Century Foundation senior fellow Richard Kahlenberg gets to the core issue in Fisher v. Texas, namely, why schools with race-neutral admissions policies that work still resort to racial preferences. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“The case, Fisher v. Texas, presents the question of whether an institution of higher education is allowed to use race in admissions even when the use of ‘race-neutral’ alternatives produce a fair amount of racial diversity by themselves. For several years beginning in the mid-1990s, the University of Texas was banned by a Circuit Court decision from using race in admissions, so it employed two alternatives: a socioeconomic affirmative-action program, and a plan under which students from the top 10 percent of every high-school class in Texas were automatically admitted regardless of standardized test scores.
“After the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the ability of universities to carefully employ racial preferences in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, Texas went back to considering race alongside the top-10-percent and class-based affirmative-action programs. White plaintiffs sued, arguing that the use of race was unnecessary and therefore violated Grutter because Texas’s race-neutral plans produced sufficient racial diversity.”
Race-based approaches seem to be a compulsion for social engineers. Even when race-neutral approaches work, they still focus on skin color. Why?
Kahlenberg says that a Century Foundation report showed that class-based preferences resulted in “almost as much” diversity as blatant racial preferences. Although I believe socioeconomic status is a sort of proxy for race, it’s more palatable than outright skin color considerations. And lower-income people of all races would benefit. Compromise is the name of this game.
Comments on this entry are closed.