Gaslighting about Affirmative Action in Universities

A recent CBS News Reports documentary explicitly and implicitly made claims about affirmative action that simply are not true.

On Dec. 22, CBS News Reports presented a documentary called The End of Affirmative Action, hosted by Soledad O’Brien. The documentary discussed affirmative action in college admission from a commonly held perspective, but one which is factually wrong. I don’t know if O’Brien and the others associated with the report simply know very little about how affirmative action actually functioned in college admissions, or if their goal was to deliberately present a distorted view – to, in effect, gaslight the viewers. In either case – through errors of both commission and omission, they presented affirmative action in a way that is a distortion of the reality of what has been taking place for at least the past 20 years (as I discuss below).

There are really three central questions to consider when discussing affirmative action in college admissions.

1. Is discrimination in college admission based upon race consistent with the constitutional prohibition on race-based discrimination?

Race-based affirmative action in college admissions began in the 1960's, originally with the intent of benefitting those who have experienced race-related disadvantages in life and education – thereby, attempting to “level the playing field” so that disadvantaged (because of race) individuals could fairly compete for admission to selective schools. The use of strict racial quotas as a form of affirmative action never passed constitutional challenge, but considering race as one of many factors when assessing applicants was ruled legal in the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case. In 2003, the legality of affirmative action was again confirmed, although in that ruling, the legality of affirmative action rested on the supposed educational advantages of universities having a diverse student body – thereby replacing the “compensating for race-related life disadvantages” rationale for a “students from diverse backgrounds” rationale. In 2023, however, the Supreme Court set aside previous decisions, ruling that because discrimination based on race is illegal in the U.S., utilizing different standards for students of different races in college admissions is illegal (Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (Harvard) and SFFA v. University of North Carolina (UNC)).

The CBS documentary did not explicitly misrepresent the current supreme court decision, and indeed much of the focus of the documentary was on the changing landscape during the past year faced by students who might previously have benefitted from affirmative action. However, even here, O’Brien made an odd statement about college admissions. She states, when discussing the issue with an advocate for economics-based rather than race-based affirmative action: “For colleges, it’s an institutional choice. If they wanted to have more racial diversity, they would have more racial diversity. It’s not magic. It’s just math and strategy.”

That was an extraordinarily puzzling statement for O’Brien to make. She essentially was saying that schools like Harvard do not really want more racial diversity. Where does that idea come from? Does she really think that if there were an easy way for Harvard (and similar schools) to have a student body that demographically matched the demographics of the student-age population in the U.S. that they wouldn’t do it? That’s nuts! And what is this easy “strategy” that O’Brien apparently believes could be used? Unfortunately, O’Brien does not explain the “math and strategy” part. Surely she knows that the use of quotas has always been ruled illegal, even during the time when some forms of affirmative action were ruled legal. But if not quotas – then what strategy is she referring to?

The problem is that by making this statement, O’Brien implies that there is no good reason why the demographics of the student population at selective universities should not exactly equal that of the student age population of the country. But given that during the past 50 years that goal has not been achieved through what at the time was judged to be legal forms of affirmative action, what does O’Brien think universities should have been doing? The truth is that there is no easy legal fix for this incredibly complex and challenging problem, and the viewers of the documentary should not have been told that there is.

2. Who benefits from affirmative action, and – given that college admissions is necessarily a zero sum game – who has paid the price for affirmative action policies?

This is is where the documentary presents its most grossly distorted view of affirmative action. The documentary focuses, in part, on a young Hispanic woman who is in the process of applying for early admission to Cornell. She is an excellent student who has taken advantage of every opportunity afforded to her to excel academically. She is a straight A student at a STEM magnet school and has an exceptional record of service as well. Her parents are not wealthy by any means and did not themselves attend college. By focusing on her, the show implies that it is students like her – students from less advantaged backgrounds who nonetheless excel academically – who are the focus of affirmative action policies in college admissions and who will be harmed by the ending of affirmative action. What viewer would not think – while watching that segment of the show – that it would be unjust for a student like that young woman to be unable to attend an elite college because of the ending of affirmative action?

The problem is – the young woman featured by the documentary is actually the kind of highly deserving student who doesn’t need affirmative action – a point never highlighted by the CBS News report, even though, at the end of the show it is noted in text that she was admitted to Cornell without the benefit of affirmative action. By featuring her, the show manipulates the viewer into believing something about affirmative action that simply isn’t true – that ending affirmative action will harm students like her.

When I talk about affirmative action with friends and family members, virtually all of them express the same belief about the policy; that it is students like the young woman described above who have been benefitting from the policy and are the target of the policy. That is, they believe affirmative action has helped a lot of poor minority students who have excelled academically despite economic and educational disadvantages – and that the best way to characterize affirmative action is that it comes into play primarily when a decision has to be made between admitting an economically advantaged white student vs an almost-equally-qualified (despite being from a disadvantaged background) minority student.

That belief is based upon the assumption that the goal of affirmative action is to give a boost to the disadvantaged in situations where the disadvantaged applicant is both qualified to be accepted and has almost as sterling an academic record as that of a wealthier white or Asian applicant. That simply is not true. The goal of affirmative action for at least the past 20 years has been to admit more members of certain under-represented groups (based upon race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and sexual identity). To achieve this goal in terms of race, it doesn’t matter to the university if the applicant is a poor African American descendant of enslaved ancestors or an African American child of wealthy recent immigrants.

