How to defend affirmative action

Although I sympathize with Shantell Richardson's article ("In favor of affirmative action" 4/11/03), the debate over affirmative action is much more complex. First, for the top twenty American colleges and universities there is a 180 point gap between the average SAT scores of blacks and whites and a 210 point gap between those of blacks and Asians (Consortium on Financing Higher Education, 1992).

Second, while many blacks are educated in public schools, many of which are under-privileged, Blacks who attend elite universities tend not to be educated in under-privileged schools. Even more troubling is that the black-white test score gap increases as educational disparities between blacks and whites decrease (Steele, 1995, 1999). Hence, the test gap is largest among the most educationally privileged blacks and whites!

Given those facts, the problem that the Supreme Court faces in the University of Michigan cases is similar to the one that the court faced 25 years earlier in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, namely, that minorities are being accepted in lieu of applicants with higher entrance exam scores. So, we cannot evade the issue. Minorities are gaining acceptance into elite programs with lower test scores. In fact, the exact reason why the University of Michigan awards 20 points to the admissions scores of underrepresented minorities is to offset this disparity in test scores (which I will explain later).

The only way that the situation is different than it was 25 years ago is that, back then, Asians were considered minorities. But now, since Asians have managed to outscore Whites on entrance exams, they are four to five times more populous in elite universities than in the general population. The mobility of Asian Americans in higher education relative to blacks, Latinos, and American Indians has only made it tougher to defend affirmative action. Furthermore, public polls show that the American public is decidedly against affirmative action programs that select people with lower scores over people with higher scores (although this percentage varies with how the poll questions are stated).

Finally, the diversity argument that Thurgood Marshall et al. used to defend race-conscious admissions in the Bakke case is invalid. From the "Opinions of the Court" we see that the diversity argument was based on the First Amendment of the Constitution. Basically, a diverse campus is important for universities to achieve a "robust exchange of ideas". Furthermore, a university has the right to select a diverse campus because they have the right to academic freedom, which is tacitly supported by the First Amendment. Since protecting a constitutional right is a compelling government interest, we should protect the university's right to academic freedom, and thus to campus diversity.

However, the First Amendment only provides conditional rights. In other words, first amendment rights are protected only if no other rights are violated. First amendment rights never outweigh conflicting rights. Merely deciding that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies suffices to restrict the university's right to academic freedom. (Section 601 of Title VI prohibits excluding persons from federally assisted programs based on race.)

Although I've painted a dismal picture for affirmative action, there are ways to defend it. One way is to show that admissions decisions based on unadjusted college entrance exam scores violate Title VI.

Here are the facts. SAT scores predict college GPA with only 18 percent accuracy for freshmen and sophomores, and even less for juniors and seniors, (Maas 2000, Steele 1999). Furthermore, we know that the predictive power of these tests decreases when there is less variation in the abilities of the test-takers. So, exams designed to predict success in graduate school are doomed to be less accurate than ones designed to predict success in undergraduate school. For example, GRE scores display only 9 percent accuracy (Myers 2001).

Since certain racial groups score lower on these tests, then using these tests in admissions decisions establishes a systematic discrimination against these groups. This discrimination would be unproblematic except for the fact that these exams are irrelevant for predicting which students will succeed at which schools. Because using unadjusted college entrance exam scores excludes applicants based on race, it violates Title VI. Correcting for the systematic discrimination, for example with an extra 20 points as the University of Michigan does is one way to remedy the situation. However, if no points are added in favor of applicants, against whom these tests are biased, then that admissions process becomes unfairly racially biased against those applicants.

There are other ways to defend affirmative action, but any of those ways must address the critical issues I have mentioned here.

Quayshawn Spencer is a Graduate student of the Department of Philosophy.