The Problem With Affirmative Action

new rules for federal contractors. It's not enough to not discriminate that's already illegal. The order says it's time to ensure no one's being left out. President Lyndon Johnson was

clear about his rationale here. He is speaking at graduation at Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, d C. You do not take a person who for a year has been hobbled by change and liberating bringing up to the starting line of a race, and then say you are free to compete with all the others and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. That's the

theory behind affirmative action. It was the idea that it took work to unlock opportunity in a more equitable way. Black people in particular were entitled to additional consideration. This did two big things. One, it set aside government contracts to minority owned businesses. It also radically changed college admissions. Colleges and universities tweaked their admissions policies to enroll more

African Americans and other minorities. Five years after Johnson signs that executive order, roughly of colleges and universities have some kind of affirmative action in place, and black student enrollment was going up. So in that regard, it's working, but it's not universally popular. Far too many affirmative action programs

divide rather than unite. Our children and grandchildren feel no responsibility for the conduct of their ancestors and the mistakes of America's past, and that is as it should be. A black California businessman named Ward Connorly waged war on affirmative action in his state. Connorley was also a regent in the University of California system, and he was the driving force behind Proposition too oh nine, California ballot initiative

to end affirmative action in the state. That's not what the text of the ballot initiatives said, though in fact it didn't even mention affirmative action by name. It instead framed it as anti discrimination section the state shall not discriminate against or grant refferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education,

or public contracting the preferential treatment it refers to. That's what would be the death knell for affirmative action. Connorly acknowledged that those kinds of measures had been necessary, but he argued it wasn't anymore. It had gone from being a transitional remedy to an entitlement, a crutch that had outlived its usefulness for black people in our reliance on affirmative action. The time has indeed come to let go. We cannot forever look through the rear view mirror at

America's mistakes. We must look through the windshield at its opportunities. It was a radical position for a black man to take. Civil rights groups roundly opposed the measure. Connor Ley said he was called an uncle Tom, a lackey, and a sellout, but he won. Prop To nine passed with of the vote, including Connorley with later brag of the black vote. By the late nineties, affirmative action in California public universities was dead.

California's is the premier laboratory for testing this experiment. If this experiment works in California, my friends, it works anywhere. It fails in California, its failure can be predicted throughout the land. The United States was about to find out whether, as Connorley said, the experiment worked. The data shows that the median white family has ten times more wealth than the average black family. One of the drivers of that

wealth gap is redlining. When it comes to understanding financial inequality in this country, economists often point to the absence of African American generational wealth. See the pleasant a plant walk from California to Night a picture of how the nation's largest university system may be transformed. Now that it's a pervative action program is going to be ended. It's a trend propelled not just by economic forces, but by

white racism and local white political and economic power. It's much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee an annual income, for instance, to get rid of poverty. Welcome back to the paycheck. I'm Jackie Simmons and I am Rebecca Greenfield. The difference economically between having

a college degree and not having one is huge. For full time, year round workers in their mid twenties and thirties, having at least a bachelor's degree is worth an extra twenty three thousand dollars a year in income, even taking student debt into account. More education predicts higher incomes and more wealth at every level. For one, it opens up more better paying job opportunities. College graduates make more money than people with a high school degree or even just

some college. People with a graduate degree make more money than college grads. It's not just jobs. People with a college or advanced degree are more likely to get benefits like health insurance through their work, which adds an extra layer of financial security. Experts also believe more education leads to better financial decision making, so people are making more money and they're making better choices with it. There's another

reason black families seek out a college education. My father is very keenly aware of the difficulty of just simply being black. You know, had an opportunity to to learn to read, write, to do those things that will make them competitive at least to fight back. He would fight back, but you know, you could always be dismissed because you couldn't do something or whatever it was. So he always taught us it was important to get an education. That's

Shirley Webber. She's had a long career in California higher education and politics. In January, she was sworn in as a Secretary of State. She's a huge defender of affirmative action and says it was critical to her success at

every point in her academic career. Without that extra step, you know, I may would have done okay in life, but I doubt if I would have if I would have gotten a PhD by the time I was twenty six, and I doubt if I would have been a professor at the age I would have been struggling trying to figure out what I was gonna do and how I was going to do it. That extra opportunity helped to get me to a level that I could actually excel, you know, demonstrate that I could do those things despite

the fact coming from a very poor background. So my first contact with affirmative action was really myself. Many black professionals probably benefited from some kind of affirmative action. I might have two. I graduated in the late eighties and applied to a million schools, including some in California, and was told race might be one factor that could help me get a second look. I can't definitively say it worked or not, but fast forward thirty years, I've definitely

had my share of professional success. Kelsey Butler is a reporter at Bloomberg. She applied to college about fifteen years after I did. Hey, Kelsey, Hi Jackie. So if I understand you weren't very comfortable thinking of yourself as having benefited from affirmative action, is that right? Yeah, that's true.

