Corrections and Additions

 

 

Below are first corrections and then additions to the book The Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, the Importance of Character and Other Lies.

Corrections of Content

Posted July 14 2006:

In my book I sometimes state that the name of the LSAT, the test that is taken for admission to law schools, is the Law School Aptitude Test. That was its original name. It is now called the Law School Admission Test.

Posted January 2006:

On page 197, in the fourth line from the bottom of the page, the title of the first academic association should be American Anthropology Association, not American Anthology Association

On page 198, in the second line of the page, the title of the last academic association should be American Sociological Association, not American Anthropology Association.

On page 281, in the fourteenth line of the first paragraph that begins on that page (the line that begins "color. At that time") "Asian American" should be "Asian Indian"

On page 344, in note 19, the page number cited should be 102, not 12.

Add to the bibliography:

Gose, Ben 1999A: "More Points for 'Strivers': The New Affirmative Action?" Chronicle of Higher Education (September 17): A55.

Corrections of Wording and Punctuation

On page 77, the last word of the first line (i.e., "found") should be deleted.

On page 85, the second "though" in the third line from the bottom of the page should be deleted.

On page 170, in the fourth line from the bottom of the page, the comma after "2003" should be a closing parenthesis. So the last two lines of that paragraph should be: "reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in its 2003) that they were willing to violate the law in order to use it."

On page 199, in the fifth line of the third paragraph, "(!982: 112)" should be "(1982:112)"

On page 200, in line 8 "(sic)" should be added after "estopped." ("Estopped" is a technical legal term.)

On page 281, in the fifth line of the first paragraph that begins on that page (the line that begins "Eastern Asian nationalities") "in" should be added after "immigrate"

Additions

Posted September 2 2008:

Accreditation Enforcement of anti-White Discrimination

On pages 125 to 127 of my Affirmative Action Hoax, I discuss the pernicious role that accreditation associations play in imposing anti-White discrimination on American universities. There I examine only undergraduate education. More horrific is the threat of withheld accreditation on professional schools. Below I quote verbatim an article from page 15 of the August 2008 issue of American Renaissance entitled "The Law Is an Ass." The sources for the article are printed below it.

"American law schools are accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA), which uses this power to advance pet projects. One of its favorites is 'diversity;' it insists law schools should produce more non-white lawyers. Schools with too many white students therefore risk having their accreditation pulled, which means students would not qualify for federal financial aid and, in many jurisdictions, would not even be allowed to take the bar exam. In 2000, an ABA reaccreditation inspection uncovered a scandal at George Mason University Law School in northern Virginia: 93.5 percent of first-year students were white. The ABA conceded that GMU had made a 'very active effort to recruit minorities,' but that was insufficient because the school was unwilling 'to engage in any significant preferential affirmative action admissions program.' In other words, GMU would not bend the admissions rules for non-whites. With its accreditation at stake, GMU relaxed standards and admitted more nonwhites: 10.98 percent in 2001 and 16.16 percent in 2002. That wasn't good enough for the ABA. In 2003 it summoned GMU's president and law school dean and threatened them personally with dis-accreditation. GMU slashed standards even further, and managed to raise its non-white admissions to 17.3 percent in 2003, and 19 percent in 2004. Still not good enough. 'Of the 99 minority students in 2003,' the ABA complained, 'only 23 were African American; of 111 minority students in 2004, the number of African Americans held at 23.' Hispanics and Asians aren’t good enough for the ABA. It wants blacks. And what of the blacks GMU did admit? From 2003 to 2005, fully 45 percent had grade-point averages below 2.15, which is defined as 'academic failure.' For non-blacks, the figure was 4 percent. GMU officials point out that the ABA's own Standard 501(b) says that 'a law school shall not admit applicants who do not appear capable of satisfactorily completing its educational program and being admitted to the bar.' As the law school's dean Dan Polsby explains, 'Adhering to this principle is the greatest obstacle to our efforts to increase the diversity of the George Mason student body.' "

[Sources: Andy Guess, "Diversity Meets Data at George Mason Law," Inside Higher Education, June 26, 2008. Gail Heriot, "The ABA's 'Diversity' Diktat," Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2008.]

The Effect of Remedial Courses

I point out on page 134 of my book that in the academic year 1999-2000, 35.5 percent of American undergraduates had taken at least one remedial course in college and that the cost of teaching a remedial course is greater than teaching an academic course. Now, finally, a careful, extensive study has been done on the effect of college remedial courses. The study was financed by the federal government and conducted by Francisco (Paco) Martorell, an economist at the RAND Corporation, and Isaac McFarlin Jr., of the University of Texas at Dallas. Its results have been published under the title Help or Hindrance? The Effects of College Remediation on Academic and Labor Market Outcomes.

