Searching for the Class of 2028

with John McWhorter

Everyone paying attention knew the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision would change the racial composition of incoming classes at America’s most selective colleges. What remained to be seen was how significant the change would be. Now, with the first post-affirmative action class entering its freshman year, we’re starting to get the numbers. At MIT, where I received my PhD, black enrollment dropped to 5% from 15% the year prior.

A 66% decrease in the number of black students in an incoming class is quite significant. But that number, and all the other numbers rolling out from other universities reporting decreases in black admits, only tells half the story. We know where these black future engineers and computer scientists and physicists aren’t going to school. The question is, where are they going? Presumably applicants rejected by MIT ended up going somewhere else instead.

Finding out where they’re going, how well they perform there, and how well they do after graduation will turn out to be much more important, I submit, than simply knowing that they didn’t go to MIT or any of the other schools that rejected them. If these students do well in college, find jobs in their chosen professions, and go on to have fulfilling, remunerative careers, we may well wonder why we made such a fuss over these numbers in the first place. Or, as John says in this clip from this week’s conversation, instead of yelling about lower admission rates at elite schools, we could make an effort to get today’s young black kids up to speed for tomorrow’s application season.

In any case, black America’s future is not going to be determined by a handful of university administrators. We’re being presented with an opportunity to take up a challenge and prove ourselves. I know, if we take ourselves as seriously as the moment demands, we’re up to the task.

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GLENN LOURY: Here we are with another academic year beginning in September. Kids are coming back to college campuses, courses are starting up. You are on sabbatical and I am in my last year of teaching. And we're black, and affirmative action was stricken by the Supreme Court. I'm going to segue somehow or another to the affirmative action theme, which is what we want to talk about.

We want to talk about the fact that colleges are beginning to report—MIT had a statement that came out, Brown University had one that came out, I don't know about other people—because the admissions statistics are in. Who's in the class of 2028 now coming in as first-year students at the elite colleges? The numbers for African Americans are down in virtue of the fact that the Supreme Court's decision has changed the legal landscape for racial preferences.

I don't know about you. I've got mixed feelings about that. I wish the numbers weren't down. On the other hand, I'm actually glad that the Supreme Court decided the way that it did. I'm aware of the fact that the decision has implications, and I think those implications present challenges to us.

But how do you feel about it?

JOHN MCWHORTER: We knew this was going to happen. We've seen that this was going to happen, because this is just a replay of what happened in California in the mid-1990s. And there are just two basic questions. We're concerned with the fate of students who otherwise would have been admitted—but now weren't—to those top flight schools. What's happened to them?

I remember the rhetoric back in the '90s that was implying that they weren't going to go to college at all, that there was a general kind of segregation happening, which by implication was about the whole world of education. And I remember one time—I don't know if I've said it on this show before, but if I did, it was a long time ago—some young black filmmakers at Berkeley in the mid-'90s grabbed me out of a crowd. They saw me walking by, and they said, “You look like somebody who could play this person in our film.” What they meant was that I looked like I was proper and starchy. I'll take it. I am.

They said, “Our film, it's a short film. It's going to be about this boy who wants to get into Berkeley, but Berkeley rejects him because now there are no longer racial preferences. And so he kills himself because he was just so upset that he couldn't get into Berkeley.” As if there was nowhere else that he could get in.

That's not really the way it goes. If we're concerned about those students, then presumably they went to college somewhere else. Very few of them went to colleges we would not want anybody to go to. I'm not sure what kind of college that would be, but they're at esteemed universities. Maybe not in that top 30 or 40, but is that really going to affect their life trajectory so much? The answer is, quite simply, no.

Now, are we concerned about what the issue is on the campuses themselves now that there are somewhat fewer black students and Latino students there? And the question is what? Okay, there's somewhat less of what's called “diversity,” and that will have the effect of what? I think we know, especially after 2020, that black students contribute these really precious views in class about what oppression and what inequality is like. But let's face it, it's at the point where every second student of any shade, including plaid, on a college campus knows all about that and is eager to demonstrate that they know about those things in order to show that they're good people.

You no longer need the black student to raise their hand in the back of the class and talk about rates of people in prison, et cetera. Is it just that socially there's supposed to be a certain amount of diversity? It has to be that we're represented at 13 percent, for example. Because then you're saying that your white daughter Valerie, she needs a certain amount of diversity so that she can be comfortable working with different kinds of people.

