In exactly two weeks 10’s of millions of voters will shuffle into voting booths across
the country to make their voices heard.
Besides the obvious race for president, voters in 32 states will decide on 120 statewide
ballot measures, from taxes, to marijuana, to campaign finance reform.
But what we’ll be talking about today is a single measure on California's ballot: the
repeal of Proposition 209 that seeks to bring back Affirmative Action into the College Admission
process after a 24 year absence.
If you love watching our videos and learning new things, be sure to check out our discord,
link in the description below, and let’s jump in.
To better understand prop 209 we need to take a step back in time.
The controversy surrounding affirmative action in California can be traced back to the historic
1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.
The court said that while UC Davis’s use of affirmative action in specific was unlawful,
they found ensuring diversity in the classroom to be a prime state interest, and that affirmative
action in general was allowed under the Constitution.
The initiative to put Prop 209, or the California Civil Rights Initiative, on the ballet was
led by advocates that felt that existing affirmative action programs led employers and universities
to reject applicants solely based on their race.
In the 1996 election Prop 209 passed with 55% of the California public voting in favor
of the initiative.
In essence, Prop 209 prohibited public institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity,
specifically in terms of employment, contracting, and education.
Today the biggest impact we see from this is the banning of affirmative action in the
admissions of the quarter million students applying to California public schools every
year.
But now, Proposition 16 on the ballot this november seeks to overturn prop 209 and bring
affirmative action back to California.
Most of the debate around Prop 209 stems around moral or anecdotal experiences.
While the channel has no intention to weigh in on these arguments, we do want to look
at the facts behind Prop 209.
And honestly, from a scientific standpoint, prop 209 could be considered a near perfect
experiment.
Not only can we see how prop 209 affected admissions statistics immediately before and
after its implementation, we can compare this data to controls from other states as well
as private institutions in california.
So, in California was affirmative action good for the students of color it was meant to
help?
First, let’s look at how affirmative action affects admission statistics in the rest of
the country.
More than two-thirds of colleges report that the race or ethnicity of applicants has "no
influence" on admissions decisions.
Now, even if we could assume that colleges were telling the truth, this doesn’t really
matter, because the truth is the vast majority of colleges are not competitive in admissions
and admit a majority of those who apply.
During the last admission season, colleges and universities accepted 66% of its applicants,
and that doesn’t even count community colleges who admit nearly 80% of applicants.
So to really see the impact of affirmative action, we have to look at competitive schools
that reject the vast majority of applicants.
At Harvard, the average asian american student had an average sectional SAT score of 770
out of 800, meanwhile the average white student had a score of 744, Hispanics 720, and the
average african american around 710.
And according to the NYT, even with affirmative action African American and Hispanic students
are more underrepresented at the nations top colleges than they were 35 years ago.
Affirmative action is meant to establish fairer access to higher education institutions, but
across the nation we can see that under represented minorities are only becoming more under represented
over time.
But perhaps this just means affirmative action hasn’t gone far enough.
So now let’s look at California specifically.
The California system is unique because there really isn’t any other example to look at
where one day affirmative action was legal, and the next it wasn’t.
This allows us to see the direct impacts from the repeal of affirmative action.
But what we actually see from Prop 209 is that affirmative action actually hurt minorities.
First off the obvious question, if affirmative action is meant to make it easier for URM
to get into secondary education, how could it possibly hurt them?
Well, this boils down to a concept known as college matching, or the concept that students
should be matched to schools that best match them and their abilities.
Let’s say we have three students, based on their educational background one should
go to a tier 1 school, one to a tier 2 school, and one to a tier 3 school.
With affirmative action, what we saw was that the student who should go to the tier 1 school
still goes to a tier one school, but now the person who should go to a tier 2 school also
goes to a tier 1 school, and the student who should go to a tier 3 school goes to a tier
2 school.
Now at first this would seem like a good thing for URM’s, after all they end up attending
better schools, but the data tells us this isn’t the case and the students who went
to schools better than they ‘should have’ were less likely to succeed, and that if they
went to their ‘appropriate school’ they could have done better and been better off
in the long run.
