When a ‘Factor’ Becomes a Quota System?

Three arguments are being offered against Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative. All are misleading.

The first is that the advantage now being given to some people based on their race, sex, color or ethnicity does not amount to a quota, which is already (largely) illegal. It is merely one factor, not a decisive one.

The only systematic data bearing on this issue comes from college and graduate-school admissions. Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai have studied undergraduate admissions to UC Berkeley. Asian Americans were the largest group to enroll (about two-fifths), followed by Anglos (one-third) and Latinos (one-sixth). African Americans were 7% of the UC freshmen class. This is about the same pattern as I have found at UCLA.

It was much easier for blacks and Latinos to get in. Consider their academic qualifications. Math scores on the SAT for each group show that there is hardly any overlap between Anglo and Asian scores, on the one hand, and black and Latino ones, on the other. Most (75%) black enrollees had a math score of 590 or below, most Latinos one of 630 or lower. Most (75%) Asian enrollees scored 670 or higher, while most Angles came in at 640 or higher. The differences were almost as great for the verbal SAT scores and for high school grade averages.

The message is quite clear: Anglo and Asian students were held to a very high standard, African Americans and Latinos to a much lower one. There was so little overlap in the qualifications between these two groups that enrollment at UC Berkeley does not simply reflect the use of race or ethnicity as “a factor.” If these aptitude scores mean anything at all (and most scholars know that they do), then race and ethnicity are so much more important as to amount to a quota.

Much the same thing happens at UCLA. Students admitted strictly on academic grounds--perhaps half the freshmen class--include people of all backgrounds, including African Americans. But the rest of the entering class reflects two criteria, not one--ability, plus “socioeconomic or educational disadvantage.” For the fall of 1995, four-fifths of the Anglos and Asians had academic scores in the top two brackets. By contrast, less than one-seventh of black and Mexican American applicants were in these top ranks. The differences are so great that if the word “quota” does not fit, find a synonym that does.

Ellen and Jerry Cook (she teaches at UC San Diego) have made similar calculations for graduate study. They compared UCSD graduates who applied to its medical school between 1987 and 1993. The only students admitted whose MCAT scores were below the 60th percentile or who had college grades below 3.0 were from affirmative-action groups.

Nor was this the result of singling out poor students for help. When they reviewed graduates of UC Irvine who applied to medical schools, they found that students from poor families did no better than ones from affluent backgrounds at getting in. Race and ethnicity, not income, were the decisive factors.

The second argument against 209 is that it would reduce “diversity.” Diversity is a vague but appealing concept--who wants to go to school with people just like yourself? Arguing in favor of it is like arguing in favor of excitement or intellectual stimulation. But, in practice, diversity means only one thing: racial and ethnic diversity. There is no admissions program in public colleges that gives any systematic boost to students who are Libertarians, Marxists, vegetarians, conservatives, students of natural law or animal-rights activists. These things may be “a factor” in some cases, as well they might be. But you cannot divide up the freshmen class into two different groups based on these factors. With race and ethnicity, you can.

The argument for diversity is a sham. It does not mean overcoming a barrier to the admission of diverse racial groups. They are admitted on purely academic grounds wherever they are found. Nobody in recent decades has ever accused California admissions officers of discriminating against African Americans or Latinos. Find a talented black, and you will find dozens of colleges competing to attract him or her. What diversity means, in practice, is not achieving intellectual variety or contesting points of view; it means giving some--but not all--racial groups an extraordinary boost.

Vietnamese students come from a country torn by a war in which this nation was a major contestant. Their families are often poor; some got here by leaving everything behind in order to escape on wretched boats. But they get no obvious assistance in public education. Protected groups--blacks and Mexican Americans--were 2.7 times as likely to get into medical school as their Vietnamese competitors. Diversity not only means racial quotas, it means quotas for some minorities and not others.

Finally, some critics contend that Proposition 209 will drop benefits that go to women. The measure itself makes ample allowance for a reasonable use of gender in making public decisions. It explicitly does not prohibit “bona fide qualifications based on sex which are reasonably necessary to the normal operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”

In plain language: Yes, you can have separate toilets for men and women, and you can require that women prisoners be searched by women guards. It is quite likely that it would also permit separate male and female athletic teams, since in virtually every sport, the best male players get better scores than best female ones. If separate sports were not allowed, there would be few female contestants. This distinction strikes me as “reasonably necessary” to public education.

A more troublesome question arises with respect to all-female classes and schools. There is a lot of evidence that many women do better in an all-female school. But the evidence is not conclusive. What is clear, however, is that under existing laws, same-sex education is under heavy attack in the courts. The all-male Virginia Military Institute had to admit women because it is a public school. The ACLU regularly campaigns against efforts to create all-male public high schools. The courts have come close to saying that excluding women must meet the same strict test that excluding blacks now must meet.

Moreover, the California Constitution already has a provision that bars sex discrimination. Proposition 209 would not change this.

The initiative at least creates an opportunity to rethink this matter by specifically allowing sex to be used in making decisions when it is “reasonably necessary” to do so. Writing in The New Republic, Jeff Rosen, an opponent of 209 who has a good legal mind, has ridiculed the idea that the measure will restrict female opportunities. He understands what some critics do not--that 209 is about ending preferential treatment based on race and ethnicity.

In a decent world, I would grant admissions officers at public colleges the right not only to search hard for racial minorities, but to admit a few more than academic scores would permit. The scores are imperfect, some talented blacks and Latinos have been forced to attend substandard high schools, and blacks have been the victims for centuries of racial intolerance.

But this is not a decent world. College and graduate-school admissions officers, out of good motives but with bad reasoning, have created a quota system. They have produced two groups of freshmen, with scarcely any academic overlap between them. If this is not a quota, then the word has lost any meaning.