The Power of Race

Soft factors, in aim and application, allow universities to shape their entering class to fit their preferences. One of the key preferences of selective American universities is that they have a rough idea of how many black and Hispanic students they want in their classes, and they will discriminate on the basis of race to achieve that rough idea. So, wham, soft factors.

Universities will profess that they love admitting students who do hip hop and don't particularly need to admit more students who do violin, but if its a Korean doing hip hop and a black guy doing violin they will change their minds in a hurry.

Plus it is an undeniable, documented historical fact that the "soft factors" introduced into university admissions were explicitly designed to keep out the undesirably academically competent disfavored minority du jour -- at the time they were first instituted, that was Jews.

I don't even know how to comment on that. I'll just point this out as a choice sentence from the article.

I still oppose racial preferences. As a teenager, I opposed them from a civil rights standpoint -- after all, they're a blatant form of institutionalized discrimination. In college, I had an experience that made me oppose preferences for a more pragmatic reason -- they can be cruel. I had a summer internship at a large company that made a substantial effort to recruit minorities. One guy in my internship class was a student at a small, historically black college in the South. He was a great guy...fun to hang out with, and had superb interpersonal and communication skills. Ostensibly, he was a computer science major but once admitted that his school had not required that he write "a program" in more than two years. This company, with all good intentions, put him in a very technical role for the summer. He failed miserably and accomplished nothing. On one of the last days of the internship program, I heard him literally sobbing to his mentor that he had accomplished nothing during the summer. He was right and smart enough to know it. If he had been white (or, more correctly a "non-disenfranchised" minority), someone would have told him that he could have a great career in marketing, PR, sales, whatever. Writing code wasn't for him, but it's not for most people, and that's quite ok. Had he not been wooed because of the color of his skin, he could have opted into a mutually beneficial internship with a PR firm where he would have learned a lot and gained self confidence. Instead, he got the message that he sucked.