Jason Riley, my colleague at the Manhattan Institute, is one of the few journalists in the mainstream media willing to say the quiet part out loud when it comes to affirmative action: It failed (“Racial Preferences Harm Their Beneficiaries, Too,” Upward Mobility, Oct. 5).
Mr. Riley defines failure here in two ways. First, in terms of academic “mismatch,” or what happens when a student finds herself at a school for which she is academically unqualified. It’s not a pretty picture: The student may fall behind her more qualified peers, become dejected and switch to an easier major or drop out altogether. Second, in terms of the discrimination Asian-American high-schoolers have been subjected to since the 1980s on account of their race and ethnicity. Not a pretty picture there, either.
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______________________Renu Mukherjee is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal