Now we have been taking account of race for three decades in admissions to virtually every highly selective university in the nation, as well as in employment and government contracting. The Supreme Court is due to issue by early July its first major decision since Bakke on the constitutionality of racial preferences in state university admissions, in a case brought by disappointed white applicants to the University of Michigan’s undergraduate and law schools. It’s a logical time to take stock. Do the benefits of this type of affirmative action exceed the costs? What do the most relevant empirical data tell us about how it works? How much longer should it continue?

First, let’s be clear about what "taking account of race" actually means in deciding whom to admit. Lawsuits have uncovered a great deal of information that had previously been secret. The weight given to race at the University of Michigan appears to be fairly typical of top universities, but unusually easy to measure because Michigan uses a numerical "selection index" to rank applicants; it almost always admits those with the highest scores. Here is how the process would probably work for two hypothetical applicants from the same Michigan high school:

Applicant A has a 3.8 grade point average, a perfect 1,600 SAT score, a very good college essay, spends her spare time running the school newspaper and playing varsity soccer (not well enough to be scholarship material), and seems like a nice kid. Her dad works at an auto body shop and her mom at a day care center.

Applicant B has a 3.2 GPA, a mediocre 1010 SAT score, a very good college essay, spends her spare time hanging with friends and watching TV, and seems like a nice kid. Her dad is a surgeon and her mom is a corporate lawyer.

B would have no chance of being admitted were she white or Asian. But because B is black (or Hispanic, or Native American), she has a much better chance than A (assuming that A is white or Asian), despite Aís demonstrably better academic record, SAT scores, and extracurricular activities.

Specifically, on the Michigan "selection index," A gets 76 points for her 3.8 GPA, 12 points for her 1600 SAT, 1 point for her very good essay, 1 point for her leadership and service, and 0 points for her race. B gets 64 points for her 3.2 GPA, 10 Asian), despite A’s demonstrably better academic record, SAT scores, and extracurricular activities. points for her 1010 SAT, 1 point for her very good essay, 0 points for leadership and service, and 20 points for her race. Both girls get another 10 points for being in-staters and 10 more for the quality of their high school and difficulty of their curriculums. This comes to a total of 110 points for A and 115 for B.

The scores would not change if the white parents had been the surgeon and lawyer and the black parents had been the body-shop and day-care workers, assuming that none of them are alumni (which would be worth 4 points); neither family appears to qualify for the 20-point preference awarded to the tiny number of applicants whose parents are either rich enough to be big potential donors or poor e nough to qualify as "socioeconomically disadvantaged."

The most widely advertised purpose of the enormous racial preference that B would receive over A is the educational value to all students of intellectual and cultural diversity, which universities say is enhanced by enrolling a "critical mass" of African-American and Hispanic students. They say they could not admit sufficient numbers of these minorities without using racial preferences because so few of them have high enough grades and test scores.

Since most students at most highly selective colleges are from relatively affluent families, it probably would increase intellectual and cultural diversity to admit a black kid whose parents are struggling blue-collar employees ahead of an Asian or white kid with a better academic record whose parents are prosperous professionals. Whether a black kid whose parents are professionals adds more intellectual and cultural diversity than an Asian or white kid from a blue-collar family is much more debatable. But Michigan and other top universities have built their admissions systems on the presumption that being black or Hispanic adds just as much diversity no matter what your family background.

Some of the most persuasive advocates of racial preferences in admissions place less stress on intellectual diversity than on the need for racially diverse student bodies in order to help engineer a more integrated, more harmonious, and less stratified society. Justice Stephen Breyer summarized this view during the April 1 oral arguments in the Michigan cases: "We live in a world where… 75 percent of black students below the college level are at schools that are more than 50 percent minority. And 85 percent of those schools are in areas of poverty. And… many people feel [that] the only way to break this cycle is to have a leadership that is diverse, and [that] you have to train a diverse student body for law, for the military, for business."

