In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Martin Morse Wooster contributes a critical review of the recent book defending “affirmative action” in college admissions, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford.

The book, Wooster finds, is in the same vein as Bowen and Bok’s The Shape of the River in that it relies on data not available to outside researchers and uses the data to defend the regime of racial preferences at elite colleges and universities while overlooking obvious problems with that case.

Advocates for the continued use of racial preferences keep producing books like Espenshade and Radford’s and James Sterba’s Affirmative Action for the Future (reviewed here by Larry Purdy, whose book Getting Under the Skin of Diversity eviscerates the arguments for preferences), but they’re little more than cheerleading for one of the great intellectual failures of our time: the idea that there is some great social benefit in shuffling a few students whose ancestry puts them in some “underrepresented” category up into colleges they wouldn’t otherwise qualify for while at the same time shuffling an equal number of students whose ancestry doesn’t qualify them as “diverse” down into somewhat less selective schools. The benefits claimed are miniscule if not entirely imaginary and the costs are serious.