Earlier studies of the effects of undergraduate remediation have been published, but this is the first in which the researchers were able to compare reliably the post-remedial performance of students who took remedial courses with those students at the same level of academic ability and achievement who did not take remedial course. The reason is that Martorell and McFarlin studied students in public colleges in Texas, where all students pursuing an academic degree must take a test that is part of the Texas Academic Skills Program.

Martorell and McFarlin reported that they could find no evidence that students who took remedial reading or mathematics classes were more likely to earn a college degree than comparably prepared students who went straight into academic classes.

Posted March 9 2008:

Additions to Chapter 6 (Admissions I: The Lie that Affirmative Action Is Compensation for Poverty and Other Handicaps) (Section A: Socioeconomic Background)

I pointed out in this chapter that after 2002, the Educational Testing Service stopped making available the information it had on the average SAT scores of different races and ethnic groups at different levels of parental income and education. However, the Autumn 2007 issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (page 68) published the fact that in 2007, the average SAT score of Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 a year (he lowest category) is 32 points higher than the average SAT score of Blacks from families with incomes above $100,000 a year (the highest category). This is a much larger racial difference than the one in 2002, which I record in my book.

Diversity

I recommend two articles by Jared Taylor published in the journal American Renaissance. They are "What Science Says about Diversity (Part I)" in the November 2007 issue and "What Science Says about Diversity (Part II)" in the December 2007 issue. In Part I, Taylor begins by summarizing studies of various animals, ranging from ants to chimpanzees, which unanimously found a strong tendency for animals to work with and help those of their species with whom they share genes and a converse tendency of hostility to those who are genetically unrelated. He then cites studies that found that the same powerful instinctual tendency operates in human beings. For example, a pre-school child is forty times more likely to be assaulted by a step parent than by a biological parent. The reason why this instinctual tendency developed is obvious to anyone familiar with the nature of biological evolution.

In Part II, Taylor summarizes studies of how racial diversity affects countries, communities inside countries, corporations, and universities. All found that racial diversity has totally negative consequences. The scholars who conducted these studies did not set out to find this result. For example, Robert Putnam of Harvard studied 41 American communities that had varying levels of racial diversity. He found a consistent pattern: the more racially diverse a community is, the lower is the level of happiness that its members report and the less confidence they express in local leaders and news media. Putnam was not happy with these results. So he checked his findings by controlling for other variables that might have affected them. Among them were poverty, age, crime rate, population density, level of education, commuting time, and home ownership. None of these had much effect. He concluded, "diversity per se has a major effect." He still was so dissatisfied with the results of his study that he waited five years to publish them.

Articles published in American Renaissance are available in the "Back Issues" section of its website – www.amren.com. But they can be downloaded only six months after their publication.

Posted September 21 2007:

American Demography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of Untied States topped 300 million in October, 2006. Of these, 100.7 million (over a third) are non-White (i.e., eligible for affirmative action). In 2006, only 54 percent of births were to White women. If present trends continue, in 2011, just four years from now, over half of the babies born in the United States will be non-White (i.e., eligible for affirmative action).

Admissions at UCLA

An article on page A42 of the Chronicle of Higher Education of April 20, 2007 (Volume 53, Issue 42) entitled "UCLA Reverses Decline in Black Admissions but Rejects More Asians" reported that UCLA had increased the proportion of its freshman students who are Black by a large proportion and the proportion who are Hispanic by a smaller but still significant proportion. At the same time, to quote the article, "larger shares of white applicants, low-income applicants, and members of certain Asian-American ethnic groups were turned away." UCLA accomplished this by using an approach that supposedly, "give[s] more consideration to the opportunities that had, or had not, been available to the applicants." Nevertheless, the article's concluding paragraph pointed out,

Although the new admissions policy is supposed to take into account the disadvantages that each applicant has faced, there was actually a decline in the number and share of admitted students who are the first in their families to attend college and whose households make less than $30,000 annually. Last year the university admitted 1,426 such students, or 24 percent of those who applied. This year it admitted 1,027, or about 17 percent of those who applied.

