The goal of affirmative action is a good one: It’s to reduce racial disparity. Like most Americans, I support this goal, but I don’t personally care much about the Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions because affirmative action does very little good and may even be harmful for long-run racial equality. I don’t know whether it does a little good or a little bad, but because it clearly does very little, the decision does not deserve much political capital. Plus, given how unpopular affirmative action is, its end was inevitable.
Let’s take the best-case scenario for affirmative action. It almost exclusively affects students that go to the most exclusive schools that admit less than 25% of applicants.
Only about 3% of African American college students go to these schools and probably about half of these students would be able to get in without affirmative action. But let’s be more generous about our rounding and say that 2% of African American college students get to go to a more exclusive school due to affirmative action. That is probably helpful to them, but maybe not because of what the economics literature calls “mismatch theory”. This is the idea that affirmative action actually harms students by pushing them into courses they’re not prepared for. I think better schools are generally better for most students, but the difference in school quality makes very little difference overall.
Whereas it is true that graduates of elite schools make significantly more money than graduates of ordinary colleges, that doesn’t mean that anyone would make more money if they attended an elite school. The defining characteristic of elite schools is their ability to only select students that they think have high future potential. Relative to normal schools, elite schools are dramatically better at screening for elite students and there is much less evidence that elite schools are significantly better at teaching. So although some papers claim that elite school graduates make 5% more than other graduates, this is not necessarily due to better education given that the main distinguishing characteristic of elite schools is their ability to cream skim students who are easier to teach than 95% of college students. The best paper that avoids this selection-bias problem just looks at students who got in to an elite school, but decided to go to a normal school. This paper shows there is no difference in life outcomes at elite schools. So normal schools and elite schools may be equally good at educating students, but elite-school students may still achieve better average outcomes due to the elite selection process. Because affirmative action just pulls relatively high-achieving students from good colleges into elite colleges, it probably has very little effect on life outcomes.
In any case, if mismatch theory were right, then the biggest harm would go toward student athletes and the children of rich donors, because they are the main group with lower academic preparation at elite schools.
In 2002, James Schulman and former Princeton University President William Bowen looked at 30 selective colleges and found that athletes were given a 48 percent boost in admissions, compared with 25 percent for legacies [children of rich alumni] and 18 percent for racial minorities.
Athletes and ‘legacies’ at elite schools are disproportionately rich and white. I think we’d all be in favor of eliminating this form of ‘affirmative action’ which reveals the real priorities of elite schools and the inherent unfairness of elite higher education in America.
Elite schools may be slightly better at educating students because they spend a lot more money per student, but elite schools are also much less efficient at education than average, and spend disproportionate resources cream skimming students, so they do not have to be particularly good at educating students and they will still get high-earning graduates. I have read that elite schools discourage students who would otherwise successfully go into STEM majors at a less selective school and decide that they prefer an easier major when thrown into an elite school. This is one place where mismatch theory may be true and this effect could be part of what counteracts any beneficial effect of elite education for non-STEM majors. STEM majors at elite schools do not earn more than at normal schools and if less-prepared students are more likely to switch out of a STEM major at elite schools, then that would be harmful and minority students (Asians excepted) are more likely to switch out of a STEM major.
So it isn’t completely clear whether or not elite education benefits minority students relative to normal universities. Given that affirmative action only helps about 2% of minority college students get into a more elite school and the fact that about 32% of African Americans get a college degree, then affirmative action only directly benefits about 6 out of every 1000 African Americans. That is pretty trivial even without deciding the controversy over whether those 6 people really get any benefit from going to a more elite school. This is just my back-of-the envelope estimate, but Zachary Bleemer is a big proponent of affirmative action who examined the University of California system in detail and argued that the end of affirmative action initially reduced the number of under-represented minority students by about 800 per year in a university system that educates 280,000 students (29% of whom are under-represented minorities), so this is a more precise estimate which demonstrates that only a very small fraction of students are affected. Bleemer thinks that it should have been maintained to benefit those 800 students, but the University of California system has since found other ways to benefit disadvantaged students as will be shown below.
