Like John, I am a bit skeptical about the argument that William Kidder makes that there is what amounts to a ceiling at many institutions on the number of Asian students they will accept and therefore the abolition of “affirmative action” will just mean more white students (at selective institutions, anyway). However, Kidder’s argument does seem to have a ring of truth to it. Admissions people clearly have it in their heads that membership in a population group that is deemed to be “disadvantaged” should count in favor of an applicant who can claim to be a part of that group. (That’s true even if the individual has no evident disadvantages at all.) Thus all the emphasis on helping blacks, hispanics, and other “protected” groups by holding them to lower academic standards than other applicants. But why assume that this only works in one direction? If there are unfairly disadvantaged groups, why shouldn’t there also be unfairly advantaged groups? If society benefits from admitting more students from groups where there would be too few in the absence of preferences, won’t it also benefit from keeping down the numbers of students from groups that are doing “too well”? If social engineering upward for some is a good thing, in order to give us a better “social balance,” why isn’t social engineering downward for others equally important? Of course, this is all very foolish, and stems from two tendencies in leftist thought. First, they insist on looking at people not as individuals but as representatives of groups. Second, they believe that their tinkering with the world has enormous benefits, which is why they get all hot and bothered with someone like Richard Sander who argues that it’s actually harmful.