On May 2, 2007, the UCLA student newspaper, the Daily Bruin (www.dailybruin.ucla.edu) had an article entitled "Score Gaps Stir Dispute over Holistic Approach." It reported that among the students who entered UCLA in 2006, the average SAT scores of Blacks and Hispanics were 255 and 246 points lower than the average of Whites and Asians. For students entering in 2007, the average differences were 293 and 249 points.

To put these SAT point differences into perspective, the reader should consult pages 314-17 of my book. There I quote an attack on the SAT by Eugene Garcia. I point out that it is full of blatant lies. Among them is that SAT scores reflect parental income. Garcia's hypothetical example is the daughter of a migrant worker with an SAT score 100 points lower than that of the graduate of a private school who attended an expensive SAT preparation course. Even Garcia could not attribute more than 100 SAT points to the most extreme difference in social background.

Racial Differences in Income

On pages 257-9 of my book I discuss the reasons for the differences in average income between American racial and ethnic groups. I point out that the main cause is differences in average intelligence, and I refer the reader to Appendix IV. I also mention other reasons. Among them are the differences in average age of different American racial and ethnic groups and, for university graduates, the difference between the subjects that they study. The example I use for the latter is that several times higher proportion of Blacks than Whites have degrees in education and several times higher proportion of Whites than Blacks have degrees in engineering. I also point out that this is itself a result of differences in average intelligence.

I will add here that Black and White women differ much less than Black and White men in the university subjects that they study. The results are evident in statistics reported on pages 7-8 of the Spring 2007 issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in an article entitled "Higher Education Is the Major Force in Closing the Black-White Income Gap." The article points out that in 2004 the median income of Black men with a bachelor's degree was $40,329; of White men with a bachelor's degree, $51,184. But Black women with a bachelor's degree had a median income of $33,877, which is 11 percent higher than the median income of White women with a bachelor's degree ($30,413). The same article reports that in 2004, the median income of Blacks with a doctoral degree ($74,207) is higher than the median income of Whites with a doctoral degree ($73,993). This is a truly astonishing fact since, as I point out on page 258 of my book, 44.3 percent of doctorates received by Blacks are in education; and Blacks received only 1.2 percent of doctorates awarded in engineering.

As for average age differences, the same issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reports (page 55) that the median age of non-Hispanic White Americans is 40.1 years; of non-Hispanic Black Americans is 31.4 years. Hispanics have a considerably higher fertility rate than Blacks. In 1999, the fertility rate of Hispanic, Black, and White women was 2.99, 2.21, and 1.85, respectively. Consequently, the median age of Hispanics must be significantly lower than the median age of Blacks. (In 2006, the fertility rate of Hispanic, Black, and White women was 2.82, 2.02, and 1.84, respectively).

Left-wing Bias of American Faculty

On pages 195 to 199 of my book, I document the stunning lack of diversity of opinion on the faculties of American universities.

In endnote 115, I state, "The results of Klein and Western's and Klein and Stern's surveys are currently (November 2004) available on www.nas.org." They are now available in the journal Academic Questions, Winter 2004-2005 (18, 1), pages 40-52 and 53-65. On pages 71-84 of the same issue of Academic Questions is an article by Stanley Rothman, Neil Nevitte, and S. Robert Lichter entitled "Politics and Professional Advancement." In it, Rothman et al., record the results of an extensive study of the views of faculty members at a broad range of American universities and colleges. In the social sciences, 75 percent regard themselves as liberal and 9 percent as conservative; in the humanities the percents are 81 and 9; in all other fields, 67 and 20.

At www.campus-watch.org/article/id/3646 ("Colleges Score Perfect Score in Liberal Bias," June 29, 2007), Timothy Furnish describes his denial of an academic position at a state university because a professor found evidence that he "appeared to be more conservative than others in my field." (The subject was the nature and history of Islam.)

Posted March 28 2007:

I urge every reader of this website to read Heather MacDonald's article "Elites to Anti-Affirmative-Action Voters: Drop Dead" in City Journal 17, 1 (Winter 2007), which can be accessed on-line at www.city-journal.org.

In it, MacDonald documents how the University of California system is blatantly circumventing the referendum that the voters of California passed in 1996 banning racial discrimination in California's public institutions. Indeed, by devaluing academic qualifications, it is adopting admissions policies that are worse than the ones that existed before 1996.

(Macdonald's information supplements Chapter 4 of my book ("Quotas Are Best: History Repeats Itself").)

