Oh, come on, this is the oldest myth in the college affirmative action book: that quotas only "tip the balance" when applicants "seem fairly indistinguishable." The white-black SAT gap at Rice back during the 400-1600 scoring days was 271 points, according to The Bell Curve. That was the biggest gap found out of a couple of dozen college. Of course, as the Rice president irritatedly pointed out to me when I called Rice's distinction to his attention at an alumni fundraiser, Rice is the smallest school to play Div. I football, so the proportion of football players' SAT scores counted under the black total is larger at Rice than elsewhere. But, still "¦
One reason colleges can pull the wool over the public's eyes on this is that very few people think in systems terms about how this works. It's hard to think about the effect of more than one college doing this at a time. If Rice was the only college in the country to have a quota, then, sure, it could fill its quota with black applicants who are "fairly indistinguishable"Â from the white norm.
But, funny thing is, Harvard also has a quota, so all those black applicants are going to Harvard instead of Rice. And the black students who are just below the Harvard-bound are going to Stanford and MIT on quotas instead of Rice. So, Rice takes the blacks who would be going to Texas A&M if nobody had a quota, and Texas A&M takes "¦
The whole system winds up pretty accurately reproducing at each college the one standard deviation gap seen in the whole population. But that's really hard for most people to grasp.
