NY Times Op-Ed: Elite Schools Are Thinking About Black Student Admissions The Wrong Way

New York Times Op-Ed:  Harvard, Brown and Other Top Schools Are Thinking About Black Freshmen the Wrong Way, by  John McWhorter (Columbia; Google Scholar):

Several highly selective universities have recently reported that in their first freshman classes admitted after the Supreme Court banned racial preferences in admissions, the number of Black and Latino students has fallen.

The percentage of Black freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, declined from 15 percent last fall to 5 percent for this fall. At Amherst College the number fell from 11 percent to 3 percent. Other schools have reported less precipitous but still noticeable drops, such as from 18 percent to 14 percent at Harvard, 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a taxpayer-supported public university in a state where 23 percent of the population is Black — and 15 percent to 9 percent at Brown University, a school that has spent considerable energy looking at its early ties to the slave trade. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady, but an overall trend is clear.

The conventional wisdom is that this is alarming, but I’m not seeing it that way. We are trained to regard news on racial preferences in a way that makes us see tragedy where, through different glasses, we might just see change.

A first question to ask: Will Black students who weren’t admitted be OK? There is every reason to suppose so. Racial preferences were banned for the University of California in 1996, and the way critics discussed it back then, one would almost have thought that the highly selective U.C. Berkeley and U.C.L.A. were the only campuses in the entire university system. I taught at Berkeley at the time, and some young Black filmmakers had me audition (long story) for a film about a fictional Black teenager who was so devastated by being denied admission because of the new rules that he took his own life in despair.

In real life it was hard to see tragedy in a Black student having to go instead to one of the many other excellent options, like U.C. Davis and U.C. Santa Cruz. As regards that student’s future success, time has borne out that intuition. A study by the Berkeley economist Zachary Bleemer found that the ban had no effect on the post-college wages of Black applicants to University of California schools. ...

[T]here is no real evidence that diversity enhances a good college education. No reasonable person is seeking lily-white campuses. But the idea that diversity means, specifically, better learning has turned out to be difficult to prove. Terrance Sandalow and others observe that what are considered Black views — on topics like police conduct or the availability of quality schooling — are as likely to be aired by non-Black students as by Black ones (a good thing, by the way). ...

Here’s a proposal, radical though it may (unfortunately) seem: Colleges should be very happy with the new numbers. Brown, for example, should be saying, “Hey look — even without that outdated and condescending Blackness bonus, we’re still at 9 percent!” Getting into an elite college is hard, and we should celebrate Black applicants pulling it off in such high numbers, even if they don’t happen to fall precisely at 14 percent. We are taught that on race, professional pessimism is enlightened. I don’t get it.

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