You Can Always Count on Goodwin Liu

More affirmative action. I'm only a very little bit into the reading from Goodwin Liu, published in 2002 i.e. while the Michigan cases were matriculating through the federal courts, and he's already made a great point. The plaintiff (well, okay, defendant by the time it got to the Supreme Court, but still, he was the plaintiff) in the Bakke case alleged that he was better-qualified, in terms of MCAT scores and science-courses GPA, than students admitted under the racial quota program. This is true; indeed, it is dramatically true. But he was also better "qualified," along these axes, than most of the people granted "normal" admission, i.e. who were given one of the non-quota slots. Despite being so extremely well "qualified," in terms of test scores and grades, he went 0-11 in applying to medical schools. As Liu puts it:

"Whatever Bakke's weaknesses were, there were several reasons, apart from affirmative action, that might have led the medical school to reject his application. Grades and test scores do not tell us the whole story."

In this particular case, apparently someone who gave Bakke an admissions interview thought him "rather limited in his approach" to medical problems. Liu then goes on to note that removing even the rigid quota of the California system, where 16 of 100 spots were reserved for minorities, would only increase the odds of acceptance extremely modestly for an applicant not benefiting from the quota: from 2.7% to 3.2% among all applicants, and from 16% to 19% among applicants who advanced to the interview stage. It's an extremely important statistical point, that because minorities are, you know, minorities, the boost in admissions-likelihood given to each beneficiary of racial affirmative action is significantly larger than the damage done to the admissions-likelihood of each non-beneficiary. And that sends us back to the point that college admissions is finicky, there are always lots of really good applicants, and you are almost certainly getting rejected (or wait-listed, in Ms. Gratz' case) for some reason idiosyncratic to you, or because they just can't take everyone, or whatever. You probably wouldn't have gotten one of the spots that went to an affirmative-action beneficiary. So get over it.