There’s another affirmative action story I’ve been hearing about this week, on NPR, that hasn’t gotten as much attention, though it’s directly relevant to the big Supreme Court story I’ll be getting to presently; about a young labor economist, Zachary Bleemer, who’s just gotten a job at Princeton, and a study he published in 2021, “Affirmative action, mismatch, and economic mobility after California’s Proposition 209”.
Bleemer noticed that when California voters passed Proposition 209 in 1996, banning the use of race and gender as factors in state university admissions, hiring, and contracting decisions, they set up the parameters of a social science experiment: when California’s great state university system saw a precipitous decline in Black and Latin students at its big prestige institutions, Berkeley and UCLA, and a corresponding increase at the less glamorous ones like San Jose State or what have you. The end of affirmative action wasn’t necessarily having an effect on who went to college, but it was having a big effect on who went where.
Berkeley and UCLA, the most selective public universities in the state, saw declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment of about 40% immediately the year after the Proposition was implemented. There was no net change in black and Hispanic enrollment at less selective California universities because while some black and Hispanic students lost access to those schools because affirmative action ended, they also gained Black and Hispanic students from more selective schools like Berkeley and UCLA that those students could no longer get into. So you saw pretty big changes at the most selective universities but no net changes in the middle and, if anything, small increases in Black and Hispanic enrollment at the least selective public universities in the state.
Bleemer examined what happened after college to the two cohorts, during affirmative action and after it was ended, whether they got postgraduate degrees, what kinds of jobs they ended up with, and how much money they were making, and so on, and found some remarkable differences: for instance, the old affirmative action policy did a lot more in the first place than the new “top percent” policy seeking to attain diversity without mentioning race:
UC’s affirmative action and top percent policies increased underrepresented minority (URM) enrollment by over 20 percent and less than 4 percent, respectively. Holistic review increases implementing campuses’ URM enrollment by about 7 percent. Top percent policies and holistic review have negligible effects on lower-income enrollment, while race-based affirmative action modestly increased enrollment among very low-income students.
More importantly.
ending affirmative action caused underrepresented minority (URM) freshman applicants to cascade into lower-quality colleges. The “mismatch hypothesis” implies that this cascade would provide net educational benefits to URM applicants, but their degree attainment declined overall and in STEM fields, especially among less academically qualified applicants. URM applicants’ average wages in their twenties and thirties subsequently declined, driven by declines among Hispanic applicants. These declines are not explained by URM students’ performance or persistence in STEM course sequences, which were unchanged after Prop 209. Ending affirmative action also deterred thousands of qualified URM students from applying to any UC campus
On the other hand,
Black and Hispanic students saw substantially poorer long-run labor market prospects as a result of losing access to these very selective universities. But there was no commensurate gain in long-run outcomes for the white and Asian students who took their place. It seems like these very selective public universities in California just provided greater value to relatively disadvantaged Black and Hispanic students who came from lower-income neighborhoods, had poorer job networks, relatively less access to otherwise successful peers, and who were thus able to better take advantage of the resources provided by these super selective universities than the white and Asian students who took their places.
White and AAPI students didn’t gain anything from getting into Berkeley and UCLA instead of San Jose State and so on. They basically got the same results they would have gotten on the less classy campuses. It was, so to speak, a less-than-zero-sum game. White and Asian students moving into the seats previously reserved for African American and Latin students didn’t get any new benefits, they just stopped the others from getting them. Nobody benefited.
In other words, with the California system at least, affirmative action only did good. It didn’t take anything away from anybody, white or Asian. Economically, white people at Irvine got just as much out of college as they did out of UCLA. Only if you were Black or Latin did you get any special advantage, and you weren’t taking anything away from somebody else because nobody else was getting that, whatever it was.
That just has to apply to some extent to the students in the wider American perspective of having all these private schools. The benefits of the very special schools, Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Duke, are probably more social than academic, networking rather than informational, which makes a (disgusting) difference in law or business school, but most white people are going to be fine if they get their degrees at Kent State or Eastern Michigan or Buffalo State, and Asian people are too. If you’re not Black, stop thinking you have to go to Harvard!
Today’s Supreme Court cases are very specifically targeted at those very famous and special places, and the decision is bad, but I think it’s in a clearly losing war. I mean this. I think they’ve gone too far.
Great stuff, thanks.
My contention, created decades ago, is that this decision would come sooner or later and any fool who runs a university knows that and plans accordingly. California and Michigan went that route long before now and one assumes (that one would be me because I'm completely unschooled on the subject) that in the intervening years they've managed to do right-ishly by the constituents who pay their salaries...
I don't really recall the arguments against AA other than handwavy cites of fairness. The entire point of AA existing was ignored by the opposition, other than arguing that Chatsworth Osbourne III did not deserved to be denied an education because someone else's grandfather owned slaves. It's of a piece with Tim Scott's claim that because he pulled himself up by his bootstraps there is no longer any systemic racism, or any kind, really, in America. It's easy to win an argument if you can simply ignore the premise and "prove the pudding" by throwing it out the window.