To the Editor:
The Peter Arcidiacono and Tyler Ransom op-ed (“Are Elite Colleges Circumventing the Supreme Court?, The Chronicle Review, December 3) on the allegedly surprising fact that some elite schools seem to have maintained their enrollment of students of color after the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action unwittingly revealed the underlying ideology of the challenge to inclusive university policies: the mere presence of nonwhite students is seen as evidence of so-called “preferences.”
En route to that troubling conclusion, Arcidiacono and Ransom seem to miss the most basic fact about college enrollment, which is that peer schools compete with one another for the students in their shared admissions tier. (One would have thought that a pair of economists would realize that colleges are in a competitive market.) To see this, observe that when they compare Princeton and MIT, they compare enrollment rather than admissions data. But the Students for Fair Admissions cases were, of course, about admissions. By eliding the difference between admissions and enrollment they ignore the possibility that both Princeton and MIT could have admitted fewer students of color, but Princeton did a better job at convincing a greater share of the smaller pool of admits to enroll.
For what it’s worth, the college consultancy Ivy Wise reports that Princeton’s overall yield rate slightly increased in the most recent year, while MIT’s slightly decreased. (I can’t find yield data broken down by race.) These are very tiny changes, on the order of 1 percent, but so is the increase in Black enrollment at Princeton that Arcidiacono and Ransom emphasize — none of us are getting stars in a regression table here.
Many factors other than the use of affirmative action in admissions can affect a college’s ultimate yield of any particular group of students. Maybe Princeton has a more inclusive climate for students of color. Maybe Princeton offers better financial aid. Maybe there’s a difference between the students who are particularly interested in engineering and other MIT-like subjects of study and those who are interested in Princeton’s more humanistic curriculum. Perhaps there was a difference at the admissions stage as well, but MIT’s pre-Students For Fair Admissions process just took race into account to a greater degree than Princeton’s. Perhaps none of those things are true. I don’t know — but Arcidiacono and Ransom don’t even ask.
Instead, they just assume that because Princeton didn’t lose students of color, its admissions officials may have been cheating somehow. They seem to be so invested in a story according to which merely having Black students — at a rate that continues to be markedly lower than the Black share of the American population — is evidence of a sinister scheme to do reverse racism that they don’t bother to consider any alternative explanations whatsoever.
Let’s hope that Arcidiacono and Ransom don’t teach research methods.
Paul Gowder
Professor of Law
Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
