The Christian Science Monitor recently published an op-ed piece defending affirmative action, written by Andrea Guerrero, a (half) Mexican American woman who was proud to have been admitted under affirmative action into Stanford (with a 1250 SAT) and into Boalt (with a 3.25 undergrad GPA). A number of other bloggers, (namely Jeff Bishop, Number 2 Pencil and John Rosenberg) have taken this op-ed apart and show why it is a more effective argument against rather than for racial preferences.

While I oppose racial preferences in all situations, I can at least understand why those who believe in group-based justice might argue for preferences for African-Americans (their ancestors were enslaved) or Native Americans (many of their ancestors were forceably displaced by more recent immigrants). But preferences for Hispanics? They're immigrants! Just like most Americans are descended from disadvantaged, impoverished, non-English-speaking immigrants who faced discrimination of various kinds. Why should Spanish-speaking immigrants (a great variety of people from twenty different countries and a range of socioeconomic backgrounds) be given advantages that other immigrants are not?

But I've seen first hand how the admission preferences game works. Back in the mid-80s when I was a computer science graduate student at Stanford, I was the student representative on the department's Master's degree admissions committee. The number of applicants greatly exceeded the number that we could admit. Only the students with the highest GRE scores, GPAs and strongest recommendations were accepted. To my surprise, two of the faculty on the committee were arguing to admit a candidate whose scores and grades (as a Stanford undergraduate) were far below the rest of the admitted candidates. "We can't let him fail" one professor said. "I'll give him as much tutoring as he needs" said the other professor. No student in the department got any where near this kind of individual attention, so this made no sense to me until I saw that the candidate was Black. So yes, at least in this case, "affirmative action" meant admitting a student who was deemed to be incapable of peforming as well as the other students. I have no idea how he actually did in graduate school. But I can't help but wonder whether he might have ended up happier and more successful had he entered a program where he was on the same academic level as the other students and where he wasn't expected to fail before he even started.