I mean it's complicated because you know, when I applied to college in two thousand five, being black and Latina, it might have been something that got me a second look or even got me in the door with admissions officers.

I honestly have no idea, but I feel like since then, in a lot of majority white spaces, you know, the term affirmative action higher or you're here because of affirmative action has been almost used as like a jab against me, and it kind of sours you almost on the concept I spent a lot of time while reporting this listening to all the arguments against affirmative action, lots of tape,

lots of recordings. I thought a lot about the racist roots of a lot of the arguments against affirmative action, and also kind of made me think about, well, if it didn't exist, then what really is there? You know, the doors to a lot of institutions would be closed to a lot of people. And is my discomfort you know, someone saying something ignorant? It seems really small when you think about it that way. One of the problems with affirmative action does it gives certain people a leg up,

maybe without them even knowing. And some people think that's unfair, even if it is creating a more level playing field. But what happens when that leg up goes away? Does that make things more fair? When California put a hard stop to affirmative action with Prop two and nine, it did do what connor Ley said, It's set up a huge experiment. The state had three decades of strong affirmative action measures and then all of a sudden it didn't. We asked Kelsey to find some answers about what that

meant for black wealth. So Kelsey, Where do we start well in terms of getting black students to college, Affirmative action definitely worked. In five only four point seven percent of African American adults had four more years of college

education according to the U S Census. It starts to go up pretty quickly after that, especially when you consider it typically takes at least four years to earn a bachelor's By nineteen eighty, eight point four percent of Black adults have a degree, almost double within fifteen years and another fifteen years, so by a little more than thirteen percent of Black adults have a four year degree or higher. And that's before Prop. Two oh nine, Right, yeah, And

actually in California the numbers are slightly higher. By seventeen point five percent of African Americans have a college degree or higher. Another way to put it is, in about thirty years, the number of Black adult in California with a four year degree has gone from about one in seventeen to better than one in six And this was after some of the earliest affirmative action measures had been

watered down. What do you mean by water down? Well, Originally some institutions used a straight quota system, setting aside a certain number of seats for black and Hispanic students until nineteen seventy seven and the U. S. Supreme Court case known as the Baki case. Baki was Alan Baki, a white man and an aspiring doctor. He wanted to go to medical school at U C. Davis in VY three.

The school was new and the student body was overwhelmingly white, so they decided to set aside seats for applicants they called disadvantage, basically a euphemism for minorities. Baki had good MCAT scores and his interviewer described him as a well qualified candidate, but he didn't get in. He complained about what he thought was a reverse discrimination and was encouraged to apply again, and he was rejected a second time, so he sued and his case made its way to

the Supreme Court. Six of the nine justices wrote opinions in the case, and when you look at them, it's really clear how divided they are. Some of um said race based quotas were clearly unconstitutional. Others said it was ridiculous to require schools to ignore racing admissions because of how black people had been held back throughout US history, and what was the controlling opinion Justice Lewis Powell tried to bridge the divide. He said, if there's a quote

compelling state interests, race can be considered. In my view, the only state interests that fairly may be viewed as compelling on this record is the interest of a university in a diverse student body. The court didn't strike down all affirmative action. In fact, Powell quotes the admissions policy at Harvard as an example of university that's doing it right. He even attached a copy of the policy to his opinion. But you see Davis was doing it wrong. Yeah, basically

because they'd set aside these rigid quotas. There were sixteen seats out of a hundred that were essentially off limits to white people. But you c Davis can rethink its policy, which Powell practically exem to do. Yet the way is open Todavis to adapt. The type of admissions program proved to be successful in so many of the universities and colleges of our country. So within ten years, basically quotas are out. That's interesting because it seems like that's what

most people think of when they think of affirmative action. Yeah, that's a popular misconception for most of its history. It's not that at all, At least in college admissions. It's much more flexible. Powell's decision does something else that's really important. He basically wipes out Lyndon Johnson's rationale for affirmative action undoing general racial discrimination or imbalance. That's not a compelling interest. The only justification he allows is the diversity argument. So

colleges are allowed to consider race. Yes, but here's the difference. Where before colleges were allowed to have quotas, now they're allowed to consider race as one factor in pursuit of diverse city and the student body. Most colleges worked within these new parameters, adding race onto a bunch of other admissions criteria. It was no longer the only factor, or even the predominant one, but it was still very explicitly considered.