The Proportion of Immigrant Blacks at Elite Colleges (for Chapter 18.B of my book)

In an article ("Black Immigrants and Black Natives Attending Selective Colleges and Universities in the United States") on pages 243 to 271 of Volume 113 (February 2007) of the American Journal of Education, Douglas Massey, Margarita Mooney and Kimberly Torres report on a study of the proportion of Blacks who are immigrants or the children of immigrants among the freshmen who entered 28 selective colleges in 1999.

They found that at these colleges, 27 percent of the Black students who entered in 1999 were immigrants or the children of immigrants, which is more than double the proportion (13 percent) of 18-19 year old American Blacks who are first- or second-generation immigrants. All the colleges in their study are selective in that they do not admit every applicant, but they vary widely in selectivity. The proportion of Blacks who are immigrants or the children of immigrants constantly rises with the selectivity of the college (as measured by average SAT score). At the Ivy League colleges in the study (Columbia, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale), the proportion of the Blacks who are immigrants or the children of immigrants is 41 percent (pages 248-9).

Massey et al., also point out (page 248) that they have undoubtedly underestimated the number of Blacks who are descendants of immigrants since their definition of "children of immigrants" is limited to anyone who has at least one parent who was born abroad. So, many of the Blacks whom they classify as "native" had immigrant grandparents.

Not only are first- and second-generation immigrant Blacks vastly overrepresented at these 28 colleges, but their average combined Verbal+Math SAT score was 1250, compared with 1193 for "native" Blacks (and 1361 for Whites) (page 260).

Massey et al., observe (page 246) that the cause is selective immigration: the most intelligent Blacks in the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa (the two main sources of Black immigration) are the ones who immigrate. In fact, Black African immigrants, on average, have completed considerably more years of formal education than American Asians and Whites. (See page 269 of my book.)

I will add three observations of my own to the information reported by Massey et al. First, as the number of Black immigrants increases, their proportion at selective American colleges will also increase rapidly. (Indeed, their proportion is already undoubtedly greater than it was in 1999.) Black immigration is a godsend to American colleges. It enables them to maintain a large Black enrolment with much less sacrifice of academic ability than if they had to depend on native Blacks.

Second, as the proportion of Blacks at selective colleges who are immigrants and descendants of immigrants rises, selective colleges will have to admit fewer and fewer native Blacks. So, the average academic ability of their native Black students will rise. (This has nearly certainly already begun to happen.)

Third, the same phenomenon must be taking place in graduate and professional schools and throughout all areas of American life. I point out on page 269 of my book that in 1970, all the highest ranking Blacks in New York City's police department were West Indians, as were all the Black federal judges in New York. (Their grandchildren are now labeled as "native" Blacks.) Selective Black immigration is as much a godsend to employers (both private and public) as to universities. They can hire and promote significant numbers of Blacks with less sacrifice of competence than if they had to depend on native Blacks.

I will end this subject with a warning. The immigration of Blacks who are more intelligent than native Blacks does have a salutary effect at the upper levels of American society; although it involves the blatant absurdity of immigrants from Jamaica (and their children and grandchildren) going through their entire lives receiving massive preferences over immigrants from Poland (and their children and grandchildren). But the upper levels of academia and employment are the only areas where this immigration helps. Immigrant Blacks are more intelligent than native Blacks, but they much less intelligent than Whites or Asians. Moreover, even with their inclusion, the gap between average Black and White academic performance continues to widen; as I point out in the entry below.

The Widening Racial Gap in Academic Measures (for Appendix III.E of my book)

An article ("The Worsening Racial Scoring Gap on SAT II Subject Test Results") on pages 30-32 of the Winter 2006/2007 issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education documented the increasing Black-White gap on ten of the twelve most frequently taken SAT II (Achievement) Tests between 1999 and 2006. (On one of the other two tests, the racial gap has remained the same; on one it has declined.)

Posted January 1 2007:

Increasing Racial Divergence on Intelligence Tests (for Appendix III.E of my book)

In an article ("Changes over Time in the Black-White Difference on Mental Tests") on pages 527-40 of the November-December 2006 issue (Volume 34, number 6) of the journal Intelligence, Charles Murray records and analyzes the increasing divergence between Blacks and Whites on intelligence and academic tests over the past fifteen years. Among his examples is that between 1991 and 2005, the Black-White difference increased from .87 to .98 of a standard deviation on the Verbal SAT and from .91 to 1.03 on the Math SAT.

