Renu Mukherjee Affirmative Action Doesn’t Work, and MIT Knows It University officials have acknowledged that racial disparities in academic preparation begin at the K–12 level.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/affirmative-action-doesnt-work-and-mit-knows-it
Several highly selective colleges and universities in the U.S.—including MIT, Yale, Princeton, and now Harvard—have finally revealed the racial makeup of their incoming freshmen, the Class of 2028. This is the first group to be admitted since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA), last year.
Supporters of racial preferences anticipated that the ruling would lead to a decline in black and Hispanic enrollment at America’s top schools. Opponents anticipated the opposite, contending that progressive university officials would find ways to evade SFFA and continue discriminating in favor of underrepresented minorities.
Both groups now have data that seem to vindicate their arguments. At MIT, the percentage of black enrollees in the freshman class dropped to 5 percent from 15 percent in the previous year; the percentage of Hispanic enrollees dropped to 11 percent from 16 percent; the percentage of white enrollees dropped to 37 percent from 38 percent; and the percentage of Asian enrollees rose to 47 percent from 40 percent. Yet at Duke, the combined share of black and Hispanic freshmen increased (compared with last fall), while the share of white and Asian freshmen fell. Meantime, at the University of Virginia, the racial makeup of the Class of 2028 remained virtually unchanged from that of the Class of 2027. Clearly, some universities, such as MIT, are taking SFFA more seriously than others.
Indeed, MIT’s President Sally Kornbluth and Dean of Admission Stu Schmill directly attributed the decline in black and Hispanic freshmen at the university to SFFA. Kornbluth, in a recent announcement to the MIT community, said: “The class is, as always, outstanding across multiple dimensions. What it does not bring, as a consequence of last year’s Supreme Court decision, is the same degree of broad racial and ethnic diversity that the MIT community has worked to achieve over the past several decades.” Similarly, Schmill told MIT News during an August 21 interview: “I have no doubt that we left out many well-qualified, well-matched applicants from historically underrepresented backgrounds who in the past we would have admitted—and who would have excelled.”
Kornbluth’s and Schmill’s statements are unsurprising, given their longstanding support of racial preferences. What is surprising—and worth pointing out—is that in the same interview in which he criticized the Supreme Court’s holding in SFFA, Schmill also suggested that affirmative action ignores the root cause of racial disparities in admittance rates. “Unfortunately,” Schmill noted, “there remains persistent and profound racial inequality in American K–12 education, and it is most pronounced in STEM. This means that carrying the diversity of American public schools forward into higher ed is difficult from the word ‘go.’” He reiterated the point in a blog post for MIT’s website: “Students from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds are underrepresented due to persistent and profound racial inequality in American K-12 education that is especially pronounced in areas of math and science most important for preparing students to study STEM in college.”
Affirmative action, by giving a “boost” to black and Hispanic applicants, attempts to reduce racial disparities in elite higher education that are the result, in large part, of racial disparities in academic preparation and opportunity at the K–12 level. As Schmill acknowledged, these disparities in preparation and opportunity are extensive, particularly in STEM education.
A November 2023 report by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights found, for example, that during the 2020–21 academic year, the 5,500 public high schools with high enrollments of black and Latino students (that is, greater than 75 percent of all students) offered fewer mathematics, science, and computer science courses than the 12,300 public high schools with low enrollments of black and Latino students (less than 25 percent of all students). More specifically, only 35 percent of schools with high black and Latino enrollment offered calculus, compared with 54 percent of schools with low black and Latino enrollment. And while 54 percent of schools with low enrollments of black and Latino students offered computer science courses, only 40 percent of schools with high enrollments of these students did the same.
The report also found racial disparities in the enrollment rates of Advanced Placement (AP) STEM courses. Black students made up 15 percent of total high school student enrollment but accounted for just 10 percent of those enrolled in AP computer science, 8 percent of those enrolled in AP science, and 6 percent of those enrolled in AP mathematics. While Latino students made up 27 percent of total high school student enrollment, they accounted for only 20 percent of students enrolled in AP computer science and AP science, and 19 percent of students enrolled in AP mathematics. By contrast, white students made up 48 percent of total high school student enrollment but represented 51 percent of students enrolled in AP science and 53 percent of students enrolled in AP mathematics. Asian students made up 5 percent of total high school student enrollment but represented 17 percent of students enrolled in AP science and AP mathematics.
Racial preferences increase the number of black and Hispanic students at America’s top colleges and universities, but this policy does nothing to alleviate the disparities that made it relevant in the first place. If university officials genuinely want to help underprivileged students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds get on a path to greater success, as they claim, then they should refocus their efforts on reducing disparities in elementary and secondary education. If, on the other hand, university officials care only about diversity for aesthetic purposes and virtue signaling, then they can continue to evade SFFA—and get sued.
One way in which elite colleges and universities can actually help disadvantaged students is by using a small portion of their endowments to build “feeder” schools that provide these students with the requisite skills to gain admission on the basis of merit. This idea was first proposed by my Manhattan Institute colleague Roland Fryer in a 2023 New York Times op-ed:
Elite colleges could operate a network of, say, 100 feeder middle and high schools—academies that are open to promising students who otherwise lack access to a high-quality secondary education, in cities where such children are common because of high poverty rates and underperforming public schools. These institutions would bring their students up to the sponsoring universities’ standards so that they are ready for elite schools when they graduate.
Fryer determined that the cost of building feeder schools would be relatively low. If, to start, these academies enrolled 50,000 students, from freshman through senior year of high school, and allocated $20,000 per student annually (the average tuition at the nation’s K-12 private schools), then the program would cost the Ivy League universities, together, roughly $4 billion—or 2 percent of their combined endowments.
Following SFFA, MIT increased its recruitment of underrepresented and underserved students, implemented a new financial aid policy (where students from families earning less than $75,000 a year can attend for free), and created “new pathways for students to demonstrate their math and science preparation beyond what is locally available.” Though well intentioned, none of these initiatives addresses the reason the university admits so few black and Hispanic students: a lack of academic preparation and opportunity in K-12.
In his aforementioned blog post, Schmill referenced a 2016 report by ACT which found that students who were better prepared in science and mathematics, as measured by their scores on the testing-company’s exam, were more likely to succeed in STEM in college than students who were less prepared. MIT has an endowment of nearly $25 billion, the fifth largest of a college or university in the U.S. University officials such as Schmill and Kornbluth should, in Fryer’s words, “put a small percentage of their endowment money where their mouths are” and help prepare disadvantaged K–12 students go toe to toe with their better-resourced peers.
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