Affirmative action plays an important role in Dartmouth and many other universities' admissions processes. This policy is obviously very controversial, as evidenced by its frequent appearance on these pages ("A Better Affirmative Action," July 5). Perhaps public school reform offers a way out of this controversy.
Blacks have always been at a substantial disadvantage compared to other Americans. Even today, African Americans, on average, have a shorter life expectancy, are less likely to graduate from high school, have lower incomes and are more likely to be imprisoned than other Americans.
As a result, beginning in the 1960s, American universities instituted affirmative action programs in the hopes that the temporary use of these programs would level the playing field. In practice, this has meant that African American and Hispanic students have a substantial advantage over similar Asian and white students when applying to selective universities. Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford found that being African American rather than Asian increased one's chances of admission to a selective university by the same amount as raising one's SAT score by 450 points (on the old 1600-point test), all other things equal.
But why do African Americans and Hispanics perform worse academically in high school than their peers? It is not because they are less intelligent or hard working: If you control for socioeconomic differences, African Americans and Hispanics are just as likely to graduate and have similar scores on standardized tests as other American high school students. Instead, African Americans and Hispanics are more likely than other students to live in poor neighborhoods and are therefore more likely to attend bad elementary and high schools. In most states, public schools are funded by local property taxes and students are forced to attend the school to which they are assigned if they are to receive a publicly funded education. This means that poor neighborhoods will have lower-funded schools and most students from poor neighborhoods do not have the option to attend a better school somewhere else. This is why education reform institutions and policies like charter schools, school vouchers, more teacher accountability and more equitable school funding formulas is so important if one truly wishes to see greater equality of opportunity.
These public-school problems are directly related to post-secondary affirmative action programs. To put it bluntly, because America's primary and secondary school systems have long been failing poor African American and Hispanic students, America's universities are discriminating against Asian Americans in favor of African Americans and Hispanic Americans in admission decisions. This entire situation is completely unjust. Going forward, it would be better to fix the public education system, which would enhance equality of opportunity for students of all racial backgrounds, than for America's universities to continue to only partially ameliorate the problem with affirmative action programs.
I attended a public high school during my freshman year. At this school, I knew several people who perhaps dreamt of attending an Ivy League university but never seriously considered the possibility. Unfortunately, this particular high school left its students completely unprepared to apply to a selective university, let alone succeed if admitted. I transferred to a private high school after my freshman year, but most of my peers at the public school were not so fortunate. It is not just that they were forced to attend a sup-par high school and therefore be left at a disadvantage compared to luckier students like myself merely because that was the school to which they were assigned by a government bureaucrat. The resulting educational inequalities produced by this injustice provide the fundamental justification for affirmative action in higher education.
It is not a sign of success but of failure that we still have affirmative action programs at schools like Dartmouth almost half a century after these programs began. Should we manage to fix America's inequitable public-school systems, affirmative action programs would probably no longer be necessary. If affirmative action still exists half a century from now, this would only be evidence for the fact that we, as a society, are continuing to fail in our pursuit of equal opportunity.
