The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (77 page)

Once again, however, the rationale for affirmative action is not fully satisfactory. Looking back to the time when the numbers of Jews or women on a campus were strictly limited, most people feel uncomfortable with the rationales, however dispassionately accurate they might have seemed at the time. They are uncomfortable partly because of the injustice, which brings us to the final criterion that should be part of the admissions process.

J
UST
D
ESERTS.
Beyond institutional benefit and social utility, college admissions may recognize what might be called “just deserts.” As the director of admissions to Columbia College expressed it, One has to take into account how well one has done with the environment [an applicant has] been handed.”
²³
The applicant who overcame poverty, cultural disadvantages, an unsettled home life, a prolonged illness, or a chronic disability to do as well as he did in high school will get a tip from most admissions committees, even if he is not doing as well academically as the applicants usually accepted. This tip for the disadvantaged does not seem unfair.

This is the intuitive rationale of affirmative action for blacks, who were demonstrably the victims of legal oppression, enforced by the state, from the founding of the colonies through the middle of this century, and of pervasive social discrimination that still persists to some degree.
To give blacks an edge because they are black accords with this sense of justice. At an elaborated level, there is a widespread impression that the underrepresentation of blacks and Latinos (and perhaps other groups, such as American Indians) in elite schools is an effect of racial or ethnic injustice, properly corrected by affirmative action in university admissions. If it were not for the racism in our society, the groups would be proportionally represented, some believe. A still more elaborated version of the argument is that the very approach to learning, reasoning, and argumentation in universities is itself racist, so that the predictors of university performance, such as SAT or IQ scores, are therefore racist too. Affirmative action redresses the built-in racism in the admissions process and the curriculum.
²⁴

Two Common But Invalid Arguments Regarding Affirmative Action

So there are three coherent rationales for concluding that it is just, as well as institutionally and socially useful, to admit minority students from specific minority groups even if they are somewhat less qualified than the other candidates who would be admitted. The rationales are not even controversial. Few of the opponents of affirmative action are prepared to argue that universities should ignore any of these criteria altogether in making admissions decisions. With that issue behind us, the
question becomes whether affirmative action as it is being practiced is doing what its advocates want it to do. Does it serve worthwhile purposes for the institutions themselves, for students, for society at large, or for a commonly shared sense of justice?

We will set the problem first with hypothetical applicants to college, divided into four categories, then we will insert the actual cognitive ability scores of the college students in those categories. The four categories are represented in the 2 × 2 table below, where “low” and “high” refer to the full range of cultural and economic advantages and disadvantages.

“Scarsdale” denotes any applicant from an upscale family. “South Bronx” denotes a disadvantaged minority youth, and “Appalachia” denotes a disadvantaged white youth. Each cell in the table corresponds to a pair of applicants—a white and a minority—from either high or low socioeconomic and cultural circumstances. Starting at the lower right and going clockwise around the table, the categories are: (1) a minority applicant from a disadvantaged background and a white from a privileged background; (2) a minority and a white applicant, both from disadvantaged backgrounds; (3) a minority applicant from a privileged background and a white from a disadvantaged background, and (4) a minority and a white applicant, both from privileged backgrounds.

Imagine you are on the admissions committee and choosing between
two candidates. Assume that all the nonacademic qualifications besides race are fully specified by high and low status for this pair of candidates and that the IQ is the only measure of academic ability being considered. (In other words, let us disregard grades, extracurricular activities, athletics, alumni parents, and other factors.) You are trying to decide whether to admit the minority applicant or the white applicant. How big a difference in IQ are you willing to accept in each cell and still pick the minority candidate over the white candidate? Let us consider each cell in turn, starting with the situation in which the minority might be expected to get the largest premium to the one in which the premium arguably should go to the white.

C
ELL
1: T
HE
S
OUTH
B
RONX
M
INORITY VERSUS THE
S
CARSDALE
W
HITE.
The largest weight obviously belongs in the cell in which the minority student is disadvantaged and the white student is advantaged. Considerations of just deserts argue that it is not fair to equate the test scores of the youngster who has gotten the finest education money and status can buy with the test scores of the youngster who has struggled through poor schools and a terrible neighborhood. Considerations of social utility argue that it is desirable to have more minority students getting good college educations, so that society may alter the effects of past discrimination and provide a basis for an eventually color-blind society in the future. We assign ++ to this cell to indicate a large preference for the minority candidate. A relatively large deficit in the minority applicant’s test score may properly be overlooked.

