The problem is that under this evaluation system, it is reasonable to predict that brown kids’ graduation rates will go down. Quite simply, the SAT did predict performance in a way that nothing else does; not using it will, via sheer logic, hobble the admissions procedure.

It is also reasonable to predict that brown students will tend to have a harder time coping with what is expected of them regardless of how spunky they are. Get ready, UC: the same administrators feeling so good about being “antiracist” right now will be assailed by the benficiaries of this “antiracism” for giving them inadequate “support” – although few will explain just what additional support could be offered – and hot on the heels of that will be plangent cries that Berkeley and UCLA are “racist” hellholes.

And let’s not even mention that white and Asian kids will see that a suspicious many of the brown kids around them are not performing on the level that they are. Even if they resist acknowledging the pattern, in line with the antiracist training they will receive in today’s context, they will not be able to help internalizing the reality of what they see. This will include that only some of the brown students around them will come from impoverished or even working-class backgrounds, something which all understand can affect one’s preparation for high-level schoolwork. This will mean a new generation of people thinking of blackness and nerdiness as antithetical (and studiously hating themselves as “racist” for feeling that way when it’s put to them in twenty years).