The U.S. Supreme Court will hear an affirmative action case concerning admissions to the University of Michigan this spring. The so-called U-Mich case has turned the heat up on the always-simmering controversy over racial preferences in state schools.
With the possible exception of the abortion debate, no contemporary controversy is so deleterious to the clear use of language. âAffirmative actionâ polls pretty well, but âracial preferencesâ do not. âQuotasâ poll worst of all. Are there meaningful differences between these things, and if so what are they? Politicians seeking to remain on the right side of their favorite constituencies have little interest in clarifying their terms.
The President has historically sought a moderate tone on this issue, balancing the demands of his base against a pet political project of his â making the Republican Party competitive among minority voters. In line with this strategy, his administration has decided to file a brief in the U-Mich case opposing the universityâs admissions program on the relatively narrow ground that it is a âquota system.â
But on its face, the U-Mich program is not a quota; it is a preference. The U-Mich admissions formula does not set aside a certain number of slots for âunderrepresented minoritiesâ (a recent language permutation reflecting the exclusion of Asians and East Indians from preferential programs), but rather adds 20 points to the admissions profile of each African-American, Hispanic or Native American applicant.
Nonetheless, there is a way in which the President could be right. The U-Mich program could amount to a quota if the size of its preference â 20 points rather than 15 or 30 â was designed to result in a freshman class with a certain percentage of minority students. Proponents of preferences tend to refer to this percentage vaguely as a âcritical mass.â If the size of the bump were determined based on some other rationale â say, as a rough stab at quantifying the effect of racism â the U-Mich system would not be a quota system.
Polls results imply that Americans consider this intellectual distinction important, but Iâm not so sure. Rather, I suspect that many poll respondents think of preferences as âplus factorsâ (to borrow a phrase from the Courtâs Bakke decision), used to choose between âequally qualifiedâ applicants, while âquotasâ admit âless qualifiedâ minority applicants.
But what is meant by âequally qualified?â Even assuming for a moment that one is using the word âqualifiedâ in the traditional sense to refer to academic preparedness (a whole separate can of worms), determining academic preparedness is far from an exact science. Two applicants with SAT scores 30 points apart are not necessarily differently prepared academically. One might have taken the test in a cold room, or next to a guy with a bad cough. High school transcripts, plagued by grade inflation and radical differences in academic standards, may reveal even less.
At what point does an admissions committee consider a gap in our imperfect measurements sufficiently probative of academic preparedness to merit consideration in the first place? Even assuming that line can be drawn, does Joe Public believe that admissions preferences should be delimited in the same spot? Despite all the ideological sound and fury surrounding this issue, these basic, factual questions have yet to be answered. Unfortunately, the principals in this public debate have every reason to prefer clouds to clarity.
Update: Just to clarify, SAT points are nowhere near the same size as the "points" awarded under the U-Mich admissions system. In fact, the entire SAT only counts for 12 points in the U-Mich admissions process.
Posted by Marie Gryphon on February 10, 2003