Bell Curve

450 Living Together Affirmutive Action in Higher Education 45 1the magnitudes of the values assigned to group membership-are notpart of the public debate.This ignorance about practice was revealed in 1991 by a law studentat Georgetown University, Timothy Maguire, who had been hired to filestudent records2 He surreptitiously compiled the entrance statistics fora sample of applicants to Georgetown's law school and then publishedthe results of his research in the law school's student newspaper. He revealedthat the mean on the Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT) differedby a large margin for accepted black and white students.In the storm that ensued, the dean of the law school ordered copiesof the newspaper to be confiscated and black student groups called forMaguire's expulsion. Hardly anyone would acknowledge that Maguire'snumbers even raised a legitimate issue. "Incomplete and distorted informationabout minority qualifications for admission into the LawCenter renew the long-standing and intellectually dishonest myth thatthey are less qualified than their white counterparts to compete inschool, perform on the job or receive a promotion," wrote the authorsof an op-ed article in the Washington Post,j and that seemed to be theprevailing attitude. The numerical magnitude of the edge given to membersof certain groups-the value assigned to the state of being black,Latino, female, or physically disabled-was not considered relevant.Such edges are inherent in the process. In as neutral and precise languageas we can devise: Perfectly practiced, the traditional Americanideal of equal opportunity means using exclusively individual measures,applied uniformly, to choose some people over others. Perfectly practiced,affirmative action means assigning a premium, an edge, to groupmembership in addition to the individual measures hefore making a finalassessment that chooses some people over others.The size of the premium assigned to group membership-an ethnicpremium when it is applied to affirmative action for favored ethnicgroups-is important in trying to judge whether affirmative action inprinciple is working. This knowledge should be useful not only (or evenprimarily) for deciding whether one is "for" or "against" affirmative actionin the abstract. It should be especially useful for the proponents ofaffirmative action. Given that one is in favor of affirmative action, howmay it be practiced in a way that conforms with one's overall notions ofwhat is fair and appropriate? If one opposes affirmative action in principle,how much is it deforming behavior in practice?It is not obvious precisely where questions of fact trail into questionsof philosophy, hut we will attempt to stay on the factual side of the lineat first. A hit of philosophical speculation is reserved for the end of thechapter. We first examine evidence on the magnitude of the ethnic premiumfrom individual colleges and universities, then from professionalschools. We then recast the NLSY data in terms of the rationale underlyingaffirmative action. We conclude that the size of the premiumis unreasonably large, producing differences in academic talent acrosscampus ethnic groups so gaping that they are in no one's best interest.We further argue that the current practice is out of keeping with the rationalefor affirmative action.The Magnitude of the Edge in Undergraduate SchoolsWe have obtained SAT data on classes entering twenty-six of the nation'stop colleges and universities. In 1975, most of the nation's eliteprivate colleges and universities formed the Consortium on FinancingHigher Education (COFHE), which, among other things, compiles andshares information on the students at member institutions, includingtheir SAT scores. We have obtained these data for the classes enteringin 1991 and 1992.4 They include sixteen out of the twenty top-ratedprivate universities and five of the top ten private colleges, as ranked inU.S. News and World Report for 1993.5 The figure below shows the differencein the sum of the average Verbal and Math SAT scores betweenwhites and two minorities, blacks and Asians, for the classes in theCOFHE schools that matriculated in the fall of 1992. In addition, thefigure includes data on the University of Virginia and the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley in 1988.~The difference between black and white scores was less than 100points at only one school, Harvard. It exceeded 200 points at nineschools, reaching its highest at Berkeley (288 points). Overall, the mediandifference between the white mean and the black mean was 180SAT points, or, conservatively estimated, about 1.3 standard deviation~.'~'This would put the average black at about the 10th percentileof white students. In all but four schools, Asians were within 6 pointsof the white mean or above it, with a median SAT 30 points above thelocal white average, working out to about .2 standard deviations. Or inother words, the average Asian was at about the 60th percentile of thewhite distribution. This combination means that blacks and Asianshave even less overlap than blacks and whites at most schools, with the