What is with this obscene obsession with diversity in higher education? I recognize that diversity has its place in creating a well-rounded society. Bringing together people from all different backgrounds encourages an influx of new ideas and opinions from a broad spectrum. As we engage with people of varying socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, we learn more about the world and our place in it. It is not diversity that I see a problem with; it's the creation of an artificial construct to encourage diversity which I find absurd.

Let's look at higher education. In my recent articles I have lambasted UC Berkeley for its hypocritical student culture but finally, I can praise the institution and the UC system as a whole for its steps in creating a diverse environment for its students without forming an unnatural student body through affirmative action, or an action or policy favoring those who tend to suffer from discrimination such as minorities. In fact, I really should be praising the citizens of California for the passage of Proposition 209 in 1998. Since then, there has been overwhelming evidence to suggest that the ban of affirmative action has not harmed minorities but has actually helped them. At UC Berkeley, there has been a documented improvement in the six-year graduation rate of black students from UC Berkeley, from 61 percent for freshmen entering in 1990 to 79 percent in 2009. At UCLA, although the percentage of minorities attending the school decreased, the number of bachelor's degrees remained the same. These cases are partially due to the lessening of the mismatch effect. The mismatch effect is when a student is admitted to and attends a school he or she is not academically prepared for in comparison to his or her peers. While the actual enrollment of minorities may have declined, the dropout rate has decreased because the minorities that did end up being enrolled were more prepared to succeed. An analogy that describes this is taking a C average high school student and shoving the student into AP and IB classes. The student will most likely flounder and struggle compared to A average students who end up taking the courses. The student will fall farther and farther behind.

So what does the UC system do to increase diversity? The UCs have embraced what is called "holistic admissions", which means all aspects of the application are considered with less emphasis on test scores and GPAs. This is a more just way of admitting students. Yes, minorities statistically are poorer and more disadvantaged, but that should not excuse subpar academic history. Race should not be a qualitative factor to be considered. What these minorities have is a compelling story. Facing so many challenges to get to where they are, they have the ability to let the admission officers realize their struggles through essays. Not all minorities end up facing hardships, and it's unfair to everyone else to give them blanket preferential treatment. There are disadvantaged people from all races, and all of these should be recognized for rising above their surroundings.

While the lack of affirmative action can encourage a stronger intellectual community ready to be challenged, the presence of affirmative action is blatantly discriminatory. One university that is often compared to the state flagships of California is that of the University of Texas. Here, the typical black student placed at the 52nd percentile of the SAT; the typical white was at the 89th percentile. How is it possible for students at the 52nd percentile to be able to compete with students at the 89th percentile? How much harder for them is it to thrive when there are such different standards for groups of students based on race? I like to believe that higher education is the leveling ground where all students have access to the same resources such as professors and libraries, regardless of class or race. It defies logic to expect the average student who scored in the 52nd percentile on the SAT to be able to succeed in comparison to a student in the 89th percentile, and students at the 52nd percentile should not "average" in any group in the University of Texas, black or otherwise.

The late Supreme Court Justice Scalia weighed in on the matter when he famously stated, “There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less advanced school, a slower track school where they do well.” This comment was highly controversial and many contended that Scalia was being racist towards African Americans. Is that really true? If minorities statistically enter higher education with lower test scores and GPAs, would they be better off in an institution where they are the average student, or an institution where they are below average? According to a study conducted by UCLA law professor Richard Sander and UCLA statistician Roger Bolus, it indicated that "[S]tudents with credentials more than one standard deviation below their science peers at college are about half as likely to end up with science bachelor degrees, compared with similar students attending schools where their credentials are much closer to, or above, the mean credentials of their peers." If we look at the percentile breakdown of SAT scores in 2012 for the University of Texas, the 52nd percentile in each category (Critical Reading, Mathematics, Writing) is 500, 520, and 490 respectively which adds up to an SAT score of 1510. In contrast, the 89th percentile is 650, 670, 640 respectively which adds up to an SAT score of 1960. According to the CollegeBoard, the standard deviation for each category was 114, 117, and 114. Obviously, the 52nd percentile black test takers are more than one standard deviation below their white counterparts and if we apply the UCLA study, these black students are at a disadvantage.

Something I stumbled across while researching for this article was a study by Richer H. Sander, Professor of Law, UCLA; Ph.D., Economics, Northwestern University, titled "A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools". In it, Dr. Sander makes several conclusions. Rather than write my own analysis, I decided to include his. The following was taken directly from his study which can be viewed here.