The goal of fostering a more racially diverse leadership is extremely important and enjoys almost universal support. The big question is whether the benefits of pursuing such diversity by systematically using racial preferences are worth the costs. And those costs have proved to be considerable:

Preferences are unfair to those Asian and white applicants who are rejected on account of their race. They are demeaning to the very best black and Hispanic students, who are widely stereotyped as "affirmative action admits" even when they would have been admitted under a colorblind process. Those black and Hispanic students who do get in to the very top colleges because of preferences find themselves in the not-always-inspiring position of competing academically against classmates most of whom arrive far better prepared. In this and other ways, preferences send the pernicious message that black and Hispanic people are and will long remain incapable of competing on a level academic playing field against whites and Asians, and that not much is expected of them academically. Worst of all, preferences are racially divisive, and encourage Americans to see themselves as members not of a national community but of tribes struggling for racially allocated shares of every pie.

Then there is the dishonesty to which many advocates resort to obscure how preferences work, and the demagogic smearing of their opponents as racist or "insensitive." Universities don’t like to admit that they use racial double standards in admissions, because double standards offend the values of most Americans of all races. So they often eschew candor in favor of misleading myths and sophistries.

One sophistry is the phrase "affirmative action" itself. It elicits overwhelming support from black people (and mixed reactions from whites) in public opinion polls. But this reflects the fact that many Americans interpret "affirmative action" as including aggressive anti-discrimination measures, recruitment and outreach efforts, and preferences for the most promising disadvantaged students of all races. Those forms of affirmative action are in fact supported by most opponents of racial preferences.

The kind of preferences that are under attack by conservatives are also opposed by between one-third and two-thirds of African- Americans, the more neutrally worded polls show, and by lopsided majorities of all Americans. Consider the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University racial attitudes survey in spring 2001, which included this question: "In order to give minorities more opportunity, do you believe race or ethnicity should be a factor when deciding who is hired, promoted, or admitted to college, or that hiring, promotions, and college admissions should be based strictly on merit and qualifications other than race or ethnicity?"

Of the 1,709 adults surveyed, 5 percent said "race or ethnicity should be a factor," 3 percent said "don’t know," and 92 percent said "should be based strictly on merit and qualifications other than race/ethnicity." More surprising, of the 323 African-American respondents, 12 percent said "race or ethnicity should be a factor," 2 percent said "don’t know," and 86 percent said "should be based strictly on merit and qualifications other than race/ethnicity."

That’s right: By a ratio of 7-to-l, black respondents in this poll rejected racial preferences. (The ratio was 12-to-l among both Hispanic and Asian respondents.)

The most Orwellian myth about the racial-preference regime appeared on the signs held by many of the demonstrators thronging outside the Court during the April 1 arguments in the Michigan cases. They equated the legal challenge to preferences with a return to state-sponsored discrimination against and segregation of African-Americans. The real issue, of course, is whether to continue state-sponsored discrimination in favor of black and Hispanic applicants, and against Asian-Americans and whites.

Following are some other myths, and the underlying realities.

Myth: Racial preferences are needed to help downtrodden descendants of slaves overcome white privilege.

Reality: This wraps together several sub-myths and half-truths:

• Most recipients of racial preferences are not downtrodden. William Bowen and Derek Bok noted in 1998, in their pro-preference book The Shape of the River, that 86 percent of blacks at the 28 selective universities they studied were middle or upper middle class

• Racial preferences do virtually nothing for the vast majority of black people, including the 45 percent who drop out of high school and the many graduates of inner-city schools who are so unprepared for serious academic work that no elite college would consider them

• Most white and Asian applicants rejected on account of preferences are not privileged. A great many are less affluent than many of the less academically qualified black and Hispanic students who receive racial preferences.

• Most of the students who lose out because of racial preferences are not white; they are Asian-American, The New York Times suggested in a February 2 article, based largely on surging admissions of Asians and relatively flat admissions of whites since racial preferences were banned in California and Texas.

• More and more preferences go not to descendants of slaves but to Hispanic immigrants and their children and grandchildren.

• While whites benefit disproportionately from the preferences colleges give to children of rich donors and alumniówhich may well be what got a mediocre student named George W. Bush into Yaleóthe most logical offset would be preferences based on socioeconomic to end their preferences for the privileged

Myth: America is still such a racist society that black people can’t get a break without affirmative action preferences.

