The Affirmative Action Illusion

Jeff Jacoby, writing for The Boston Globe, makes the case for eliminating affirmative action policies in higher education. Pretty convincing. Here's a snippet:

IF RACIAL preferences in higher education were good for racial minorities in higher education, we surely would have seen definitive evidence of it by now. Instead, a widening shelf of empirical research suggests that the opposite is true - that affirmative action in academia is not advancing minority achievement but impeding it. ...

When an elite institution relaxes its usual standards to admit more blacks and Hispanics, it all but guarantees that those academically weaker students will have trouble keeping up with their better-prepared white and Asian classmates. Minorities who might have flourished in a science or engineering program at a middle-tier state college are apt to find themselves overwhelmed by the pace at which genetics or computer architecture is taught in the Ivy League. Many decide to switch to an easier major. Others drop out altogether.

Especially when it comes to issues of race, no matter how bulletproof the evidence, ideology will always trump reason and cheap political pandering will outweigh the common good. Consequences be damned.