The MIT’s Affirmative Action And The Defective American Admission System

In 2024, 5% of MIT’s incoming undergraduate class was Black or African American, which is a significant drop from the 13% average over the previous four years. MIT’s dean of admissions, Stu Schmill, attributes the drop to the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end consideration of race in the admissions process. Schmill said, “We expected that this would result in fewer students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups enrolling at MIT. That’s what has happened”.

That is where we are. I am still waiting for a study which shows the bottom of the class on graduation day, by race. In other words, even though Obama might have needed affirmative action to get in, he was not the bottom of his class [on affirmative action policy, Obama noted that it “allowed generations of students like Michelle [Obama] and me to prove we belonged”] .

The implication is this: any system which does not make it possible to discover the potential best student, and who without extra help would not have gotten in, is defective.

So, as companies after companies (Ford, Lowe’s, Deere & Co. and Harley-Davidson) implement the Supreme Court ruling which has abolished affirmative actions, and use of race in admissions into anything, it is important to ask this question: were the people who needed help always the least performing? If not, it means you have your own version of affirmative action – institutionalized privileges built on moats, preventing others from proving they “belong”.

Comment On Feed

Comment 1: What Ndubuisi Ekekwe did is to show that the end results from the comparative performance of those admitted with Affirmative Action to others show that AA is corrective of other latent biases / edges in the system before the admission evaluations were done.

My Response: Nurudeen explains the core of my thesis: it has nothing to do with test scores. Obama needed AA to get into Harvard but graduated top 1% of his class. That Harvard needed to admit him via AA implied that the system was biased against him. How can an AA student be a president of Harvard Law Review  which was purely based on “MERIT”? So, this AA thing helped Obama to demonstrate that he belongs which without he would have been left behind. The argument of test scores is a distraction.

Comment 2: This is such an important discussion. It’s easy to focus on how people get in, but what truly matters is how they perform once they’re there. The idea that those who benefited from affirmative action are always the least successful is far from the truth—many excelled and proved they belonged, just like anyone else.

As companies adapt to the new landscape post-Supreme Court ruling, it’s vital to remember that talent can come from any background. If we don’t offer opportunities to those who need a bit of extra help, we might miss out on incredible potential. We should be questioning the systems that keep people from having a fair chance to show what they’re capable of.

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