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...blind assumption is that just breathing the air on an elite campus is remediation." But some diversity advocates are so frustrated that they are ready to give up on the whole idea of trying to select the best of the best. "It would be a moral mistake for Berkeley to continue to rely on the new system," says Ronald Takaki, a professor of ethnic studies at Berkeley. He has called for his school to admit its next class from a lottery among the top third of all applicants. With roughly the top one-third of applicants to Berkeley submitting...
Well, no matter. The facts are out. And affirmative-action proponents are eagerly waving them like a bloody shirt. At two elite University of California campuses, Berkeley and UCLA, black and Hispanic admissions are down significantly. On the basis of admissions, the number of black freshmen at Berkeley will decline 57% from 1997; the number of Hispanics, 40%. The drop at UCLA is 43% for blacks, 33% for Hispanics...
Affirmative-action proponents decry as a national tragedy the fact that black admissions to Berkeley make up not 5.6% but 2.4% of the freshman class. But what happens after admission? Affirmative-action proponents don't tell you that the dropout rate for blacks at Berkeley is 42%, vs. 16% for whites...
Given the huge academic handicap burdening black students admitted under affirmative action--their average SAT scores were 288 points below the Berkeley average--this dropout rate is understandable. These students were arbitrarily thrown into an environment with students far more advanced academically. The result was predictable: failure. Even more tragic is the fact that these bright black students, as social theorist Thomas Sowell puts it, "were perfectly qualified to be successes somewhere else" but were instead "artificially turned into failures by being admitted to high-pressure campuses, where only students with exceptional academic backgrounds can survive...
...welfare of these individual students is far less important to affirmative-action propagandists than puffing out their chests and boasting about admissions numbers. Consider: under affirmative action, nearly half the black freshmen at Berkeley don't make it. Under the new color-blind system, yes, the black freshman class is cut roughly in half (hence the headlines). What will happen to the less advanced half--those who didn't qualify academically and would probably have ended up among the 42% that drop out? They will likely end up at other UC campuses where they should do very well...