The Michigan Referendum Banning Affirmative Action

On pages 1-6 of the January 2007 issue of American Renaissance are articles that analyze the November 7, 2006 referendum in Michigan that prohibited affirmative action, the extent of racial discrimination at the University of Michigan, and the promise of the president of the University of Michigan that the university will defy the decision of the voters and maintain racial discrimination. (The first of these articles is by me.) They can be accessed at www.amren.com. (After January 15, they will be in its "Back Issues" section.)

Posted October 4 2006:

Affirmative Action at Large Law Firms

In the July 2006 issue (Volume 84, number 5) of the North Carolina Law Review is a 66-page article "The Racial Paradox of the Corporate Law Firm" by Richard Sander, a professor at UCLA Law School. (Sander himself is White, but he is the father of a half-Black child.)

Sander points out that large firms – firms with 50 or more lawyers – use extremely high salaries to attract those law school graduates who had the highest grades in law school. He also points out that all available data confirm their faith in the predictive accuracy of law school grades. Grades in law school measure "skills or qualities that continue to be relevant to effective performance throughout a legal career."

One other factor enters into the hiring practice of large law firms: minority membership. Although Blacks make up between 1 and 2 percent of laws school students with high grades, they make up 8 percent of the graduates that large law firms hire. This preference in hiring is reflected in their poor performance as lawyers.

Posted July 14 2006:

The Widening Racial Gap in Academic Measures (for Appendix III.E of my book)

An article ("The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on Standardized Tests for Admission to Graduate School") on pages 8-11 of the Spring 2006 issue of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education pointed out that the difference between the average scores of Whites and Blacks on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), taken for admission to graduate business schools, increased from 101 points in 2003, to 104 points in 2004, to 107 points in 2005. On the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), taken for admission to graduate programs in the arts, sciences, and education, the difference between the average scores of Whites and Blacks increased from 236 points in 1996 to 241 points in 2003.

Are Asians Victims of Affirmative Action? (for Chapter 18.D of my book)

An article by Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung on pages 293-305 of the June 2005 issue of the Social Science Quarterly ("The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities") argued that if affirmative action for Blacks and Hispanics were eliminated at elite universities, four-fifths of the openings created would be taken by Asian Americans. This claim has subsequently been widely cited as a fact.

Espenshade and Chung have not published the database from which they derive their conclusion. They may publish it in a book that they are writing on this subject. However, in an article on pages 605-24 of the Spring 2006 issue of Michigan Journal of Race and Law ("Negative Action versus Affirmative Action: Asian Pacific Americans Are Still Caught in the Crossfire") William C. Kidder demonstrated that even the data that Espenshade and Chung presented does not support their conclusion.

Kidder’s own analysis concentrates on law schools. But in a footnote (footnote 36, on pages 612-13), he casually provides a set of undergraduate statistics for various ethnic groups at his own university, the University of California at Davis. There the average combined Verbal+Math SAT score in the class that entered in 1998 was 1200 for Whites, 1187 for Japanese, 1177 for Koreans, 1165 for East Indians and Pakistanis, 1158 for Pacific Islanders, 1137 for Chinese, 1099 for Filipinos, 1060 for Vietnamese, 1045 for "Other Asians," and 1040 for Blacks.

Moreover, comparisons between White and Asian undergraduates invariably compare their combined Verbal+Math SAT score. However, as I point out on pages 275-6 of my book, this criterion is extremely misleading because the Verbal score is considerably more important than the Math score, and Whites do better on the Verbal section than Asians but worse on the Math section.

Posted January 2006:

On pages 79-80 of my book I compare the average Black and White SAT scores at different levels of parental education and income. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE) of Autumn 2005 reported (page 90) that in 2005, the average combined SAT score of Blacks whose parents had an annual income of $100,000 or more (the highest category) was 10 points lower than the average combined SAT score of Whites whose parents had an annual income of less than $10,000 a year (the lowest category). This is a considerable greater racial difference than the one I record in my book, which is from 2002. As the article in the JBHE that contains this information (pages 88-93: "The Widening Racial Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test") observes, the difference between average Black and White SAT scores continued to increase in 2005. (I discuss the widening racial gap in all measures of academic performance in Appendix III.E (pages 307-10) of my book.)

