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2020 U. Chi. L. Rev. Online 119 (2020)
Affirmative Action, Transparency, and the SFFA v. Harvard Case

handle is hein.journals/uchidial88 and id is 826 raw text is: 10/30/20 U. Chi. L. Rev. Online *119 AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, TRANSPARENCY, AND THE SFFA V. HARVARD CASE' Peter Arcidiacono, Duke University, NBER, and IZA Josh Kinsler, University of Georgia Tyler Ransom, University of Oklahoma and IZA Affirmative action in college admissions for underrepresented minorities provokes strong emotions. These strong emotions are guided by two competing principles. One of these principles is the desire to treat individuals as individuals. For many, it is galling that race plays an explicit role in college admissions decisions. And in an ideal world it would not. On the other side is the fact that we do not live in an ideal world, but rather a world that has treated some minority groups-and especially Blacks-appallingly. Given the current reckoning over the mistreatment of Blacks, there is a strong desire to set things right, or to at least move in that direction. For those with strong positions on either side of the affirmative-action debate, there is no need to study the effects of affirmative-action policies. For some, the effects are irrelevant: one's race should never play a role in admissions, and race-based preferences should be outlawed. For others, any outcome that deviates from proportional representation is by definition unjust given the lack of genetic differences across races. All that is needed for this group is for the racial shares among matriculants to line up with their respective shares in the population. While affirmative action is often presented as a binary issue, some may support race-based preferences at certain levels but not at other levels. For this group-at least until Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard-it would be nearly impossible to form a position on whether current admissions practices go too far or not far enough. The reason for this is simple: universities tightly guard their data, and so actual 1 Peter Arcidiacono served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) in the SFFA v. Harvard case. SFFA is not funding his work on this Essay. Josh Kinsler worked as a consultant for SFFA in the SFFA v. Harvard case. SFFA is not funding his work on this Essay. The views expressed and conclusions reached in this Essay are those of the authors; they do not purport to reflect the views of SFFA. To the extent this Essay relies on records from the SFFA v. Harvard case, it relies solely on the public records from the case.

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