NYT: Affirmative Action a Failure

Lucianne.com links to a National Review article by David French which is, in turn, based on a data-rich article in The New York Times. The Times article documents that decades of affirmative action have failed to gain proportional representation for blacks and Hispanics in the nation's universities and colleges.

David French writes an explanation for why affirmative action has failed. As he says, it never had a chance to succeed. Some key quotes:

After decades of affirmative action, billions of dollars invested in finding, mentoring, and recruiting minority students, and extraordinary levels of effort and experimentation, black and Hispanic students are “more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago”. White and Asian students, on the other hand, remain overrepresented as a percentage of the population, with Asian students most overrepresented of all.

On the one hand, these statistics represent a staggering failure. It’s difficult to overstate the modern campus obsession with diversity.

On the other hand, however, one wonders whether failure was inevitable. Not even the most aggressive of affirmative-action programs can find students who don’t exist. And when it comes to college admissions, the problem isn’t a lack of collegiate demand for qualified minority students but rather a serious deficiency in supply.

Here’s an interesting fact. The cohort that’s most overrepresented in American colleges and universities, Asian Americans, also happens to have the lowest percentage of nonmarital births in the United States. In fact, the the greater the percentage of nonmarital births, the worse the educational outcomes. Only 16.4 percent of Asian and Pacific Islander children are born into nonmarried households. For white, Hispanic, and black Americans the percentages are 29.2, 53, and 70.6, respectively.

There’s abundant evidence that even vast increases in public spending on education hasn’t led to corresponding increases in test scores, and when you understand how education really works, it’s easy to understand why. One of the most common characteristics of high-achieving students is they come from families that prioritize academic success.

And yet, in places like California, if the public colleges and universities can't get Hispanic kids to come, stay, succeed and graduate, Hispanic legislators will cut funding, campuses will close, and people will be laid off. Administrators are desperate to succeed, for the most selfish of reasons, but to date haven't figured out how to make it happen.