This is the basic theory and the evidence does support it.
After Prop 209, 4-year graduation rates for URMs rose 55% and 6-year graduation rates
rose 75%.
This is because of better matching without affirmative action.
This is ignoring the fact that without affirmative action, the UC system now has the most diverse
student body ever.
So when affirmative action was removed, not only did more minority students graduate at
all UC schools, they graduated faster, meaning they had to pay less for college.
And better matching extends beyond graduation rates, too.
At UC San Diego, the year before Prop 209 was introduced of the 3,000 students admitted
20% of whites had a first year GPA of 3.5 or better, meanwhile only one African American
student did, no not 1%, literally one student, but one year later, 20 percent of black students
had a 3.5 GPA or better after their first year, comparable with whites.
In just one year the number of Honor roll students at UC San Diego had gone up nearly
100 fold
And it affected the bottom of the class too.
Immediately prior to Prop 209, 15% of black students and 17% of native americans had a
GPA of less than 2.0 and were in danger of being expelled compared to only 4% of white
students.
Immediately after Prop 209 these racial differences were all but eliminated with black and native
american rates falling to 6 percent in 1998.
And you may think that removing affirmative action kept many URM’s out of higher education,
but UCSD had only 12 fewer black freshmen in 1998, but it als had 7 fewer with a failing
GPA after the first year.
Meanwhile those 12 students likely had a chance to attend a school where their chances of
success were far greater.
While it may seem that more people getting into top tier schools is for the best, according
to the nations top economists, minority students in the lowest quartile of high schools pursuing
STEM programs were twice as likely to graduate from a less competitive UC campus (like Santa
Cruz or Riverside) than they were from the top UC campus’s (like Berkeley and UCLA
(in that order)).
This is really important, because minority students graduating with degrees, instead
of accruing debt and dropping out with no degree, is what would allow them to move up
the socie-eonomic ladder, which is the goal behind affirmative action in the first place.
And this topic may actually be less controversial than you think.
According to Pew the vast majority of minorities don't want race-based affirmative action.
This all isn’t to say that minorities aren’t capable or deserving of getting into the states
top schools, but that race-based affirmative action is simply a poorly made bandaid for
the much deeper wound that is socioeconomic inequality.
An incredibly important issue that many California law makers refuse to discuss is the deficient
performance of California K–12 education.
California ranks 40th for educational quality among US states.
The reason for this is because, like most of the county, a significant percentage of
school funding comes from local property taxes.
In California, on average, local property taxes make up 60 percent of school funding,
so wealthier areas have more money flowing into educational programs.
Ultimately, the wealthiest school districts in California end up spending nearly 10 times
more per student than those in impoverished areas.
What this means is that students from low-income families typically attend the worst-performing
public schools and only about 5 percent of African American students are attending high-performing
schools, while whites and those of Asian descent are much more likely to attend a high-performing
school.
Research shows that implementing reforms to the rules governing
tenure and promotion, to pay criteria, and to the high costs of firing a poorly performing
teacher would substantially raise student performance.
These reforms have become so obviously needed that they are constantly advocated for by
policy experts, but they’re ultimately suppressed by teacher unions, which in turn have a very
close political relationship with many California lawmakers.
Overall, the end of affirmative action and race-based admissions vastly improved minority
graduation rates, academic performance, and STEM degree attainment through more efficient
matching of undergrad applicants with colleges.
Addressing representation issues requires a fundamental overhaul in how we fund public
schools and not through affirmative action.
Just a final note before you click off.
In depth videos like these, especially ones that require a lot of statistics, sourcing,
and research take a lot more time to make then some of my other videos, and they often
perform worse.
So if you like these in depth looks at more political and intensive topics like affirmative
action, gun control, or climate change be sure to drop a like and a comment down below.
I say this every video, but it’s honestly one of the best ways to help small channels
like this grow and keep producing the content you like.
As always, have a great day, and remember, there is always more to learn.