The end of affirmative action would be a disaster

It’s a funny topic because the same people who insist that private businesses must be allowed to discriminate based on gender or race are now saying that private colleges must not be allowed to factor race into admissions. And the same people who find discrimination abhorrent in all forms tend to think this is a case where it’s justified.

But I suppose that’s the danger of casting one’s beliefs as principled platonic ideals that must apply in all cases, regardless of context.

> The cases represent a standoff between those who insist that the college-admissions process should essentially be limited to quantitative metrics, such as grades and test scores, and those who believe grades and test scores should be one of many factors in the admissions equation—along with leadership qualities, personal talents, race and ethnicity, and family circumstances.

This is a straw man. I don't think I've heard a single argument that schools shouldn't be able to use other factors.

The rest of this is damnation through faint praise. It paints a pretty bleak picture of education for black Americans, but nowhere do they make the case that Affirmative Action is actually helping. If anything, the dramatic difference in dropout rates seems to imply that even if you stuff these deserving youth into these opportunities, it doesn't seem to be doing much other than padding metrics.

"From 1988 to 2014, the number of K–12 schools in the U.S. that had a 99 percent nonwhite student population more than doubled, from 2,762 schools to 6,727. By the 2010s, the percentage of Black students attending schools across the South that were at least 50 percent white had plunged by nearly half, from a peak of 44 percent to 23 percent."

The fraction of the U.S. population that is white is declining, which may explain these numbers.