The College Fix

In an essay in Time, Heather MacDonald explains how racial preferences work against the very people they are supposed to help:

A body of empirical research has emerged showing that racial preferences can hurt their purported beneficiaries by catapulting them into schools for which they are inadequately prepared. Placed in classrooms pitched above their current level of knowledge, they learn less than they would if they were among peers whose academic skills more closely mirror their own…

Here are the details: black and Hispanic undergraduates at the University of Texas cluster in certain programs like education and are only minimally present in more challenging majors, according to the Fifth Circuit opinion upholding Texas’ [affirmative action] policy. A study out of Duke University demonstrates how this happens. Black freshmen arrive at Duke overwhelmingly planning to major in natural sciences and economics, but over half of them drop out of those fields and switch to the humanities and soft social sciences, leaving the hard sciences largely the province of whites and Asians. Whether a Duke student will switch out of the hard sciences is wholly a function of his incoming academic qualifications, measured by SATs and high school GPA, black students whose academic qualifications match those of their white and Asian peers are no more likely to drop out of quantitative fields than other students.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/28/how-affirmative-action-backfires/?iid=op-main-lede#ixzz1nhP5nASH

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter