It’s a sign that America’s historically oppressed minority groups are finally becoming less discriminated against.
Is it a cause for joy?
No, because that group is Asian Americans, and discrimination is occurring in the area of college admissions.
MIT released its first post-affirmative action admissions numbers for the class of 2028, with the percentage of Asian American students increasing significantly from 40% to 47%.
Black students decreased from 15% to 5%, Hispanic students decreased from 16% to 11%, but the percentage of white students remained roughly the same, down 1 percentage point.
There are two possible interpretations of these numbers.
Is MIT’s admissions office somehow infiltrated by racists who want to exclude as many black and Hispanic students as possible (while strangely encouraging Asian Americans? ), or the affirmative action system that the Supreme Court ruled against last year was working for them. Shutting out talented Asian American applicants.
Of course it’s the latter.
We still need to see the gains from other top schools, but MIT’s numbers support critics who say affirmative action is a form of systemic discrimination against high-achieving Asian Americans. Of course – this is the first hard evidence post-Supreme Court that they were right.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth essentially acknowledged this, saying that the change in the school’s entering class was “a result of last year’s Supreme Court decision.”
MIT’s numbers are not that different from Duke University scholar Peter Arcidiacono’s estimates of what Harvard admissions would be without affirmative action.
Arcidiacono, an expert witness in the Student Fair Admissions case brought to the Supreme Court against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, said there was a large increase in Asian American students, a modest increase in white students, and a large increase in black students. We predict a significant decrease. and Hispanic enrollment.
This was California’s experience in 1996 when it passed the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209.
The proportion of Asian Americans among freshmen at UC Berkeley increased from 37% in 1995 to 43% in 2022 (white students decreased from 30% to 20%).
Supporters of affirmative action believe that this kind of change is a blow to “diversity,” but this is a superficial and racially reductive view.
There are no giant factories anywhere that produce generic “Asian-Americans” where everyone has the same background and mindset. The category of Asian American, like other large racial classifications, often obfuscates more than it clarifies.
This category includes people from countries that have long been enemies or have little to do with each other (such as China, India, and the Philippines).
Chinese and Japanese students may come from families that have lived here since the 19th century, and some are immigrants. Some Asian Americans are wealthy, some are working class, some are woke, and some are conservative.
What unites them all is that they convincingly demonstrate that they belong at MIT.
We should be proud of what they accomplished, rather than regret that they are “too much,” and they should be treated as such, as a matter of basic fairness and American ideals. You should recognize that you are a worthy individual.
One of the problems with affirmative action is that its obsession with racial categories makes it more attractive to African-American applicants whose father is a prominent lawyer and mother is a college professor than to Asian-American applicants whose parents are refugees. There is a possibility that the child may be given preferential treatment in a perverse manner. Originally from Burma.
No one is reducible to race.
MIT’s new admissions system should also dispel doubts that black and Hispanic students are admitted solely on the basis of merit.
For students who would have been admitted under the highly segregated old system, just because they get into some good state school doesn’t mean they don’t have a future.
Some may think that less discrimination is actually a good thing, but what matters to supporters of affirmative action is who is being discriminated against and why.
Twitter: @RichLowry
