The Affirmative Action Illusion | City Journal
In his New Yorker essay, Jelani Cobb notes a precipitous drop in black enrollment at highly selective UCLA and UC Berkeley after California passed Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot initiative that banned the use of race in college admissions. But Cobb omits the most important fact: black graduation rates at those schools, which had been in decline, subsequently began to increase, as did both black enrollment and graduation rates throughout the University of California system.
Prop 209 changed the minority experience at UCLA from one of frequent failure to much more consistent success, write Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., in their book Mismatch. The school granted as many bachelor s degrees to minority students as it did before Prop 209 while admitting many fewer minority students and thus dramatically reducing failure and drop-out rates. Perhaps the biggest difference between Jackson and Thomas is that the latter has much more faith in the ability of blacks to move forward without special treatment.
Jason Riley.