At California public schools, for example, black and Hispanic students had lower s A T score and g p A cutoffs for admissions. At places like Harvard, race is one factor of many that the school considers when letting students in. Black student enrollment drops for a bit, but then it continues to pick up. Even at U C. Davis Medical School, the overall minority student admit rate is higher five years after BAKY than it was in the five years before.

By the case against affirmative action has a new twist. There was the controversial idea of protecting white people from the threat of reverse discrimination, but now it's also about asserting that black people no longer need a leg up or extra consideration of any kind. We've made it. That's the argument connorally makes the support Prop to OH nine. It's passage created an opportunity to find out whether he was right. Maybe we black people didn't need affirmative action

after all. Since Prop TU and I took effect in the nineties, researchers have been looking at these questions, and enough time has passed if they think they have some answers. Zachary Bloomer is a PhD candidate and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He looked at the impact of

the law on black and brown students. We can compare the longer run outcomes of black and Latino university applicants in the years just before when affirmative action was still in place to the years just after when affirmative action had ended. We're just gonna follow those cohorts of students along over the next ten, fifteen, or even twenty years and ask what happened to them as a result of their more selective university enrollment under affirmative action. So that's

what Bloomer did. He looked at where ten thousand college Albicans in California ended up without prop to OH nine, both in college and in their careers. What he found was pretty clear. Absent affirmative action, Black and Latino students are less likely to earn college degrees. They're less likely to earn graduate degrees, you know, following them another five years into the future. They're less likely to earn degrees

in lucrative stem fields. This is science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors that are seen to provide long run wealth returns to students without those degrees. African Americans and Latino has made less money after affirmative action ends. The average Black and Latino university applicant loses about five percent of their wages. Bliemer looked at higher earners, people making about a hundred thousand dollars in California by their mid thirties.

So let's put that into context. California in twenty four team had about twenty thousand high earning Black and Latino workers in the state around the ages of like thirty to thirty four. How would that number of workers change if affirmative action had stayed in place and so those thirty to thirty four year olds had access to more selective universities fifteen years ago when they went to college.

The answer is roughly three or four percent. So about seven hundred or a thousand people working in California would have been high earning if they had access to these selective universities through affirmative action. So for African Americans and Latinos, affirmative action had worked, they got more better academic credentials and that translated into higher salaries. But what about other students.

One of the common arguments against affirmative action is that it takes one of those slots away from someone quote more deserving. Bloomers looked at that too. If that argument was right, key theorized, then getting rid of affirmative action would make their outcomes better. It didn't. Where did the white and Asian students who would have gone to Berkeley?

Where did they go? Instead? Most of them go to highly selective private universities of similar quality to UC Berkeley, and so as a result, when you follow those students along, providing them access to UC Berkeley actually gives them surprisingly little in terms of longer run wage outcomes. That brings us back to the wealth gap. What Bloomer's research suggests is that part of the reason that affirmative action measures don't harm white and Asian students is because they tend

to have other options. The reason they have those other options is because they are, on average, coming from families with greater wealth to begin with. Black and Hispanic students, on the other hand, don't have as many of those resources that limits their options college wise. They don't again, on average, ridge have equal opportunities elsewhere. Right after Prop two O nine, past college enrollment for black students in

California state schools dropped by about fifteen percent. Ever since, California legislators and advocates have been trying to overturn it or to find another way to strengthen affirmative action measures in the state. Colleges have continued to prioritize diversity, so overall, the number of black people getting four year degrees is still rising. But not as fast as it was, and

it's never caught up to white people. Last year, as the pandemic swept across the US and the Black Lives Matter movement put civil rights front and center, California lawmakers tried again. Shirley Webber led that fight. The ballot initiative this time was called Prop sixteen. Okay, it's supposed been cheered by somebody else's voice. That usual false to me, and I just said, let's do it. You know, if we're gonna do it, let's do it. The language was clunky.

