Pre-Empting Equality

The news of the moment in our on-going culture war is that Columbia University, one of the eight Ivy League schools that stand at the pinnacle of tertiary education in America (in reputation, at least), is permanently dropping the standardized testing requirement from its admissions process.

Our review is purposeful and nuanced — respecting varied backgrounds, voices and experiences — in order to best determine an applicant’s suitability for admission and ability to thrive in our curriculum and our community, and to advance access to our educational opportunities.

Allow me to cynic-splain this action.

Such as Columbia have long been dominated by social justice ideologues. That crowd operates under certain presuppositions, including the notion that minority students are "systemically" oppressed and therefore require an active counterbalancing effort in order to achieve equity. Equity, not equality, mind you, with equity sounding suspiciously like equality but meaning whatever they want it to mean.

Columbia's Class of 2025's demographic mix is 54% white, 28% Asian, 20% Hispanic, 18% black, and 4% native American. Note the >100% tally, which reflects both the classification of Hispanics as "white" and the ability to choose more than one of these categories.

For the purposes of comparison, the US is 59% white-not-Hispanic, 19% Hispanic, 14% black, 6% Asian, and 1% native American. 3% report as multi-racial.

If Columbia's goal is to overweight minorities, it has succeeded. Not drastically, mind you, but perhaps sufficiently given such a goal.

So, why the big change in the admissions policy? Why eliminate a standardized metric?

Two words: Supreme Court.

The Court is currently pondering two cases that may have a profound impact on the college admissions process as exercised by the Ivies and many other universities.

Per Harvard's brief in these cases, 60% of selective universities factor race into their admissions decisions. I’d bet you the real number is higher. A ruling that debarred discrimination by skin color in university admissions would be a seismic event in the process, and lay bare the terrible injustice perpetrated upon big city black and Hispanic kids by over half a century of progressive public education policies. If not enough black and Hispanic kids are getting in based on merit, the first place we should look is the system that failed to teach them well enough. That injustice is systemically papered over by affirmative action admission policies at the college level, allowing good and proper leftists to rage against everything but their own philosophy's failure.

And their own bigoted practices. Want to see true systemic oppression? Just look at the Left's disgusting opposition to charter schools and other forms of school choice. It should be no surprise that charters, at least in my locale, vastly outperform the “traditional” public schools that cater to the unions far more than to students, and for half the money per student.

A private university should be free to do what it wants, but it is the vanishingly rare college creature that doesn't soak up some sort of taxpayer largess, either via direct funding of student loan underwriting, so different rules should apply. This includes non-discrimination, either in the affirmative sense of giving a skin-color-based edge to some, or the negative sense of penalizing others based on skin color (yes, I'm referring to Asians here, who need to outperform everyone else, including whites, in order to get into top schools).

It's not a great leap to expect or predict that the Court will repudiate discriminatory admissions criteria this summer. That expectation is, I believe, the reason for the no-SAT policy. Rather than comply with the Court, the woker-than-thou educrats in their ivy towers will try their best to end-around whatever ruling comes down. Eliminating objective criteria such as SAT and ACT scores will make it harder for people to prove discrimination. If statistics showing that Asian students are required much higher scores than black students suddenly become unavailable, lawsuits based on the Court's ruling will have a tougher time succeeding.

Eliminating testing requirements is a cynical ploy to further opaque an already-inscrutable process, and pre-empt a Court ruling in favor of equal treatment. We already know that our Best-and-Brightest have contempt for the nation's institutions when they get in the way of their dreams and delusions, so this latest move should shock no one.

I'm rooting for them to continue down this road. They're doing themselves long-lasting harm, alienating Americans, and undermining the decades of messaging that 'everyone should go to college' that inflated their enrollments and swelled their coffers. As I wrote a couple months ago, a crackup seems increasingly likely, and I'll not shed a single tear if and when it arrives.

This isn't the first time in recent memory that people who “know better” are thumbing their noses at the Court. Ever since Trump tipped the Court away from leftism, the Best-and-Brightest have held, and sometimes railed openly, that the Court is “illegitimate.” As I recently shared, the Court’s affirmation of Second Amendment rights and slap-down of a gross infringement by New York State was met with open defiance, not respectful compliance. Such will be the way if the Court strikes down affirmative action admissions this summer, and such will likely be the way going forward whenever the Court tells a leftist, “no you can’t.”