New college admissions data reveals the dangers of affirmative action

MIT has just released the demographic breakdown of its undergraduate class of 2028, the first to be admitted after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that affirmative action was illegal. The use of racial preferences in college and university admissions, the court ruled last June, was unconstitutional. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “The student should be treated on the basis of his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.”

After the affirmative action ban, the percentage of Asian American students admitted to MIT increased from the average of the previous four years, from 41 percent to 47 percent, the percentage of black/African American students decreased from 13 percent to five percent, and the percentage of Hispanic/Latino students decreased from 15 percent to 11 percent. The percentage of students who identified as white/Caucasian remained about unchanged at 37 percent, compared with an average of 38 percent in the previous four years. Still more students reported other racial backgrounds, with totals exceeding 100 percent, since students were allowed to report multiple ethnicities.

These numbers strongly suggest that under the previous Affirmative Action regime, Asian Americans were discriminated against on the basis of their race, while some Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino students were admitted on the basis of racial preference. While factors beyond the Supreme Court ruling influence the demographic distribution of admissions, MIT’s dean of admissions effectively confirmed this racial disparity by stating that the expected impact of the court’s ruling would be a decline in the number of students from “historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups” (although the term “underrepresented” is clearly loaded).

Other evidence confirms high levels of racial discrimination at other schools under the old affirmative action regime. From 2010 to 2015, excluding “legacy students” and recruited athletes, a student in the top academic decile had a nearly 60 percent chance of being admitted to Harvard if he was black, about 35 percent if he was Hispanic, less than 20 percent if he was white, and less than 15 percent if he was Asian. In fact, a black student whose academic ranking was just below average was nearly twice as likely to be admitted to Harvard as an Asian student whose academic ranking was in the top 10 percent.

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American economist Thomas Sowell has long studied the disastrous consequences of affirmative action and was cited extensively in Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court case that struck it down. In his 2023 book Social Justice Fallacies , he highlighted, among many examples, the unfortunate consequences of MIT’s practice of affirmative action over the decades.

Although the average black student at MIT was in the top 10 percent of American students in mathematics, they were in the top 10 percent of American students in mathematics. bottom “10 percent of MIT students whose math scores were at the 99th percentile,” Sowell explained, citing a 1987 paper. “The result was that 24 percent of these extremely well-qualified black students did not graduate from MIT, and those who did graduate were concentrated in the bottom half of their class.”

While these black students could have been at the top of their classes at most universities, admitting them to MIT on the basis of race rather than academic readiness led to failure. In a similar vein, Sowell recalls that when he taught at Cornell, a huge influx of black students in the 1960s due to race-based programs resulted in half of black students being placed on probation for academic deficiencies. More recent national data show that these negative consequences of affirmative action were not limited to MIT and Cornell and have persisted for decades.

Black students who were admitted to top schools on the basis of academic merit also suffered negative consequences of affirmative action. If we apply the latest MIT admissions data roughly, under the previous affirmative action regime, only five of 13 black undergraduate MIT students were admitted on the basis of merit. The inevitable result is that many who were admitted on the basis of merit, many of their colleagues and teachers would have initially assumed, or at least strongly suspected, that they had been admitted on the basis of race and adjusted their expectations accordingly. That doesn’t help anyone.

Wikipedia’s description of “affirmative action” reads: “Affirmative action is intended to reduce underrepresentation and to increase the opportunities of certain minority groups within a society to provide them with access equal to that of the majority population.” Sowell responded in an interview last year: “Well, there are always wonderful words to describe things that aren’t so wonderful.” Racial discrimination is indeed not wonderful, and students of all races would be better off if the practice were banned from college admissions.