The Affirmative Action Debate, Part III: some reflections

 Having looked at both the majority and minority opinions in the affirmative action case, I will try to put the issues involved in the decision in a much wider context.  Let us look first at the state of American higher education, then at how the issue relates to broader issues of economic inequality, and then at its political effects.

Regular readers know that I spent my working life (1976-2013) in higher education and still try to keep abreast of what is happening within it.  The Supreme Court decision will once again focus public opinion on the question of affirmative action in admissions.  No matter what you may think about that issue, I think that is much less important than several related parallel developments that have had catastrophic consequences for higher ed and its role in our society.

On the one hand, our student bodies—like our population, and especially our population of young people—are far more diverse than they were nearly sixty years ago when I entered college.  They are also much larger rising from about 20 percent of the 18-24 age population in 1965 to 38 percent in 2021—but their total numbers are now declining because of lower birth rates and other factors.  And meanwhile, they have become much more expensive.  One year of Harvard now costs about $80,000, compared to about $2000 in 1965—and even accounting for inflation that represents a fourfold increase.  I think that on a percentage basis the cost of major state universities—many of which were nearly free sixty years ago—has gone up much more. And as a result, 45 million borrowers owed an average student loan debt of $37,000 in 2021, and graduates of professional schools owed much more.  Much of three generations have mortgaged their futures to get a college degree.  These trends, I think, have exacerbated certain trend that began in the late 1960s when higher education populations mushroomed to accommodate the boom generation.

Having expanded their facilities and their faculty very rapidly, colleges and universities needed to maintain the size of their student bodies.  That meant attracting and holding on to many students who would not have attended college in previous years—and that statement has nothing to do with race or gender. In addition, the Boom generation was the first television generation, and reading among young people and everyone else has declined a great deal in recent decades.  Workloads have become much less demanding, especially in the humanities, and school calendars have become shorter.  The student rebellions of the late 1960s also convinced faculty and administrators that students deserved a greater voice in the curriculum.  Grade inflation reached remarkable levels, especially at elite institutions.  Since every one of their students had jumped through so many hoops to matriculate, demonstrated such wonderful qualities, and committed so much more money to their education (in the last few decades), it seemed unfair to give them a C or even a B.  In short—to put it bluntly—students today are receiving less education for three or four times as much money, which in turn pays for more impressive transcripts.  And I have the distinct impression from various campus controversies—although I cannot document it—that this has not made students happier, on the average.

The biggest reason for the higher cost of higher education is a small increase in faculty per student and a massive increase in the size of the administration, which now outnumbers the faculty on many campuses.  Admissions offices, development offices, and public relations offices have grown enormously, and entirely new diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies have grown up as well.  Most of these new bureaucrats—such as all but one of Harvard’s approximately ten vice presidents, who average at least $350,000 a year in salary—contribute nothing directly to the education of students.  In the 1940s and early 1950s James Bryant Conant of Harvard was one of many college presidents who used his office to shape the undergraduate curriculum, but top administrators no longer play that role.  Indeed, relatively few institutions—such as the St. Johns colleges in Annapolis and Santa Fe and other schools with a great books curriculum—market themselves based upon a distinctive curriculum.  By and large, our universities—including the new for-profit ones that do more and more of their teaching online—are marketing a credential, not an education, and the elite institutions are marketing an entrée into the upper reaches of our economy, the financial and tech firms that recruit most of their new hires from a select group.  And the main job of college presidents today is not education, but fundraising—that is, trying to ensure that university endowments receive their share of the greatly increased wealth that today’s economy allows their graduates to create and retain.

Our universities, in my opinion, have become somewhat parasitic institutions that have used their prestige and their critical role in young peoples’ lives to siphon off far more of the nation’s resources than they deserve.  Other industries playing a similar role are the health insurance industry, which makes US medical care about twice as expensive as care in other advanced nations, and our burgeoning legal gambling industry.   Because administrators run universities themselves, most of them are very unlikely to undertake necessary reforms—least of all those of top institutions that are still deluged with applications.  Perhaps however a few small liberal arts colleges—many of whom are threatened with extinction—or state universities with budget crises might try drastically reducing their administrative staff and even their faculty, which might allow them to offer a better product at a much reduced price.  If this worked it would put a great deal of pressure on other institutions to follow suit.  It will be interesting to follow the impact of laws in Florida and other states aimed at eliminating DEI bureaucracies in public institutions, which so far remain unclear.  Universities and colleges would also benefit enormously from returning to more traditional humanities curriculums focusing on the great works of western civilization, but as I have often pointed out in other posts, they have strayed so far from them that it is hard to see how that might take place—or where they would find the faculty who could make that shift.  As it is, most of them are dominated by social justice ideology, which divides the world into oppressors and oppressed based on their race, gender, and sexual orientation, and teaches that one's reality is a function of those categories.  As we saw in the last post, Ketanji Brown Jackson in particular is one of many thousands who have picked up that ideology and are applying it in their work.

