Myth No. 5

Schools don’t need affirmative action to make diverse classes.

“‘Diversity’ isn’t why colleges need affirmative action,” Bloomberg View declared in 2012. The fact that some universities,like Texas A&M, have increased diversity while banning affirmative action might suggest that schools don’t need such programs to keep their campuses diverse. And like other opponents of affirmative action, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has argued that such policies are unfairly discriminatory and don’t help minority students, writing with David Sacks in Stanford’s alumni journal that “if ‘diversity’ were really the goal” of affirmative action programs, “then preferences would be given on the basis of unusual characteristics, not on the basis of race.”

But affirmative action programs do appear to increase diversity at colleges and universities. Though colleges are often cagey about releasing exact numbers on the subject, a look at what happens when such programs disappear tells a worrying story. When affirmative action programs are banned, black and Hispanic enrollment tends to lag. As Haley Munguia pointed out in 2015 at FiveThirtyEight, in states where affirmative action is banned, far fewer universities have shares of black and Hispanic students equal to those in the general population, while states with affirmative action have far better representation in black and Hispanic enrollment. At the University of Michigan, in particular, black enrollment fell 30 percent in the seven years after affirmative action was banned.

Today, affirmative action has lost much judicial support, and public opinion polls on these programs show mixed results. The Supreme Court permits race-conscious admissions policies at colleges and universities only to pursue “diversity” in student populations, not to compensate African Americans for centuries of racially discriminatory public policy. Meanwhile, most minority groups remain underrepresented on college and university campuses, even though most students enrolled at the country’s K-12 public schools are minorities.