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As the left went into full freak-out most last week denouncing the Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, I argued that they were really overstating their case. One of the points I made in passing was that most colleges aren’t competitive. Today a pair of academics have written an opinion piece for the NY Times highlighting this even further.
We’ll get to the text of the argument in a moment but the article itself opens with a graphic highlighting all of America’s major four-year colleges ranked by admittance rate. So, for instance, Harvard and Stanford have the lowest admittance rate in the country of just 4 percent. But only a small handful of schools have admittance rates under 25%. All together those schools educated about 6% of the entire total. If you include schools with an admittance rate up to 50% you’re still talking about just 16% of total enrolled students. The vast majority of schools have an admittance rate around 70% and that’s where the majority of students are attending. Here’s what the graphic looks like with the two schools who were part of the SCOTUS decision highlighted.
“Because affirmative action only opened a tiny window of access to America’s most elite institutions, the ruling will make little difference for most college students,” write Richard Arum and @mitchellatedf. https://t.co/OHQd3OMEYf
New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) July 3, 2023
Best I can tell, this graphic does not include community colleges which enroll about as many students as four-year-colleges. If you were to add those to the graphic they would all be on the far right because their admittance rate is usually around 80%. Obviously, you don’t need affirmative action to get into a school with a 70% or greater admittance rate. And since that’s most schools in the country, most students simply didn’t benefit from affirmative action.
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision that struck down race-conscious admissions, we should recognize that, in practice, affirmative action mattered a great deal for very few and very little for most…
…the majority of Black and Hispanic students attend universities that accept more than three-quarters of their applicants.
