An interesting opinion piece from Dr. Tyler Austin Harper, an assistant professor at Bates College who benefitted from affirmative action and still supports it as a kind of reparations. None of that really makes Harper any different from many other progressives who support affirmative action. What’s different about this piece is that Harper admits the system has been gamed for a long time and, arguably worse, it encourages students to think about race first and foremost in their applications.

Harper’s insight began when he was a grad student working as a freelance tutor in Queens.

For my first gig, on a sweltering summer afternoon, I made my way to a cramped apartment where my teenage client told me what she needed: for me to read over her college applications and make sure she didn’t seem too Asian…

Nearly every college admissions tutoring job I took over the next few years would come with a version of the same behest. The Chinese and Korean kids wanted to know how to make their application materials seem less Chinese or Korean. The rich white kids wanted to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids wanted to make sure they came across as Black enough. Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids.

Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification. For these students, the college admissions process had been reduced to performance art, in which they were tasked with either minimizing or maximizing their identity in exchange for the reward of a proverbial thick envelope from their dream school.

Harper goes on to say that he believes affirmative action works and is necessary “to redress the historical evils of chattel slavery.” He also says he believes he’s a beneficiary of it suggesting he might not have gotten into his undergrad college or his PhD program without it. And yet…

I also believe that affirmative action — though necessary — has inadvertently helped create a warped and race-obsessed American university culture. Before students ever step foot on a rolling green, they are encouraged to see racial identity as the most salient aspect of their personhood, inextricable from their value and merit.

That sounds very bad. I suspect I think it sounds even worse than the author does. But here’s where the author makes a leap that I think is probably wrong. He believes that the end of affirmative action will make things worse, though he immediately calls conclusion into question.

Writing college essays will descend further into a perverse, racialized version of the Keynesian beauty contest. Many minority applicants (and their parents and tutors) will be left to guess which racial or ethnic category or subcategory — or even which crass racial stereotype — will be most appealing to any given admissions officer or to the particular school they are applying to. Chief Justice John Roberts all but offered a road map to gamification in his majority opinion Thursday, writing, “Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.”

In truth, this is already happening: As the sociologist Aya Waller-Bey wrote in a brilliant but depressing piece in The Atlantic, minority college applicants are keenly aware that they are more likely to be admitted if they cough up their darkest experiences. Meanwhile, many white or Asian or rich applicants will continue trying to appear less white or less Asian or less rich when they think it best suits their chances of winning admission to a fiercely picky elite campus.

I think it’s fair to say that the end of affirmative action won’t end racial gamification. The progressives who run these institutions (like the author himself) want these outcomes and are willing to use any legal fig leaf to get them. But he’s certainly wrong to say it will be worse. How can it be worse than nearly every student applying for college playing this game, which is exactly where we are now. Put another way, how do things get worse than 100% gamification?

As for the actual outcomes, he suggests today’s ruling will result in fewer black and brown students. I don’t think that’s true. As I pointed out earlier today, California eliminated affirmative action back in 1996 and black enrollment did drop initially. But lately the percentage of black students in the UC system is higher than it was in 1997. The percentage of Hispanic students is double what it was and the percentage of white students is half what it was. Even at the prestige schools like UCLA black enrollment hit 7% last year (the population of California is about 6% black). Only UC Berkeley has a lower percentage of black enrollees than it did when affirmative action was still legal back in 1997. And that’s almost certainly because of sky high Asian enrollment (43%). White enrollment at Berkeley is also down since 1997.

Also, a good point by someone I don’t usually cite here:

One of many fact points in wake of aff action ruling:

—Depending how you count, somewhere betw 3500 – 5500 colleges in US.

—Of them, all but 100 admit most (>50%) students who apply

—Only about 70 admit fewer than 1/3 of all applicants

A real issue, but a concentrated one.

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) June 29, 2023

So, the doomsaying we’re hearing today is almost certain overstated.

Harper has some interesting suggestions for what to do next starting with ousting “the D.E.I.-industrial complex, which prioritizes the kind of cheap fixes, awareness raising and one-off speaker events that have been shown to bear little fruit.” I couldn’t agree more but the reality is that won’t happen because the progressives in charge of universities won’t let it.