As a result, very few of those admitted with the help of affirmative action at elite schools are from poor underprivileged families, and a better “poster child” for the reality of affirmative action – better, that is, than the young woman featured in the documentary – might actually be someone like current Harvard president Claudine Gay, who is the child of Haitian immigrants and who attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire, and who then attended Princeton University for one year before transferring to Stanford University,

You certainly would not have known from the CBS News documentary that most black students at Harvard are from advantaged backgrounds, or that those who have been most negatively impacted by affirmative action have been members of another minority group – Asian Americans. The failure of the documentary to talk at all about Asian Americans is quite odd, because it was discrimination against Asian Americans that formed the basis for the lawsuit that lead to the banning of race-based affirmative action. Moreover, the documentary never acknowledges explicitly that the academic qualifications of those African Americans admitted under affirmative action policies have been far below those of Asian Americans who had an equal chance of being admitted. In other words, it has not been a matter of admitting an African American applicant instead of a similarly qualified white or Asian applicant. Instead, affirmative action in practice has resulted in large differences between the qualifications of equally-likely-to-be-admitted African American vs Asian applicants.

3. Were the students admitted under affirmative action policies well qualified to perform well at the elite colleges to which they were admitted, and did they ultimately benefit professionally from being admitted to those colleges?

An affirmative answer to the above questions is essentially part of the premise of the documentary. In an interview on the CBS News Morning show promoting the documentary, Gayle King asked O’Brien: “Soledad – So many people believe that affirmative action means that people who are not as qualified get into schools or they get a break What do you say to them?”. O’Brien began her response by saying “The data would disagree with that.” Of course, at that point I was expecting O’Brien to provide data indicating that the affirmative action admits perform as well at university as the white or Asian American students who had an equivalent likelihood of being admitted, and that the affirmative action admits virtually all end up doing better professionally than they would have if they had not gone to an elite university. That’s what I expected — but I was wrong; rather oddly, and illogically, the rest of O’Brien’s answer had nothing to do with data regarding the performance and ultimate professional success of affirmative action admits.

A likely reason why O’Brien did not mention any data relevant to King’s question is that – the data that do exist supports the claim that affirmative action admits are not as qualified and that they DO get a break. Claiming otherwise almost makes no sense, because if that were not the case there would be no need for affirmative action! What has been found when examining college performance is that affirmative action admits have typically performed about exactly as would be expected based upon their SAT scores and performance in AP classes. As summarized by a recent report from the Manhattan Institute: “the tendency of students who receive large preferences to fall low on within-school measures such as class rank is an effect of mismatch that is generally not disputed.” and “black students would do just as well as their white peers at the same schools if they had the same academic credentials. They do worse in practice, on average, because they have lower credentials than their peers, which is largely due to affirmative action.”

A report from the Heritage Foundation in 2016 reached a similar conclusion:

“Affirmative action-induced low grades are a serious problem—as demonstrated by research over the course of the last decade. For example, in one study of top law schools, more than 50 percent of African-American law students (many of whom had been admitted pursuant to affirmative action policies) were in the bottom 10 percent of their class. And the dropout rate among African-American students was more than twice that of their white peers (19.3 percent vs. 8.2 percent).

This highlights the problem of academic “mismatch,” regardless of skin color. When a student’s entering credentials put him or her at the bottom of the class, it should come as no surprise when he or she switches to an easier major, drops out, or fails out. It’s become increasingly clear that affirmative action is doing more harm than good to the very people it is intended to help.

The problem doesn’t stop there. Because of affirmative action policies, fewer minorities enter careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.

Study after study shows that minorities tend to be more interested in STEM fields than their white counterparts. But admitting students with lower high school grades and SAT math scores into schools with elite science and math programs is a recipe for disaster. Heriot describes one study conducted by UCLA law professor Richard Sander and UCLA statistician Roger Bolus, which indicated:

Students with credentials more than one standard deviation below their science peers at college are about half as likely to end up with science bachelor degrees, compared with similar students attending schools where their credentials are much closer to, or above, the mean credentials of their peers.“

The findings regarding the question about professional success following graduation is somewhat more complex. According to the Manhattan Institute summary: “When examining long-run economic outcome, a reasonable summary of the findings is that “some affirmative action is certainly good for those receiving it—no one thinks that, say, a one-point ACT boost that gets someone into UCLA will leave him so hopelessly mismatched with his peers as to outweigh the benefit of getting in to UCLA—but those benefits may disappear or reverse when preferences become too large.” In other words, the likelihood of negative affirmative-action mismatch effects seems to depend on the magnitude of the difference between the qualifications of affirmative action admits and the average of the qualifications of those admitted without an affirmative action boost. But even these somewhat mixed findings are clearly not consistent with O’Brien’s quick and complete dismissal of the the perspective described by Gayle King’s question.

Summary

A basic premise of the CBS News Reports documentary – consistent with what many people believe about affirmative action – is that (i) affirmative action has primarily benefitted economically disadvantaged students, (ii) that those students are actually as qualified to be admitted as are other admitted applicants, and (iii) that the students admitted under affirmative action policies are able to perform well in college and in almost all cases benefit in their future professional life from having gone to an elite college. None of that is true, and CBS should not have gaslit viewers by explicitly and implicitly supporting that belief.