The bitter fight over racial preferences in college admissions (a.k.a. affirmative action) is quite needless. Instead of using highly subjective preferences to allocate access to top-quality education, why not make more of it available?
So argues Ben Goldhaber in today’s Martin Center article.
He observes, “Most other goods in the economy don’t work this way. We don’t need to practice ‘affirmative action’ on TVs, making sure there’s an equitable distribution of them among different ethnic groups, or affirmative action for car sales, ensuring that the right type of person has first dibs on new models. The ‘normal’ economy loves to make more TVs and cars, enough for every color, class, and creed. It would be silly to embrace racial discrimination in those cases, because we have market mechanisms that automatically seek to correct discrepancies and increase supply to fill demand.”
Our “elite” universities artificially limit the number of students they accept as a means of keeping up their prestige factor. That isn’t illegal, but the right response should be to expand good opportunities for the students who aren’t admitted.
Especially now with the allure of the BA degree as the one and only path to success fading, why not emphasize other paths? Goldhaber continues, “In N.C., that looks more and more like funding and celebrating non-four-year university programs. There are myriad paths that focus on practical education—for instance, organizations like the Center for Advanced Manufacturing at Guilford County Technical Community College, which educates people in manufacturing skills and has quickly expanded to meet the demand for trained specialists in Greensboro.”
Goldhaber is right. We should do away with racial preferences and simultaneously encourage the growth of non-BA options for young (and even not-young) Americans.