The great expansion of higher education during my adult lifetime has provided a worse and far more expensive education to a much larger proportion of our young people.  I wonder whether that also means that we should revise our goal of giving everyone a college education—a goal which we have never come close to reaching anyway.  Apprenticeship programs and purely vocational education could train many of our professions at least as well, including some that rely on brainpower, not muscle power.  I firmly believe that unusual intellectual ability is distributed pretty randomly among our whole population, regardless of race or gender, and that our educational system should specifically try to identify those people and give them an opportunity fully to develop their talents.  I don’t think that is happening today. 

Instead, our elite institutions have the principal role of gatekeepers to our economic, political and social elite.  That is why justifications for affirmative action so often focus on the need to diversify that elite, even though as we have seen the Supreme Court never endorsed that goal.  Now the idea of meritocracy—to which I subscribe—holds that society’s greatest rewards should go to its most intellectually capable members.  Here we encounter another huge problem of our society has it has now developed.  I think it is impossible to maintain support for a meritocratic ideal—which we can never fully achieve anyway—in an economy in which a small elite secures for itself so much of the wealth and income of our society.

The following table shows what happened to the after-tax income of various parts of American society from 1970 to 2020.

While the top .01 percent increased their after-tax income by about percent and the top 1 percent by 350 percent, the incomes of Americans from 50 to 90 percent did not quite double and the income of the bottom 50 percent increased by about one third.  By contrast, the share of the top 1 percent   had fallen from 22 percent in 1940 to 11 percent in 1975, while the rest of the economy gained.  Patterns of wealth accumulation reflected these changes.  This leads us to the critical question of what affirmative action in elite college admissions, as now practiced, does and does not do.  While it gives a few thousand representatives of minority groups the chance to enter into our economic elite, earn vast income and increase their wealth, it does nothing for the 50 percent or more of Americans of all races whose incomes have been almost stagnant for half a century.  Seeing people who “look like them” among the rich and famous is hardly adequate to solve the economic problems of the mass of the population—and this is probably why so much of the population has lost touch with our political elite. Shifting from race-based to class-based affirmative action will not change this picture either.  Affirmative action may make powerful institutions feel better and look more diverse, but it won’t help most of the American people.  And these trends are particularly tragic—in the literal Aristotelian sense—for the Democratic Party, which was largely responsible for the levelling trend of the 1940-75 period and still imagines itself as the party of the working class.

That in turn brings me to the other elephant in the room with respect to the Supreme Court decision.  The great mass of the American people agree with the court majority that race should not be a factor in college admissions.  This table, which for some reason I cannot past into this post, gives use the results.  Half of those surveyed disapprove of the use of race, while 33 percent approve of it and 16 percent are not sure.  Whites and Asians oppose it by large margins; black Americans favor it 47-29; and Hispanics are evenly split.  54 percent of Democrats support it and 74 percent of Republicans oppose it.  Yet opposition may be even greater than this.  In 1996, a California referendum barred the state from considering race in its state university applications process by 55-45 percent.  That substantially reduced black and Hispanic representation at UC Berkeley and UCLA, but increased it on other campuses, and, according to some sources, raised minority graduation rates overall because black and Hispanic students were attending colleges where their test scores matched those of other students.  In 2020 a referendum to repeal the 1996 measure was on the ballot—and the most diverse state in the country, and one of the most Democratic, voted it down by an even higher margin, 57-43.  Every single one of about half a dozen states that have voted on affirmative action in college admissions have rejected it.  President Biden reacted to the Supreme Court decision by attacking it.  This position may well accelerate the trend of poorer voters away from the Democratic Party that is already apparent among Hispanics and even, to a smaller extent, among blacks.

To build a better future for our country, in my opinion, we must make higher education much cheaper—which we could do—and restructure wages, benefits, and taxes to stop the trend towards economic inequality.  That is what we did in the 1930s and beyond to undo some of the effects of the Gilded Age.  A patronizing, self-righteous and largely ineffective elite-led approach will only increase resentment outside the elite—resentment which already threatens us with political disaster.