Affirmative action — the decades-old practice of assigning a positive weight to some candidates’ race during application processes — is over, at least for college admissions. I’ve yapped about this in a few different forums, but will give a somewhat unique take here: The practice’s end is a good thing for minority kids.
For at least the past three or four decades, as all experts but surprisingly few laymen know, affirmative action has almost never actually meant directing technical aid to STEM programs in struggling “POC” schools, or even assigning some slight weight to race among well-qualified and otherwise roughly equal competitors. Instead, the standard practice in higher education has been to give extraordinarily large race-based bonuses to almost every black or Hispanic applicant to a selective college. The basic reason for this is simple and obvious, if awkward to discuss: There are currently substantial and fairly stable performance gaps between different racial groups on board tests like the old SAT, and any college that wants to “look like America” is going to have to take these into account.
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