Who are the winners and losers from college admission affirmative action?

College quotas haven't worked out as planned back in 1969.

Ever since 1969, a small number of social scientists have been arguing in journals over who is hurt and who is helped by college racial quotas. Now, there’s an intriguing new study shedding light on an old question: Who benefits and who suffers from racial quotas for letting in college applicants? The answers the researchers find would have surprised the great and the good of 1969.

The obvious answer would appear to be that the main victims are the intended victims: whites and Asians. But, at least until very recently, many if not most white people haven’t liked mentioning the existence of two generations of anti-white policies. It’s just not done.

In contrast, Asian-Americans are more likely to publicly speak out against being discriminated against because they are lacking in White Guilt. Thus, the recent Supreme Court decision finally announcing that the 14th Amendment really does mean what it says about “equal protection of the laws” when it comes to getting into college came in a lawsuit with Asian rather than white plaintiffs. (By the way: are colleges obeying the Supreme Court? We’ll finally start to find out shortly when colleges release stats on whom they admitted last April — assuming they don’t just deep-six the data.)

A more respectable argument has long been “mismatch:” that blacks are hurt by being tossed into more rigorous colleges, so they wind up flunking out or switching to softer majors.

But, are any colleges all that rigorous these days?

Consider California, whose voters have twice (1996 and 2020) banned affirmative action in state programs like the University of California.

UC Berkeley or UCLA used to be pretty brutal sink or swim experiences for students because they would just pack them in huge lecture halls while a grad student with a thick Chinese accent lectured incomprehensibly. For example, six of my high school friends went off to UCLA in 1976, joined this one fraternity, had a great time, and got booted out after the first quarter: “Eleven weeks of college down the drain!”

But UC does a lot more hand-holding of marginal students these days, in part because Diversity Is Our Strength, so kicking out students for flunking, some of whom are our precious Diversity, is far more frowned upon.

On the other hand, my impression is that you still pretty much have to work really hard to get a BS degree in engineering. On the other other hand, I’m not sure if it’s all that much easier to get an engineering degree at Directional State U. than at, say, the University of Michigan. The engineering profession, at least until recently, had pretty rigorous standards everywhere.

So there’s an interesting new working paper up at the National Bureau of Economic Research that compares how voters in California, Texas, Washington, and Florida banning affirmative action is state U. admissions back around the the turn of the century affected locals relative to states that kept quotas.

Who benefitted more from the bans? Men or women? Blacks, white or Hispanics (but unfortunately not Asians in this study)?

I’m paywalling the rest of this post.

After all, not meaning to guilt trip you (well, actually, I am), but isn’t it about time you subscribed?