Through the years, racial preference proponents have talked about the so-called benefits of diversity. Preferences benefit minorities by virtue of their being preferred over the majority and non-preferred minorities (people of Asian descent, for example). What’s difficult to assess is how campus diversity benefits non-preferred groups.
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan law school’s use of race in admissions to achieve a “critical mass” of minorities was narrowly tailored to further a compelling interest in “obtaining the educational benefits that flow from” skin deep-only diverse student body. The court said the law school’s critical mass rationale “is further bolstered by numerous expert studies and reports showing that such diversity promotes learning outcomes and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce, for society, and for the legal profession.”
One of the reports the court relied on to make this assessment was the Gurin Report. Patricia Gurin, a psychology and women’s studies professor, said racial diversity “has far-ranging and significant benefits for all students, non-minorities and minorities alike,” and that interacting with racially diverse peers “is positively associated with a host of what I call ‘learning outcomes.’ Students who experienced the most racial and ethnic diversity in classroom settings and in informal interactions with peers showed the greatest engagement in active thinking processes, growth in intellectual engagement and motivation, and growth in intellectual and academic skills.”
Duane Ellison, of the National Association of Scholars, submitted a response brief to the court challenging Gurin’s study. For example, Ellison says Gurin’s work is statistically flawed…”inconsistent and…trivially weak.”
“Gurin defines her own idiosyncratic diversity variables, which she labels ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘democracy outcomes…[b]ut, Gurin finds no statistical correlation between a racially and ethnically diverse student body and her ‘learning outcomes’ and democracy outcomes.’ Her statistical output shows that taking an ethnic studies course, participating in a diversity workshop, discussing minority issues, and other measures yield exceedingly weak correlations with learning and democracy outcomes, at least some of the time. At other times, she finds nothing, no statistical correlation.”
In other words, the relationship between doing all of these race-focused things and racial and ethnic diversity on campus is not strong enough to sustain the diversity-benefits-everyone argument. Yet, the Supreme Court relied on this study to decide racial discrimination was constitutionally permissible.
With the intro out of the way, I’ll point you to an article at Benzinga.com that summarizes a new study by two Duke University professors, Peter Arcidiacono and Jacob Vigdor (pictured), challenging the diversity-benefits-everyone argument. The person who wrote the article noted that increasing minority representation “usually” entails lowering standards for those minorities, a fact that isn’t expressed nearly enough.
According to the study, evidence strongly suggests that racial preferences themselves have “a negative net impact on students not directly targeted by the program.” The researchers found weak evidence of a relationship between campus diversity and postgrad outcomes of whites or Asians.
“Our empirical results cover a broad range of outcomes, including earnings, educational attainment, and satisfaction with both one’s life and one’s job. Across these varying specifications, we fail to find any significant evidence that white or Asian students who attend more diverse colleges do better later in life. Moreover, the strongest evidence we uncover suggests that increasing minority representation by lowering admission standards is unlikely to produce benefits and may in fact cause harm by reducing the representation of minority students on less selective campuses.”
In other words, whites and non-preferred minorities don’t benefit from racial bean counting in admissions. Let’s be honest. Is that one of the goals of “affirmative action”? I say no. Asserting that whites and others will obtain certain educational benefits because they’re surrounded by preferred minorities is part of the advertising claim to sell the obviously discriminatory policy. Some whites buy the product; some don’t.
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