Reality: Can’t get a break? The CEO’s of AOL-Time Warner, American Express, Merrill Lynch, and Fannie Mae, as well as the Bush Administration’s top two foreign policy officials, Education Secretary, Deputy Attorney General, and White House Counsel, are all black, except the latter, who is Latino.

"The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations… is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa." This quotation comes not from some Republican propagandist, but from a statement by left-leaning black sociologist Orlando Patterson, who is now chair of Harvard’s Afro-American Studies Department, in 1991. It should be required reading for every victimologist in the country.

Myth: Banning racial preferences would "resegregate" top universities.

Reality: This would be extremely disturbing if true. But it is greatly exaggerated. That is the lesson of both recent experience and an important study by the Century Foundation, released in April. It found that replacing racial preferences with "economic affirmative action" for disadvantaged students would produce a dramatic increase in economic diversity and only a modest decline in racial diversity, with black and Hispanic students dropping from 12 percent of the students at 146 top universities to 10 percent.

The "resegregation alarums assume that if racial preferences were banned, colleges would consider only grades and test scores. But colleges have never done that and never will. This has been established by three laboratory experiments: Racial preferences have been banned in California and Texas since 1996 and in Florida since 1999, by judicial decision, statewide referendum and administrative action, respectively. While minority enrollments initially plunged, most of those states’ universities have found waysóincluding laws requiring admission based on class rank alone of the top students at even the state’s worst and poorest high schoolsóto admit as many or more black and Hispanic students as before.

There are, to be sure, significant exceptions: California’s two most selective undergraduate campuses and the professional schools in all three states still have substantially fewer African-Americans than they did under the preference regime. Part of the reason is that they face intense competition for the best minority students from other prestigious institutions that still use racial preferences in admissions and financial aid.

The class-rank approach to admissions, endorsed by President Bush, is a crude approximation of economic affirmative action. The Century Foundation study, released on March 31, suggests that giving economic preferences to the best-qualified disadvantaged students on an individualized basis would work much better. Both approaches admit many more underprivileged black and Hispanic students than do overt racial preferences.

The study, written by Anthony P. Carnevale of the Educational Testing Service and Stephen J. Rose, a research economist, advocates retaining racial preferences, too. But it refutes scholarly conventional wisdom that economic preferences would add little or no racial diversity. And another Century Foundation expert, Richard D. Kahlenberg, uses the same data to advocate substituting economic for racial preferences. This "would produce almost as much racial diversity as using race [and] far more economic diversity," he writes, and "would benefit a quite different group of African-Americans and Latinos, high achievers who overcame economic deprivation ó as well as a whole new cohort of working-class whites and Asians.î

Myth: Racial preferences are the best way to foster intellectual and cultural diversity on campus.

Reality: If the universities really wanted intellectual and cultural diversity, they would have preferences for poor students of all races (which many have on paper only), evangelical Christians, and conservative Republican professors, and not for children of affluent black professionals.

Myth: Racial preferences do not lower academic standards.

Reality: Some black and Hispanic students need no preferences and excel at all levels. But virtually all top universities use systematic double standards in admissions that amount to pervasive discrimination against whites, Asians, and other minorities who are not on the Preferred list. Michigan’s "selection index," for example, has about the same race-norming effect as would a law penalizing white and Asian applicants by treating their A’s as though they were B’s and their B’s as though they were C’s. A 3.0 GPA combined with a black or Hispanic pedigree can get you the same ranking as an otherwise indistinguishable white or Asian applicant with a 4.0 GPA.

How do preferentially admitted students fare in academic competition once in college? Most do graduate. But they have failure and dropout rates several times higher than their white and Asian classmates. Most are clustered in the bottom fourth of their classes academically, according to various studies. Very few do well enough to win admission to elite professional schools on the merits. That’s why those schools also use racial double standards.

Indeed, in an amicus brief supporting racial preferences in law school admissions at Michigan and elsewhere, the Law School Admission Council stressed that "only about 25" of the black applicants to the most selective law schools each year have done well enough in college to rank among 4,000applicants of all races with grades and LSAT scores high enough to qualify under the standards applied to most whites and Asians. And distressing percentages of preferentially admitted law students go on to flunk their first bar exams.

Myth: The SAT and other standardized tests are culturally biased.

