Just Say No to Discrimination

The release of data on incoming freshmen this fall was watched keenly in light of last year’s Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard decision that effectively outlawed race-based affirmative action policies in college admissions. As the data have been released, the picture is mixed.

Some schools have seen the expected results: a larger proportion of Asian and white incoming students, with declining black and Hispanic populations. However, some schools have not followed that pattern. Are some schools ignoring the Supreme Court decision? Confusing things further: schools are wildly inconsistent in how they report their data; some exclude foreign admissions, for example, while others do not. Hispanic students may also be classified as “white” or “nonwhite.”

However, the most interesting, rather solid conclusion is that an increasing proportion of students refuse to indicate a racial classification. This usually tiny proportion of “race refuseniks” has grown dramatically, from two to seven percent at some schools. While this is frustrating for the racist bean counters, I view it positively as a step toward a colorblind society.

I have argued for years that colleges and universities should not ask applicants about their race.

Students should be assessed predominantly based on their prior knowledge and academic performance, perhaps secondarily on leadership potential, special talents—great pianist or ball thrower—etc. It should generally not matter who their parents are—which gets to the issue of legacy admissions—or the coloration of their skin.

Then why do colleges ask for race information?

It appears when asked about race, more students are saying, “It’s none of your business.” And, from my way of thinking, they are right. The best way to enforce a race-blind admissions policy is for the schools to not collect racial data. And we should not have a federal agency, the U.S. Department of Education, collecting race-based data that colleges could use to make race-determined decisions in admitting students, hiring workers, or selecting contractors.

An even more controversial and radical idea would be to prohibit schools from asking for financial information about their students.

That information allows schools to discriminate in price discrimination, charging different tuition fees depending on a student’s personal assets or parental financial background. Automobile dealers, Amazon, Wal-Mart, and department stores are not allowed to ask customers about their family finances to decide how much to charge them for goods. Hospitals do not ask you to fill out a financial disclosure form to determine how much to charge for an expensive medical procedure. Why should colleges be different? If inequalities in income and wealth are concerning, a strong case can be made that they should be addressed comprehensively through the political process rather than piecemeal by private providers of goods and services.

The historic special financial support given to historically black colleges and universities also seems inconsistent with race-blind policies.

Whatever the legitimate case for them 100 or more years ago, do they exist today? I understand that black enrollment in some HBCUs has fallen somewhat in recent years. Does a school cease to be an HBCU if, for example, a majority of students are not black? More generally, is the special treatment of HBCUs consistent with either the Supreme Court’s recent decision or, for that matter, with Martin Luther King’s wise observation that the content of their character should judge people?

Perhaps the most pervasive form of price discrimination in U.S. universities exists with respect to giving certain students lower tuition fees based on geography.

State universities universally charge lower tuition fees for in-state students than for out-of-state—or out-of-country—ones. I think the federal system of government has worked great for the U.S., and interstate competition for residents and their resources is a source of great American vitality. But might it be better to eliminate tuition differentials based on location but allow state governments to give vouchers towards tuition fees to their own residents—to be used at colleges anywhere in the U.S. (or arguably, the world)?

More generally, a good case can be made that publicly supported schools should assess students based on merit, not skin coloration, location, or non-academic attributes. I am rooting for more students to not provide racial information to campus authorities.

Image by AleksandarNakic — istockphoto.com — Stock photo ID:176111680