No wonder then that affirmative action isn’t even popular among it purported beneficiaries, African Americans & Hispanics. According to a recent Washington Post poll, 47% of African Americans would support the Supreme Court ban! Affirmative action only helps a few of the least needy African Americans who are already privileged relative to the vast majority of African Americans because they are in the top quarter of college-bound students. Affirmative action disproportionately benefits richer Blacks, some of whom could pass as white, and many of whom are foreign students or recent immigrants from elite African families. It is not something that most African Americans expect to benefit from.
It is even possible that affirmative action could be harmful to African Americans as a whole because it increases racial division. There is a widespread misperception that most African Americans benefit from affirmative action which means that employers discount the hard-fought achievements of African Americans as being unearned and undeserved and that would hurt the job prospects of the >99% of African Americans who got nothing from it. Given the fact that affirmative action helps almost nobody, nothing could be further from the truth and yet its existence is one of the reasons why the majority of white Americans think that African Americans face less discrimination than whites in according to some polls. Even president Obama’s remarkable accomplishments were diminished by critics who claiming that he was undeserving and only became president by benefitting from affirmative action. That kind of attitude hurts all African Americans and helps explain why almost half do not approve of affirmative action.
Affirmative action also politically divides poor whites from poor minorities and engenders racial hostility. Racial quotas have historically been particularly harmful to Asians and this perception among Asians that they are disproportionately hurt by affirmative action is why an Asian advocacy group was the plaintiff that won the Supreme Court case banning affirmative action. Perhaps ending affirmative action can help bring more political unity between racial minority groups and between underprivileged families of all races to work for more equality of opportunity in America. I agree with the Marxists that race is a social construct that has been consistently used by elites to divide the working classes in order to maintain inequality and class hierarchy.
Focusing on more precise measures of disadvantage like class is better for increasing equal economic opportunities for all races without causing all the problems of racial affirmative action. As is often the case, California is about 20 years ahead of the rest of the country on this issue. California banned racial affirmative action 20 years ago and yet their minority participation at elite schools has approximately bounced back to where it was by changing focus towards less controversial and more accurate measures of disadvantage like economic class.
Source: L.A. Times
Elite schools like affirmative action because it makes them look egalitarian, not because of a deep commitment to social justice so it is not surprising that they fill their racial quotas by finding students who are 1/8th Native American (and 7/8th white) or the children of rich Black Dominican immigrants. The whole point of elite education is elitism, not egalitarianism. Affirmative action makes elite schools look like they are somewhat egalitarian, but it does nothing to fix the main inequalities of our educational system which lavishes vast resources on the top 5% of our college students and neglects the bottom 50%. Affirmative action merely disguises the incredible inequality built into the entire system like lipstick on a pig.
If we really want to be inclusive and egalitarian, we should care more about putting more resources into the normal schools that educate 95% of minority students and end the massive government subsidies and tax advantages that go to wealthy elite schools. Plus, we should also ban the massive affirmative action for rich ‘legacy’ students and well-to-do student athletes. That is a much bigger source of unfairness than race-based affirmative action and ending it would open up space for many more disadvantaged students. Plus, if elite schools are so good at educating students, then they should expand and admit a lot more students. All elite schools could afford to double in size and they would still have more money per student than the average college has. That would be the best affirmative action program of all, but it would be the radical opposite of the whole point of elite education which is to create elite exclusivity through constructing artificial scarcity.
Conclusion
Affirmative action only helps at most a couple percent of minority students go to elite schools and these are already the highest achieving minority students who need the least help. It isn’t even clear that these students achieve better life outcomes. However, the misperception that affirmative action is pervasive means that the achievements of minorities are often incorrectly judged to be undeserved and causes racial divisiveness which prevents real reforms that could benefit all underserved people. Given that African Americans are ambivalent about affirmative action and it is deeply unpopular among all other groups because of perceived unfairness means that it is politically vulnerable in a democracy and we should look for more effective alternatives such as increasing enrollment at elite schools, and focus more upon individual measures of disadvantage such as income, wealth, and neighborhood as the University of California system has done which can better serve disadvantaged individuals while avoiding the problems of purely race-based affirmative action.
Medianism 
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