Traditionally, critics of affirmative action have focused either on its unfairness to those groups that don't receive preferences (usually whites and Asians) or on the inherent conflict between racial preferences and the legal ideal of colorblindness.
Over the last few years, however, a new and potentially even more damaging line of inquiry has emerged: the idea that racial preferences may materially harm the very people they are intended to benefit.
For instance, researchers Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber found that racial preferences at Ivy League colleges had a large and negative effect on the academic aspirations of black students.
The mechanism worked like this: Blacks admitted to elite schools with large preferences had more trouble competing with their classmates, and tended to get lower grades. Low grades, in turn, sapped the confidence of students, persuading them that they would not be able to compete effectively in PhD programs. As a result, blacks at Ivy League schools were only half as likely as blacks at state universities to stick with plans for an academic career.
Dartmouth psychologist Rogers Elliot and three co- authors found that the same problem was keeping blacks out of the sciences.
Black students who received preferential admissions were at such a strong academic disadvantage compared with their classmates that fully half of those interested in the sciences tended to switch to majors with easier grading and less competition. Again, the net effect of preferential policies was to "mismatch" blacks with their academic environments.
My research over the last two years, using recent data that track more than 30,000 law students and lawyers, has documented even more serious and pervasive mismatch effects in legal education.
Elite law schools offer very substantial racial preferences for blacks, Latinos and American Indians in order to create student bodies that are as racially diverse as their applicant pools. Because these elite schools admit the black students that second-tier law schools would normally admit, second-tier schools, to keep up their minority numbers, also offer big racial preferences. The result is a cascade effect down the law school hierarchy, leaving 80% to 90% of black students at significantly more selective schools than they would get into strictly on their academic credentials.
Most legal educators have traditionally assumed that this helps blacks by giving them a more elite degree, better connections and maybe even a better education.
