[BretLudwig]

Fighting the Bell Curve: Why Affirmative Action is an inevitable disaster


September 10, 2008

Affirmative Action (AA) started out as a well-intentioned effort to
increase the representation of black, then other minorities and women, at
the higher levels of the American educational system. Well-intentioned,
but ill-founded because it was based on the article of faith that the only
reason there were fewer blacks in colleges, universities, and professional
schools is the legacy of racism and discrimination.

Initially AA was first defined as making every effort to find qualified
minority members. The search was expanded to include even the "potentially
qualified,€� but when that failed, the program transmogrified into one of
"goals and timetables" €” a euphemism for quotas based on race, etc. This
is the antithesis of the supposed objective of the Civil Rights movement,
namely judging on "the content of character."

Well, AA could have benefited from some advice from the other AA €”
Alcoholics Anonymous, one of whose admonitions to family members of
recidivist abusers is "you didn't make 'em that way, you can't fix 'em."

While fair-minded commentators and the public at large have had their
fill of reverse discrimination, ethnic activists continue to make every
effort to enforce more and more AA until some critical mass of minorities
inhabits every desirable sector of American society.

In California, citizens led by former University of California Regent Ward
Connerly (who happens to be African American) passed Proposition 209,
which banned "preferential treatment" of race, sex or ethnicity in
admissions to California's public universities. The box sco by fall
2006, only 250 of the 12,189 students admitted to UCLA's freshman class
were African American, roughly 2%. This is the lowest number since at
least 1973 €” results that could have been predicted right out of the
tables and graphs in The Bell Curve.

The Bell Curve, the outstanding tome by Richard Herrnstein and Charles
Murray, shows that African Americans have a mean IQ of 85, one whole
standard deviation below the white mean of 100. Even more disconcerting to
AA advocates is that Richard Lynn has summarized findings that sub-Saharan
Africans have a mean closer to 70.

And the devil in the bell curve is not only in the details but in the
tails of the curve. The normal or bell curve describes continuous
biological variation that is the result of many genes. The classic case is
height, but IQ is almost the same: Most individuals fall at the middle or
closely around it. The further one goes either up or down from the
average, the fewer the number of individuals. The further out one goes,
the greater the effect.

And this applies with a vengeance when two groups differ in their average
score. The further out you go in either direction €” up or down, good or
bad €” the greater the differences between the groups. What this means in
terms of education is that as one goes from high school to junior college
to college to graduate/professional school, the percentage of qualified
blacks goes steadily and increasingly down. And the ratio of qualified
whites to qualified blacks goes up dramatically.

This can be easily seen by looking at the figure below:

The figure shows what happens if you have two IQ distributions that differ
by a standard deviation €” whites on top, blacks on the bottom. If the
test is made so that 50% of whites pass, then 16% of blacks will pass.
This would mean that if we consider a population of 1000 people taking the
test in a population that is 10% black and 90% white, then 16 blacks would
qualify, compared to 450 whites€”a ratio of around 28 to 1 €” much
higher than the population ratio of 9 to 1.

The 28 to 1 ratio is pretty steep €” exactly the sort of thing that gives
the affirmative action industry fits. And it explains why even tests for
fire fighters and policemen €” which are geared for the middle of the IQ
distribution €” have to have lower standards for blacks. Here's a case
where white firefighters who scored high on an employment test
successfully sued the city of Boston for favoring lower-scoring blacks.

But if the test is made more difficult, it gets way worse. The figure
shows what happens when only 16% of whites pass. (This would make the test
more like a law school admissions test.) In that case, only 2% of the
blacks pass. This means that if we consider a population of 1000 people,
10% black and 90% white, only 2 blacks of the 1000 would qualify, compared
to 144 whites€”a ratio of over 70 to 1. Hence the desperate need for
affirmative action.

And imagine what happens when one adopts the standards of an elite law
school like Harvard where the average of successful white applicants
approaches the 99th percentile. Finding a black that can compete on the
basis of mental ability in a situation like that is like finding a needle
in a haystack.

Which reminds us, wed love to see Barack Obamas grades and test
scores at Harvard Law. In fact, Stanford Law Professor Richard Sanford has
already shown that black lawyers have no difficulty being hired by elite
firms but are much more likely to leave these firms without making
partner. Just recently he filed suit to obtain the records of the Bar Exam
of California to replicate previous findings that black law school grads
are over 6 times more likely to fail the bar exam even after multiple
attempts than whites. His thesis is that blacks are being set up for
failu They are admitted into schools where they cannot hope to compete
with those admitted on the basis of intellectual ability.

Maybe thats why Obama became a €œcommunity organizer€� instead of
trying to compete in the world of big time law.

But Affirmative Action advocates and ethnic minority activists rarely
allow fact to disturb their attempts at social engineering. In a recent
article, we compared advocates of the No Child Left Behind law to King
Canute commanding the tides to behave. Its the same here. The realities
of the two different racial bell curves are such that any would-be
affirmative action King Canute who commands that blacks be admitted to law
school at the same level as their percentage of the population would have
to override not just the tide, but a tsunami tidal wave.

Not that that will stop them. They remain undeterred, seated in their
thrones, or at least in their endowed academic chairs.