My question is, okay, what is it about black people that would make her uncomfortable? What is it that she has to learn? And why does it have to be that we have to be 13 percent in order for Valerie to get that lesson. Her name is been a longer “Valerie,” but I can't think of anything else.

Now you see all the buzzwords that people are using. These poor administrators, they can't help it. They cannot speak real English about this. They have to get up there and spout this word salad. But the truth is, I don't see what the tragedy is, because the students who didn't get in are doing just fine. And the campuses themselves are not suddenly these lily-white and lily-Asian campuses. Campuses are just fine. A person who didn't know about any of this, a person who didn't know about these percentage differences might not, and in fact would not, even notice anything different about the incoming class.

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It's not as if there are no brown students at all, and it's not as if it's down to just three. It's just like at Berkeley. And I would hope that we could take a lesson from that, to tell the truth. Why don't people have any faith? You see something like this, say at MIT. Fewer black students. And you think, “This just isn't right. We have to let the black students in according to an altered standard, because otherwise this is the best it's going to be.”

Hey, who says? How about looking at those rates and making a sincere effort. And not MIT making recruitment efforts. I'm sure they've done all they can. But from the other end. I hate to say it, but within the whole culture, the idea being, what can we do to make it so that more of us get into MIT without having to need special favor? That's what I think most cultures would do, or just decide that they're interested in something other than getting into MIT.

But the idea of insisting, “yes we can't,” that for us, you must change the standards. No, this would look absurd to the civil rights leaders of even the recent past, and it's going to look absurder to the ones of the past coming very soon. We're just caught up in word salad and it's hard to look beyond our own time.

That's how I feel about it. I see no tragedy at all.

I can't say that I disagree with anything that you've just said. I think the first order point is that the effect of affirmative action is really only discernible in the most selective institutions. Most colleges and universities admit a vast majority of the people who apply because they're looking to fill the seats. What's the difference between Princeton and Rutgers? It's not trivial, especially in the most rarefied areas of study. But for most of the students, is it a life altering event? Have I consigned somebody to failure if they don't get into Princeton and they end up at Rutgers? Is it something someone should contemplate suicide over, because Princeton is so desirable and Rutgers is so crummy? No, I don't think so.

But there is this—and this pushes a little bit against the theme that you've introduced—which is, there are portals into the upper echelon of American society, and places like Princeton and MIT are among the gateways into the super-elite of the society, and a place like Rutgers or Rensselaer Polytechnic are less ...

But Glenn, are they? This is a real question. Do we know that they are? We assume that they are. Is this something studied, that there's some significant difference?

I'm sure it has been studied. My colleague John Friedman, the economist here at Brown University and his associates have a lot of data. And Raj Chetty, the guy at Harvard University, and those kinds of people, they study these kinds of things. I'm not on top of the data to the extent that I could answer your question definitively. But my impression is yes, that there is a bump.

There's anecdotes. If I look at the law schools that were attended by justices who were sitting on the Supreme Court, they're all, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. If I look at the people who are at the top of the business heap or whatnot, I don't know whether or not going to Ivy League institutions is is a big deal. I can understand your skepticism about that, but such is the impression, in any case. The impression is, these are gateways, and when black kids are not represented in what we regard to be adequate numbers in these gateway institutions, they are deprived of the opportunity of entering into the cadres of leadership in the society.

We're rationing access to the elites, and if we don't bring in enough students of color, that undermines the legitimacy of the elite institutions, and it's a question of justice understood in those terms.

Now, I'm mumbling. I understand that I'm mumbling here. Please don't accuse me of word salad, because it's not an argument that I can fully embrace. And I wonder whether in the reaction here, the studies will pay attention to some of the more subtle questions. So for example, when you lower standards, you change expectations. A person comes with a degree from an elite and selective place, and they're black, and I know that elite selective place is practicing affirmative action. I have an assessment of the quality of that person that looks different than it would look if I knew that university was not practicing racially preferential affirmative action. I would give greater weight to the distinguished degree of an African American if I knew that it had been earned under dispensation which doesn't practice preference.

That's one kind of subtle effect that I wonder, in assessing the effects, the consequences of eliminating affirmative action, whether the scholarship will attend to. And there's a lot of stuff that's like that.