1. Black students as a whole are at a substantial academic disadvantage when they attend schools that used preferences to admit them. As a consequence, they perform poorly as a group throughout law school. The median GPA of all black students at the end of the first year of law school lies roughly at the sixth percentile of the white grade distribution. Put differently, close to half of black students end up in the bottom tenth of their classes. This performance gap is entirely attributable to preferences; none of it seems to be attributable to race per se.

2. The clustering of black students near the bottom of the grade distribution produces substantially higher attrition rates. Entering black law students are 135% more likely than white students to not get a law degree. Part of this is the effect of low grades on academically strong black students who would have easily graduated from less competitive schools; part of this is the effect of high attrition among the five or six hundred academically weak black students admitted to the low-prestige law schools. But again, virtually all of the black-white gap seems attributable to preferences; virtually none of it seems attributable to race or to any correlate of race (such as income).

3. Generally low grades among blacks have even larger effects on bar performance. Blacks are nearly six times as likely as whites to not pass state bar exams after multiple attempts. The difference, again, is mostly attributable to preferences. Half of the black-white bar passage gap is traceable to the effects of blacks with good credentials getting low grades at higher-prestige schools; nearly a quarter is due to low-prestige schools admitting blacks with lower credentials than almost any of the other students in the system.

4. When blacks pass the bar and enter the job market, they encounter a generally positive climate. Blacks earn 6% to 9% more early in their careers than do whites seeking similar jobs with similar credentials, presumably because many employers (including government employers) pursue moderate racial preferences in hiring. Nonetheless, affirmative action by schools hurts blacks in the job market more than it helps. The data in Part VII suggests that employers weigh law school grades far more heavily in evaluating job candidates than most legal academics have assumed. Law school racial preferences give blacks fancier degrees, but also systematically lower their GPAs. For at least two-thirds of black law graduates, the harm preferences do to a student’s grades greatly outweighs the benefit derived from the more prestigious degree. Only black students graduating from the top ten law schools even arguably derive net benefits from this trade-off. Racial preferences therefore have not been an indispensable part of credentialing blacks for the job market; overall, they clearly end up shutting more doors than they open.

5. In 2001, about 86% of all black students who attended accredited American law schools would have been eligible for admission at one or more law schools in the total absence of racial preferences. System-wide, racial preferences expand the pool of blacks in law school by only 14%. These 14%—about five to six hundred students admitted to low-prestige schools— have very low academic credentials and face long odds against becoming lawyers. Only a fifth of this group finishes law school and passes the bar on their first attempt; fewer than a third become lawyers after multiple attempts at taking the bar.

6. When one takes into account the corrosive effects of racial preferences on the chances of all black law students to graduate and pass the bar, these preferences probably tend, system-wide, to shrink rather than expand the total number of new black lawyers each year. If all preferences were abolished, the data in Part VIII suggests that the number of black attorneys emerging from the class of 2004 would be 7% larger than it is. The number of black attorneys passing the bar on their first attempt would be 20% larger. These numbers are simply estimates, resting on the assumptions I have detailed; but even if the attrition effects of the current system were much smaller than I have estimated, we would still be producing approximately the same number—and much better trained—black attorneys under a race-blind system.

There are some very obvious downsides to affirmative action which I have presented both at the university level and the graduate school level.

Here are some other noteworthy statistics.

• Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites.
• Blacks who start college interested in pursuing a doctorate and an academic career are twice as likely to be derailed from this path if they attend a school where they are mismatched.
• About half of black college students rank in the bottom 20 percent of their classes (and the bottom 10 percent in law school).

In conclusion, society has odd fixation on diversity. Instead of artificially creating a diverse environment, we should focus on creating equal opportunities for all people. In the case of education, investing in elementary, middle, and high schools in low income and minority dominated neighborhoods will create a more academically focused college applicant. The problem lies not just with the school system, but also with the environment disadvantaged students live in. Poverty, unemployment, and crime need to be targeted as well. Instead of trying to apply a quick fix at the top, changes in the foundation are needed. Lastly, I believe the current holistic admissions without the inclusion in race in the UC system clearly has its merits, and I hope this will be an increasing trend in the future. Diversity should not be at the expense of academic excellence, not now, not ever.