Case in point: one Darnell M. Hunt, professor of sociology at UCLA and
director of the university's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American
Studies. Pontificating in a recent LA Times OpEd, he decries the effects
of Prop 209, while heaping praise and hosannas upon a new "holistic"
admission policy implemented at UCLA which considers applicants' grades
and test scores more fully in the context of their life experiences.

Technically, admissions officers would not consider race, gender or
ethnicity as a plus, which remains illegal under Prop 209. But they do
consider "all available information about a student." Whereas previously
the files of applicants were divided into academic and personal areas and
read by separate reviewers, reviewers now consider "the total package."
Although racial preferences per se remain forbidden, "socioeconomic and
other factors" can be taken into account. Race by any other name€¦.
(Remember those bad old days when prospective students were required to
submit a photograph?)

Prof. Hunt is wholly happy with the results of the "holistic method." The
number of African American freshmen admitted to UCLA in 2007 climbed to
407, and this year it climbed again to 453 €” nearly double the 2006
number. He expresses no concern that many of these holistic admissions
will either drop out or graduate with meaningless degrees in subjects
devoid of market value. To Hunt, that smells like, "important progress"!


While African American activists like Prof. Hunt are gloating about these
results, others are not even mildly impressed. Just the opposite. Those
with eyes to see and ears to hear have noted that this increase in the
relatively small number of African American freshmen admitted constitutes
clear evidence of "illegal admissions practices."

Anti-affirmative action crusader Ward Connerly, for example, called a
spade a spade, accusing the university of trying to "rig the system,"
while political science professor Tim Groseclose resigned from the
UCLAs admissions oversight committee. Groseclose declared that UCLA is
"cheating" on admissions and is engaging in a "cover-up" to keep it from
being discovered.

Either outraged by the candor of Connerly and Groseclose or willfully
ignorant of the totality of scientific evidence, Prof. Hunt offered up the
usual litany of anti-testing mantras (e.g., "test scores are not
objective,"), all of which have been tested and disproven, tried and
failed. Wed love to see Prof. Hunt make a serious attempt to dispute
Arthur Jensens massive data on the validity of IQ tests.

Over 100 years of research in mental testing and genetics has established
that IQ is measurable and predicts not only academic, but other life
outcomes that are critically important to maintaining a complex,
technological society. IQ is heritable, culturally fair, and not tractable
to any significant degree.

Fortunately, Heather MacDonald has provided readers of the LA Times with
the lowdown on the low down machinations of the AA activists.

Ms. MacDonald tells it as it truly is: "The University of California has
tried to engineer admissions systems that would replicate the effect of
explicit racial quotas while appearing color-blind."

She then makes public the dirty laundry dumped out of the AA hamper by
Prof. Groseclose. In somewhat Stalinist tactics, the university has
refused to give him access to the data that would prove the point, thus
causing his resignation.

Despite the stonewalling, enough info has leaked out to establish not only
the facts, but the motive. When Prop 209 reduced the number of unqualified
African Americans admitted to campuses across the state, UC officials
resorted to a bit of academic chicanery to sneak underqualified blacks and
Latinos back into the system's most demanding campuses, and they did it
without officially "making race a factor." Rather than race, they
introduced a preference for low-income students. But alas, they were hoist
on their own petard: Rather than blacks and Hispanics, poor whites
(especially Eastern Europeans) and Vietnamese filled up the slots €” not
the sort of diversity the university had in mind.

This is because whites outperform blacks at every social class level (once
again showing that the black/white IQ gap is not caused by social class.)


Administrators cut the low-income preferences in half and went back to the
drawing board.

One scheme was to reduce the weight given to academic qualifications in
ranking students. For example, in 2002, the law school at UC-Berkeley
admitted only 5% of white students in a low academic rank, but it admitted
75% of black applicants in the same range. At UCLA, from 1998 to 2001,
black applicants were 3.6 times as likely to be admitted to its
undergraduate college as whites, and Latinos 1.8 times as likely, even
after controlling for economic status and school ranking, according to an
unpublished study by statistician Richard Berk.

The next finagle factor introduced to subvert the will of the people and
simple fairness was what is euphemistically termed a "comprehensive
review" which, it is claimed, "broadens the conception of merit."
Translation: Students academic qualifications are cranked up or knocked
down based on their "life situation." (Guess what that means.)

Even that didn't do the trick. UCLA still had a dearth of qualified black
students. You just can't beat the bell curve if you take any objective and
valid measure into account. Enter acting Chancellor Norman Abrams and the
more radical €” "holistic" review, so beloved by Darnell Hunt.

But even that's not enough. UCLA's Associate Vice Provost for Student
Diversity (doubtless a well-paid sinecure for a person with appropriate
non-white skin tone) also decreed the admissions committee must increase
the number of blacks who read and rate student applications. This resulted
in a 25% black representation among readers, which is three times the
percentage of blacks in California's population! Presumably this is a hope
that ethnic favoritism will succeed where all else has failed. Theyre
probably right.

Those interested in the entire sad saga of the UC "Educational" system and
the courageous efforts of Prof. Groseclose to restore it should consult
Heather MacDonald's wonderful summary. Suffice it to say the future of the
Golden State, once praised as the high tech center of the globe and with
the best kindergarten to college educational system in the nation, is
being sacrificed to the gods of political correctness."

Permanent Link:

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.com...BellCurve.html



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