How Affirmative Action In College Admissions Ruins The Lives Of Those It Claims To Help
Thomas Sowell writes that 40 years ago, when he was teaching at Cornell University, he discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation:

These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.

Why were they in trouble at Cornell, then? Because the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile. The classes taught there -- including mine -- moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students.

The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell. But the average white student was unlikely to be admitted to Cornell, in the first place. Nor was a white student who scored at the 75th percentile.

That was a "favor" reserved for black students. This "favor" turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into failures at Cornell.

None of this was peculiar to Cornell. Black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math had serious academic problems trying to keep up at M.I.T., where other students scored somewhere within the top 99th percentile.

Nearly one-fourth of these black students with stellar qualifications in math failed to graduate from M.I.T., and those who did graduate were concentrated in the bottom tenth of the class.

There were other fine engineering schools around the country where those same students could have learned more, when taught at a normal pace, rather than at a breakneck speed geared to students with extremely rare abilities in math.

So, many of these students -- who would have done okay if they'd been admitted at institutions commensurate with their intelligence and ability -- were racial show ponies for these institutions they ended up attending.

To their own detriment.

"We're from the government and we're here to help."

How's hundreds of thousand of dollars in student loans, no degree, and a job as a barista sound to you?

via @SteveStuWill