Outputs versus Inputs in Higher Education, vis-a-vis Affirmative Action

Here's a sentence from a John McWhorter column in the short-lived New York Sun in 2003, in anticipation of the Court's then-upcoming affirmative action cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger:

"The raison d’être of the nation’s selective universities is to forge a well-educated, national elite. Thus, our post-preferences approach to admissions must be meritocratic, though few people would want schools simply to choose students with the best SAT scores and grades and call it a day."

He's arguing, of course, against race-based affirmative action. I think it's interesting to notice the tension between the first and second sentences. The first sentence is about the desired outputs of selective universities, which he describes as "a well-educated national elite." The suggestion is, of course, that the selective universities play a crucial role in "forging" this elite, and in well-educating it. The second sentence, however, is all about the inputs to selective universities! In the first sentence he seems to be suggesting that exclusive colleges imbue a small group of people with the skills necessary to form a national elite (an odd but, in a certain way, refreshingly candid way of putting it), but in the second sentence, he seems to imply that what these colleges do is rather identify the most skilled youngsters in society and give them a stamp saying "Look, elite person here!"

Those are very different functions. If what colleges actually do is imbue their students with important skills and learning, then one might wonder why we need to be so concerned that the people chosen for such imbuing are the very smartest people possible, before they've gone to college. And if that's the case, if "meritocratic" admissions are unimportant because the whole point is to increase the merit of those who get admitted, then maybe we shouldn't even be troubled in the slightest if black people with worse SAT scores get into Harvard while white people with higher scores get rejected. If, on the other hand, college admissions is merely about identifying the ready-made elite in society and labelling it as such, and the actual experience of going to college doesn't add anything important, and if it's important that we not identify as a member of the elite anyone who lacks the right skills to function properly as a member of that elite, then we should be mortified if these non-elite black people are getting themselves entry into the elite tribe.

Of course, if all colleges do is label the pre-existing social elite, one might wonder about the worthfulness of that entire enterprise. And one might also wonder whether it's particularly, you know, fair or just to keep excluding black people from the elite based on the disadvantages passed down from their ancestors' having been forcibly kept out of the normal class, let alone the elite. Clearly John McWhorter had no interest in wondering either of these things. But if your view of college is that it does provide something extra, that you become an "elite" (if that's really the thing we're looking for you to become) by spending several years of your young adulthood attending a good higher learning institution, then the whole justification for using admissions to identify the very smartest high school seniors and nothing else falls away.