The Educational Benefits of ‘Diversity’
City Journal | Diane Yap
In the wake of the SCOTUS oral arguments, Yap writes that Harvard and UNC’s arguments “rely on a dubious conflation of two distinct concepts: racial diversity and racial balancing” and that “Justice Thomas is right to question the wisdom of letting the discriminators decide whether racial discrimination is necessary.”
“In recent oral arguments on affirmative action before the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas repeatedly asked for specifics about diversity’s educational value. But research on whether racial diversity makes any difference in educational quality is either weak or methodologically flawed,” Yap writes. “One can find little evidence for the educational benefits of diversity that isn’t based on self-reported attitudes..there is zero evidence that maintaining a precise racial distribution benefits students…”
In sum, Yap argues, “The goal of these school’s admissions officials appears to be the achievement of a particular racial mix, despite the dearth of evidence that any specific racial proportion produces educational benefits. Justice Thomas is right to question the wisdom of letting the discriminators decide whether racial discrimination is necessary.”