It asked voters to repeal the amendment to the state constitution that prohibited discrimination or preferential treatment on the basis of race, but it had lots of support from across the left. The founders of b LM, the a c l U, and the California Teachers Union all lined up behind it, and lots of celebrities too. Here's Eva DuVernay, Tracy Ellis, Ross and Ray encouraging people to vote for a Prop six team and the fight to dismantle systemic

racism is on the ballot in California. Voting yes on Prop sixteen is our chance to right the wrongs of the past. Voting yes on Prop sixteen is one way to prove that black lives matter. I'm voting yes on Prop. Sixteen because I wouldn't have gotten into college had it not been for affirmative action, which means I wouldn't have had the same access to opportunities and resources as my wife peers. Voters in California, one of the most liberal states in the US, went to the polls again on

affirmative action. It was a really big election, and the state's progressive voters were excited either to boot out to Donald Trump or to cast a vote for the first woman of color as vice president following a summer of Black Lives Matter protests. If there were ever a time for affirmative action to come back, this would be it, and Prop sixteen lost of people voted against it. In nearly twenty five years since California ended affirmative action, the

policies had gotten even less popular. Surely, Weber thinks that Prop sixteen made some people once again feel like they might be on the losing end of a deal. If I tell you that, you know we're looking at the universities, then you know there's only so many seats in the university, and will your kid get a seat? That's always a question.

And so those who thought they had a certain advantage decided that it was too much to get, which is not uncommon too much to get, So, you know, it's one of the sad stories of the progressive California voting for affirmative actually equal opportunity and access was a little bit more people wanted to do, you know, a little bit more. It may have cost them something. So even if the advantage that white people might have overall is unfair to begin with or evolved out of centuries of unfairness,

individuals don't see how that applies to them. Yeah, and that perception of unfairness might be really hard to overcome. The thing is, focusing on education might be the wrong way to think about closing the racial wealth gap. For a long time, economists and policymakers thought that closing the education gap would eventually close the wealth gap. Better education,

better jobs, more money, and walla equality. But recently a pair of e anymous at the St. Louis Federal Reserve suggested closing the education gap wouldn't even be enough when you look at wealth across racial groups. So For example, just among people with college degrees or advanced degrees, there are still huge gaps. The FED research shows that white and Asian people on average basically benefit more from education than Black and Latino people do at every level of education.

The wealth gap and the income gap persists. What's that work? They say, are factors that you can't really see, discrimination or other long term structural disadvantages. They might account for as much as seventy of the wealth gap for black families. What do they recommend instead, They don't really make recommendations, not in that paper. What they do say is that individual initiative or marginal policy changes might only chip away at the gap. To really make significant progress, we need

quote more fundamental change general society. Maybe we should stop fighting or small policy changes and push for bigger, more radical things. Shirley Weber is doing just that. In October, California passed into law another piece of legislation she wrote, We'll just start here by signing this. With this signature, Governor Newsome made history, making California the first state in the country studying and developing proposals for potential reparations for

African Americans. That bill is focused on on African Americans, not on equity and everybody else. You know, there's a there's an awful lot old to group of people who've been here four hundred years, came here before the Mayflower, and still are at the very bottom of opportunity. Um. So, whether it's manifests itself in reparations, whether it manifests itself an affirmative action, remains to be seen. So what does

the bill say, They're going to study reparations. It's a first step, and for people really interested in leveling the playing field, so to speak, it's an important one. For much of the past fifty years, no one took the movement for reparations all that seriously, it's different now. There are tons of questions about what real reparations would look

like in the US. Next week on the Paycheck, we find out what happened when one affluenced Chicago suburb when looking for answers, it is a way to repair egregious injury and crimes against humanity against the black community, and we need to acknowledge that. And so yes, it is reparations. Let's not call it anything else. To make you feel better about it, your role in it, or our inability to address it before. Now let's call it what it is. Yeah,

thanks for listening to the Paycheck. If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was hosted by Me, Rebecca Greenfield and Me Jackie Simmons. Today's episode was edited by Janet Paskin and reported by Kelsey Butler. This episode was produced by Lindsay Cradowell. We also had production help from Magnus Hendrickson and editing help from Francesca Levi, Rackheeta Saluja, Jackie Simmons, and Me.

Our original music is by Leo Sigen. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. We'll see you next time.