redbloodedamerica:

Affirmative Action Hurts Those It’s Intended To Help

What if I told you there was a way we could have more black doctors, more black engineers, more black scientists, more black college professors, and we already have the key to accomplish this.  All we have to do is open the door.  Isn’t that something we all want?  

Well, as it turns out, the door blocking the way is “affirmative action” policies that give preferential admissions treatment to students along racial lines.  That might sound counter intuitive, but well accepted science has shown these policies produce the opposite outcome of what most people pushing for them want.  

How can that be?

Ask Richard Sander, economist and law professor at UCLA.  Interested in the effects of affirmative action on law school classes and supported by the Searle Freedom Trust, Sander conducted research finding that when students are paired with schools that match their prior academic credentials they do better, and when they’re put in schools where they have lower academic credentials than their classmates, they don’t do as well in the long run.  

At his school, UCLA, Sander found that 90% of law students who were admitted with large racial preferences were graduating, but only 50% of those students passed the bar exam.  If they had gone to different schools that better matched their academic credentials, they were more likely to pass the bar.  Sander named this problem “mismatch”.  

Sander continued to study mismatch, but it wasn’t easy.  Many universities refused to provide him or other researchers with access to data, presumably out of fear it would overturn the prevailing narrative over racial equity in education.  While Democrats and so-called progressives have denounced mismatch theory as racist, nonpartisan investigative teams, including one from Duke and Cornell Universities, have concluded that there is substantial evidence for mismatch theory.  For example, when California passed Proposition 209 in 1996, which prohibited state governmental institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in public education, African American attendance at UC Berkeley and UCLA went down, but throughout the UC System as a whole the number of African Americans increased by 30% and the number receiving bachelor’s degrees went up a whopping 70%.  

Additionally, research found that under Affirmative Action, African American students were more likely to switch out of STEM majors and into easier majors with fewer career opportunities  

So the science is clear: affirmative action is counterproductive.  Open the door and remove affirmative action, and you’ll see more black professionals—exactly what preference supporters claim to want.