Reality: It’s true that there are large racial disparities in average SAT scores ó 1070 for Asians, 1060 for whites, 910 for Hispanics and 857 for blacks among seniors in 2002, according to the College Board. But if these scores understated blacks’ academic potential then blacks would do better in college than whites and Asians with similar scores. The opposite is the case: Black and Hispanic students "have college grade-point averages that are significantly lower than those of whites and Asians" with similar SAT scores, according to a 1999 College Board report.

Myth: Preferences are temporary, because racial gaps in academic performance are narrowing.

Reality: Some of the most measurable racial gaps are growing. The black-white SAT gap, for example, which had declined substantially until about 1988, has grown since then from 189 to 203 points, according to a March 5 article in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. "There is no compelling evidence that any improvement is in the offing," it added.

For a generation, racial preferences have been advertised as a transitional "affirmative-action" corrective for past discrimination. But there is nothing temporary about the diversity bureaucrats’ plans to continue discriminating against whites and Asians in order to enroll as many kids from the preferred races as they call. No university has pledged that there will ever be an end point. A Supreme Court ruling for Michigan might well have the effect of perpetuating racial preferences as a permanent feature of the American landscape

Myth: Racial preferences are a great thing for black and Hispanic students.

Reality: It’s true that elite-college credentials are a valuable asset. But the very best black and Hispanic students suffer greatly from the inaccurate but widespread perception that they must have needed preferences to get in. And some students who did win admission through racial preferences might be better off at less-elite colleges, where they could be academic stars. "Affirmative action is contributing to the number of minority students getting lower grades, which seems to contribute to them selecting non-high-achievement careers," researcher Stephen Cole, principal author of a recent book titled Increasing Faculty Diversity, told The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Consider the unusually downbeatóor candidódepiction of black academic performance at Colgate University by Phillip Richards, an Associate Professor of English (who is black), in a September 13 column in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Perhaps it’s time to stop deceiving minority applicants into thinking that they will achieve the same academic and social success as their white counterpartsó or even be held to similar standards___The black students whom I encounter tend to arrive less well prepared than their classmates, and only a few go on to perform at the level of the best white and Asian students. With the exception of a few high-performersóoften women from the West Indies or Africaómost black students do not achieve academic distinction. That experience is clearly not unusual. The U.S. Department of Education recently released a report documenting that black students arrive on campuses with less preparation for college-level work than other groups, and that almost half of black undergraduates get C’s or lower.

Although every professor I know has observed it, the institution has done little to deal openly with the problem within the faculty as a whole. Public discussion focuses on multiculturalism and diversityónot the problem of inadequate black intellectual achievement at a prestigious academic institution.

Myth: Racial gaps in academic performance are entirely the fault of inferior schools and poverty.

Reality: These are clearly a big part of the reason. But other factors are also at work, the fundamental problemópapered over by preferencesóis that a shockingly small percentage of black high school graduates are well prepared for academic competition at the highest levels. Even middle-class black kids from educated families do much worse academically, on I average, than white or Asian kids from similar or less affluent families at the same schools.

"Whites from families with incomes of less than $ 10,000 had a mean SAT score that was 46 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $ 100,000," according to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. In his new book, Black Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement, scholar John Ogbu documents "a wide gap in academic performance.between white and black students" from similar socioeconomic backgrounds at the same schools in affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio. The book attributes such gaps largely to "the ways minorities interpret and respond to schooling," including "cultural and language differences."

Writer John H. McWhorter puts part of the blame on affirmative action itself, because it teaches black and Hispanic students that they need not meet the same standards as whites and Asians. "In this light," he wrote in his 2000 book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, "the maintenance of affirmative action hinders the completion of the very task it was designed to accomplish, because it deprives black students of a basic incentive to reach for that highest bar."

If the Supreme Court bans consideration of race in admissions, the universities will strain to find race-neutral (or ostensibly race-neutral) alternative ways to maintain racial diversity. And if (as seems more likely) the Court allows racial preferences to continue, the universities should strain to find race-neutral alternatives anyway. In order to get beyond racialism, we must first stop doling out opportunities by race.

Otherwise, the Rev. Martin Luther King’s dream of an America in which people are judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" will not merely be deferred. It will be dead.

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