C
ELL
4: T
HE
S
CARSDALE
M
INORITY
V
ERSUS THE
S
CARSDALE
W
HITE.
If a college is choosing between two students in the high-high cell, both from Scarsdale with college-educated parents and family incomes in six figures, the social utility criteria say that there is a rationale for picking the minority youth even if his test scores are somewhat lower. But doing so would violate just deserts when the white student has higher test scores and is in every other way equal to the minority student. Which criterion should win out? There is no way to say for sure. Our own view is that, as personally hurtful as this injustice may be to the individual white person involved, it is relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. The privileged white youth, with strong credentials and parents who can pay for college, will get into a good college someplace. We therefore assign a + to this cell to signify some ethnic premium to the minority candidate but less than in the first instance.

C
ELL
2: T
HE
S
OUTH
B
RONX
M
INORITY VERSUS THE
A
PPALACHIAN
W
HITE.
Now imagine a minority student from the South Bronx and a white student from an impoverished Appalachian community. The families of both students are at the wrong end of the scale of advantage. Which one should get the nod in a close call? The white has just as much or nearly as much “social utility” going for him as the black does. American society will benefit from educating youngsters from disadvantaged white backgrounds, too. Both have a claim based on just deserts. America likes to think that people can work their way up from the bottom, and Appalachia is the bottom no less than the South Bronx. Perhaps there is some residual premium associated with being black, based on the supposition that just being black puts one at a greater disadvantage than a white in the “all else equal” case—a more persuasive point when applied to blacks from the South Bronx than when applied to blacks from Scarsdale. We assign ≈0 to this cell, indicating that the appropriate ethnic premium for the minority student is not much greater than zero (other things being equal) and is certainly smaller than in the Scarsdale-Scarsdale case.

C
ELL
3: T
HE
S
CARSDALE
M
INORITY VERSUS THE
A
PPALACHIAN
W
HITE.
Now we are comparing the privileged minority student with the disadvantaged white student. Where one comes out on the scale of social utility depends on how one values the competing goals to be served. It seems hard to justify a social utility value that nets out in favor of the minority youth, however. (Yes, there is social utility in adding a minority to the ranks of successful attorneys, even if he comes from an affluent background, but there is also social utility in vindicating the American dream for poor whites and in adding a representative of disadvantaged white America to the ranks of successful attorneys.) Something close to zero seems to be the appropriate expected value on the social utility measure, and the white youth should get a plus on the just deserts argument. If the choice is between a poor white youngster from an awful environment and an affluent minority youngster who has gone to fine schools, and if the poor white has somewhat lower test scores than the affluent minority, it is appropriate to give the poor white at least a modest premium. We thus enter—into this cell, to reflect the fact the white youth gets the nod in a close call.

The filled-in table is shown below. We may argue about how large an ethnic premium, expressed in IQ, should be tolerated in each cell, but
the ranking of the premiums seems hard to dispute. With this in mind, we are ready to examine how affirmative action in the NLSY sample squared with this view of the appropriate discrepancies.
²⁶

To fill in the table with data, we divided NLSY students who went to four-year institutions into those in the upper and lower halves of socioeconomic background, using the socioeconomic status index described in Appendix 2. (We also conducted the analysis with more extreme definitions of privilege and disadvantage.)
²⁷
We then selected the subsample of whites and blacks who had attended the same schools, and computed the mean IQ for the upper and lower halves of socioeconomic status for these matched pairs, statistically controlling for institution. Sample sizes of these matched pairs ranged from 72 for the cell in the top left to 504 for the cell in the lower right. The filled-in table below shows the difference between the white and black IQ scores in standard deviations.
²⁸

Let us try to put these numbers in terms of the choices facing an admissions officer. He has two folders on the desk, representing the lower left-hand cell of the table. The two applicants differ in cognitive ability by 1.17 standard deviations, and both are socioeconomically disadvantaged. More specifically (incorporating information about the means not shown in the table), one student is almost exactly average in cognitive ability for such college students, at the 49th percentile of the distribution; the other is at the 12th percentile. Is it appropriate to treat the choice as a toss-up if the student at the 12th percentile happens to
be black?
²⁹
The typical admissions officer has, in effect, been treating two such applicants as a toss-up.

We put the question in that way to try to encourage thinking about a subject that is not much thought about. How big an edge is appropriate? In a properly run system of affirmative action, should the average disadvantaged black and average disadvantaged white who got to a given college differ by so large a margin?