…after saying “racial preferences have substantive beneficial effects for the preferred students.”

They’re not called “dependent clauses” just because they live in their parents’ basements.

Also, Ampersand says that Light and Strayer concluded that racial preferences in admissions help minorities attend college

Well, Light and Strayer’s own text would probably be the place to find the answer to that question, but that requires research. Let’s just BS it.

I think we can take it as a matter of general agreement that (say) an ordinary black youth has certain disadvantages in life. There are people who will not like him because of the color of his skin. There are greater chances that he faces adverse circumstance in his educational, social or family environments. And so forth. We can argue about the weight of these various oppressions but there is general agreement (at least here) that they exist.

If you weigh someone down, you also slow her down. A significant part of the college evaluation that goes on is based in large part on how quick you are. College is a learning machine, and machines don’t generally want slow parts, so they’re likely to turn down the kid who’s a year or two behind.

That ends up having detrimental effects on our hypothetical black teen (HBT). S/he’s perhaps someone who is striving – but has adversarial conditions in her life that result in a low GPA, or bad attendance, etc. Seeking a better life, HBT seeks to attend college nonetheless. The college looks at her record and thinks “borderline case”.

If the college, however, also has a racial preference in place, it thinks “borderline case + bonus points = admit”. And in comes HBT! Which, on the whole, is a good thing. A student who really is bright enough to be in college is in college; hooray!

In terms of admission chances, I will freely concede that racial preferences have substantive beneficial effects for the preferred students. (Amp seems to have attacked this point pretty hard, so I like to make complete my surrender on it.)

Indeed, it is partially because I believe those benefits exist (albeit the net benefit is decremented by the existence of the ratchet effect), that I believe racial preferences to immoral; it’s wrong to award privileges to people on the basis of their race.

Wrong when it was Noah and Pharoah, wrong when it was Sumerians and God knows who, wrong when it’s white people in the Americas, wrong when it’s N people in X country. Wrong, a priori.

I don’t even pretend to believe that the benefit being delivered to racially preferred minorities today approaches the scale of some of those historical injustices, but the principle is operative both when matters are life and death and when they are trivial, and every point between. (My outrage is scaled accordingly; I estimate I give 1/1000th the energy and attention to racial preferences in college admissions, that I would give to some giant race war.)

How can community college students be hit by the ratchet effect? Don’t they take anyone?

In the case of community colleges, I wager that the effect hits them like this: students who really ought to do a year in community college instead go off to State. Sometimes they come back after a good try, sometimes they make it at State, sometimes they fail and just drop out completely. In any event, it represents a reduction in the talent pool available to the community colleges.

Some of them probably just shrink to adjust to the market demand change. Others, particularly private institutions at that level, increase their marketing operations and lower their standards. That’s speculative; maybe they all just shrink, in which case, no problem. There is a problem, however, in that the average level of the students enrolled is now slightly lower. The best ones have all been taken up to State.

In my college experience, classes were proportionally more valuable the smarter my fellow students were. (And the professor, too.) Classes where we had lots of bright kids moved faster and did everyone a lot of good. Sappy as it is to say, when there are lots of bright kids you often get situations where the bright help the slow keep up. Classes without those “stars” tended to drag, as the instructors have to spend a lot of time wiping noses and patiently repeating instructions which are written right there on the freaking syllabus…sorry, flashback. All better.

In any event, that’s the one thing I’d confidently wager as a ratchet effect negative impact on community colleges: fewer star pupils.

Also, Ampersand says that Light and Strayer concluded that racial preferences in admissions help minorities attend college. How is this possible? Doesn’t it just help them attend better colleges than they would otherwise be able to? I can’t imagine that anyone passes up a chance to go to a state college because he can’t get into an Ivy League school, or the lower-ranked state college because he can’t get into the good one.

The fact that there is more support available at better schools doesn’t speak to the question of whether a student is appropriately matched to the school.

Amp’s quote from Alon and Tienda says clearly and precisely, “Minority students’ likelihood of graduation increases as the selectivity of the institution attended rises.”

I believe that your basic error here is conceptual, not philosophical. You see a result that says “the grazing is better on field A than on field B”. You see a report that says “the cows on field B are not as fat as the cows on field A”. And you reach the conclusion that “the more cows that graze on field A, the better off all cows will be!” Which will be true – for the first few cows to switch pasture. (What you ought to be asking is “how do we make field B more like field A”.)

Bob, I hate to say this, but this has to be one of the most profound things you’ve contributed so far. Indeed, it it can be applied to many of the principles that concern all sides of the political dodecahedron. Give me a few days (or weeks) to chew on things, and I’ll see what I can do to expand this line of thought.