Deep sixing affirmative action.

This "cascading" effect [following passage of Proposition 209 in which minority students were admitted to universities appropriate to their actual academic abilities causing minority enrollments there to increase] has had real benefits in matching students with the campus where they are most likely to do well. . . . Leapfrogging minority candidates into elite colleges where they often become frustrated and fail hurts them even more than the institutions. . . .

Affirmative action often creates the illusion that black or other minority students cannot excel. At the University of California at San Diego, in the year before race-based preferences were abolished in 1997, only one black student had a freshman-year GPA of 3.5 or better. In other words, there was a single black honor student in a freshman class of 3,268. In contrast, 20% of the white students on campus had a 3.5 or better GPA.

There were lots of black students capable of doing honors work at UCSD. But such students were probably admitted to Harvard, Yale or Berkeley, where often they were not receiving an honor GPA. The end to racial preferences changed that. In 1999, 20% of black freshmen at UCSD boasted a GPA of 3.5 or better after their first year, almost equaling the 22% rate for whites after their first year. Similarly, failure rates for black students declined dramatically at UCSD immediately after the implementation of Proposition 209.

"Getting Beyond Race. Justice O'Connor ponders the twilight of affirmative action." By John Fund, Wall Street Journal, 4/9/07 (emphasis added).