in part because, as explained below, affirmative-action beneficiaries tend to shy away from subjects like science and engineering, which are graded on a tougher curve than other subjects.