Another one that I think about is, what about the historically black colleges and universities? People talk about wanting to support them. Politicians brag about legislating money for them. This Supreme Court has just bestowed a huge indirect beneficial endowment upon HBCUs, because the marginal African American student who now doesn't anticipate getting admitted to a highly selective institution because of affirmative action when making the decision about where to apply and where to matriculate, will be, at the margin, more encouraged to consider an HBCU as a place. And I should think that the quality of the applicant pool at these institutions would be discernibly improved in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision, and that's a measurable outcome that I think scholars were assessing.

Not just counting the numbers that have gone down at some places, but counting the numbers that have gone up at other places, to the benefit of those places. It's another kind of subtle effect.

I worry about grade inflation, to be honest with you. That is, about what happens to the integrity of students assessment in an environment where, because of the desire to get racial diversity, you have lowered the standards in recruiting black students. And because the standards are lowered, the performance on average of those students is lower than it otherwise would have been. But assessing the performance of all students candidly and honestly would expose the consequent disparity of performance by race amongst the students who are admitted under affirmative action. And therefore the incentive to blur the assessment in order not to expose that consequence of affirmative action is created.

I can't prove this. This is the kind of thing that would require some carefully designed empirical inquiry. But I speculate that it's a reasonable consequence to anticipate, and something that would should attract the attention of people who are looking into this kind of thing.

It's the first thing that you mentioned. It's such a no brainer, really. And yet you're not supposed to bring it up because there's no good answer to it. So much of the discussion of racial preferences is about politeness. But it's very simple. It's very simple. So often, black students say, “They think I got in because of affirmative action.”

First of all, do you think you didn't? And what makes you think so? And what that person may be thinking—I've never asked them, but what they may be thinking is that affirmative action is based on disadvantage. It's only poorer black kids who got in because of affirmative action. That would be pardonable. But that would mean, why does everybody scream bloody murder when somebody like Richard Kahlenberg or me or, I presume, you says it would be better to base this on socioeconomics rather than melanin.

Quite simply, it's not that anybody's evil. That makes no sense. It makes no sense at all if students are inclined to think, “It wasn't me who got in based on affirmative action.” Two, if there is that policy, why are students so evil to start making those sorts of assumptions? It's perfectly rational to suppose, if that's the policy, then there's a risk when I'm in a group with this black student or when I'm just socially interacting with this black student, there's a possibility that they were not admitted for the same kinds of reasons. And so many people would say, if that's how it feels to be a member of a race who are beneficiaries, so to speak, of racial preferences, then wouldn't one solution, just one possible solution, one possible thing that you might want to bring in, is eliminate this policy as quickly as possible.

You can imagine a Korean immigrant grandmother saying in Korean—there's a family discussing who's getting into what schools—saying, “What about the black students? If they have this different standard for the black students, then doesn't that mean everybody's going to think that they're not as good?”

What would we say to grandma? Why is grandma so wrong? Why is it that she's only asking that because she's an immigrant or she's elderly or she's naive? What are you supposed to say to grandma? Grandma is using pure logic. She's not wrong because she's Korean and she doesn't speak English and she's just saying it in somebody's kitchen. We are not supposed to use basic rationality in assessing this sort of thing.

And then the other very quick thing is how commonly it is brandished that black students don't like to talk about things black in class. No black student wants to be representative that way. You're always thinking, suppose I don't say it right. Suppose people don't want to hear it. Suppose I had a bad night last night. Suppose I don't want to be bothered. Black students don't like representing diversity in the classroom. And yet, whole admissions policy is based on an idea that you need black students on campus to represent those sorts of views.

Once again, it makes no blessed sense. Now the hard right these days or the MAGA right or whatever often will say there's a conspiracy. They're evil. They're trying to take over the world. No, it's not. That's not how human affairs usually work. It's simply that we are urged not to make sense, with the larger view of battling whiteness and its power.

It will not do. And that is what these new statistics are encouraging us to do. To be an enlightened American is to know that language. It's how to greet people. It's to ask your elderly great-aunt whether she needs you to go get her another plate instead of expecting her to get up and go get the plate itself. Nobody tells you that after a while. Can I get you some food, Aunt Carol? Same thing. You learn that you are not supposed to present real answers to these very simple questions. It won't do.

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