Affirmative Action

The worst of all academic affirmative action worlds is one where affirmative action is legally banned but schools do everything they can to maintain racial diversity.

Let's say that under a true merit system 2% of members of a certain group would attend a given college. The college, however, wants at least 7% of its students to be members of this group. If the college can't use affirmative action it might just abolish its merit standards for everyone so it can admit 7% from the favored group. Even most critics of affirmative action, I suspect, would prefer the college to (a) keep its merit system for most students but have some affirmative action than to (2) reduce the importance of merit for everyone.

Because California's constitution bans affirmative action Boalt law school has opted for option (2). "Boalt Law School reduced the role of the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and college grade-point average (GPA) in ranking students, and it lowered the LSAT cutoff score that would disqualify a student for consideration—measures that previously it had applied only to minorities but would now technically apply to all students."