The term has hardly been in session for three weeks, but McNutt is already busy recruiting '17s and '18s, filling spots on athletic teams and giving tours to prospective students. Like most colleges, Dartmouth has an affirmative action program that plays a role in the Admissions Office. According to its formal mission statement, "diversity at all levels is critical to Dartmouth's mission." The accepted purpose of affirmative action is to remedy past discriminations. Less accepted, however, is who pays the price. With a 10 percent acceptance rate, admitting one student means rejecting nine others.
Evaluating the weight placed on race and ethnicity may be difficult due to the secrecy surrounding the issue, but Princeton University's Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung do a phenomenal job in their 2005 article "The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities." Their model accurately quantifies the relative admissions advantages different racial and ethnic groups receive. On a 1600-point SAT scale, African-Americans receive "the equivalent of 230 points" and Hispanic students about 185 points, while Asian-Americans lose 50 points. To put this in perspective, recruited athletes get an additional 200 points, and legacy students receive 160 points. Their analysis provides tangible answers for many key questions.
For years, diversity proponents have criticized the preferential treatment of athletes and legacy students, claiming that it negatively impacts the availability of seats for minority students. While this varies from college to college due to the size of the athletics program, the decline is at most a meager 2 percent. On the other hand, opponents of affirmative action have claimed cases of "reverse discrimination" wherein qualified white students are denied entry to elite colleges. The Espenshade and Chung study shows, however, that more than 80 percent of those seats would actually go to Asian-Americans, not whites. In other words, it is "Asian-Americans who bear the brunt of affirmative-action policies at elite institutions."
If affirmative action is meant to rectify previous exclusions of groups of people, a system that legitimizes denying otherwise worthy Asian-American applicants proves bafflingly counterproductive. Some scholars, such as professor Stacey Lee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggest that Asian-Americans are viewed as a "model minority" who are inherently hardworking and over-achieving. Thus, an individual's achievements can be dismissed with a simple "she's Asian," making Asian-Americans an easy scapegoat for the real cost of diversity policies. While conveniently overlooking restrictive immigration quotas, internment camps and racial taxes, affirmative action programs have in practice arbitrarily isolated Asians.
Race is no longer the sole, overwhelming reason for discrimination. Religion, poverty, social status, sexual orientation, gender and the intersections of all these forces must be taken into account. A 2004 Century Foundation study showed that in the 146 most selective academic institutions, just 3 percent of students came from the bottom quarter of the socioeconomic scale. Meanwhile, 74 percent of the student body came from the richest quarter. Nationally, the number one reason that students drop out of college is the immediate need for a job. When faced with the choice of immediate income versus a long-term investment in human capital, many students choose income. If "diversity at all levels" is truly important, then how can an institution justify looking solely at the color of one's skin at the expense of other races, and more importantly, other aspects of diversity? Due to immigration and varying birthrates, by 2042 the United States will become a majority-minority country, where non-Hispanic whites will be 46 percent of the population. Accordingly, notions of affirmative action must inevitably shift away from a solely race-based program to include other aspects of exclusion.
While race-based affirmative action mostly admits very affluent members of minority races, a class-based system could allow for racial diversity in addition to socioeconomic differences. It's been nearly 50 years since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, but our educational system still judges people on the color of their skin. Worse, it pigeon-holes them into a single check-box, ignoring other facets of their identity.