On pages 85-90 of my book, I show that cultural and psychological factors – low self-esteem, anti-academic peer pressure, lack of parental interest – cannot account for the terrible academic performance of Black students. I can now supplement the evidence I provide there with statistics from subsequent issues of the JBHE (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education):

On pages 103-107 of my book I quote examples of the media’s recent compromise with the reality of genetic determinism of intelligence. In addition, the New York Times of June 3, 2005 (page A21: "Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes") and the Economist of June 4, 2005 (listed as June 2 on www.economist.com) ("The Evolution of Intelligence: Natural Genius?") reported explanations for the extraordinarily high average IQ of Ashkenazi (i.e., European-origin) Jews, which is the highest of any group of people in the world. Both articles assumed without question what experts in this field have long known: the hyper-intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews is genetically determined.

On pages 263-4 of my book I discuss the argument that affirmative action harms Blacks because it puts them in universities that are too demanding for them. Consequently, they drop out of outstanding universities instead of graduating from the mediocre universities they would have attended without affirmative action. I point out that the opposite is true. Affirmative grading enables the overwhelming majority of Blacks who enter elite colleges and law schools to graduate. I can now supplement those statistics with those from business schools. The Winter 2004/2005 issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (page 89) published the graduation rates of Blacks from eighteen of the highest ranking American business schools. In thirteen, the Black graduation rate was 100%. In only one was the Black graduation rate below 92%.

On page 341, in note 1, I mention a monograph that I wrote entitled Prejudice Is Free, but Discrimination Has Costs: The Holocaust and Its Parallels. In it I discuss several examples of affirmative action (i.e., racial and ethnic discrimination to solve the perceived problem of unequal success). The second half is devoted completely to affirmative action against Jews in Germany between 1933 and 1938. I point out there that the Holocaust was the most thorough and ruthless implementation of affirmative action ever undertaken.  This monograph can be purchased for 50 South African rands (about eight U.S. dollars) from the website of the Free Market Foundation of Southern Africa (www.freemarketfoundation.com). On that website, click on "Publications," then on "View all our Monographs."

Class-Based Affirmative Action

Recently many leaders of the academic community have urged America’s elite universities to admit more members of the White working and lower middle class. Some argue that this policy is necessary to promote greater diversity. A more radical argument is that the academic criteria by which universities choose their students are merely the means by which the ruling class perpetuates itself. An example of the latter view is Jerome Karabel’s recent book, which was published after mine, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). Karabel wrote (pages 549-50),

The modest number of poor and working-class students at the Big Three [Harvard, Yale, and Princeton] is … a product of a powerful, if hidden, social process common to all societies – that the qualities that come to define "merit" tend to be attributes most abundantly possessed by dominant social groups. …Those who are able to define "merit" will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources – cultural, economic, and social – will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious (pages 549-50).

[A]ny serious attempt to attain greater economic diversity will require a reassessment of the very meaning of "merit." For by conventional definitions, the privileged are the meritorious; of all students nationwide scoring over 1300 on the SAT, 66 percent come from the top socioeconomic quartile and only 3 percent from the bottom quartile (page 554).

Both the argument for greater diversity and the argument that academic performance is an arbitrary criterion ignore the huge numbers of studies have been done of the predictive accuracy of all sorts of criteria for job performance and the predictive accuracy of IQ tests taken in childhood for adult success. These studies have unanimously found that tests of cognitive ability are by far the best predictor of job performance, that childhood IQ is a remarkably accurate predictor of adult occupational and social success, and that a child’s socioeconomic status (SES) has nearly no correlation with adult success independent of his IQ. (I discuss these studies in my book on pages 121, 136-39, 221, 232-39, 256, 318-28, and 334-38.)

The argument for class-based affirmative action also ignores another crucial fact, which I discuss on pages 303-307 of my book: cognitive tests and similar criteria that are used to admit applicants to universities, and to hire and promote employees in business, the civil service, armed forces, etc overpredict the performance of members of lower scoring groups relative to the members of higher scoring groups, and this overprediction is large. So if the child of a White professional and the child of a White laborer have the same score on the SAT, MCAT (for admission to medical school), or on qualifying tests for hiring and promotion, the child of the professional will probably perform much better.

These two facts do not refute the argument for class-based affirmative action. But its proponents must realize that even now qualifications are biased in favor of people from lower SES backgrounds. If the proportion of people from lower SES backgrounds is increased at colleges, professional schools, and in occupations in which they are now rare, that will decrease the average ability of university students and of the members of those occupations. Advocates of greater class-background diversity must understand that they will have to pay for it with less competent teachers teaching their children, less competent doctors treating their families, less competent lawyers handling their legal affairs, and a generally lower standard of living and poorer quality of life.

Karabel’s argument ignores another crucial empirical fact: the close correlation between a child’s academic success and his parents’ SES is not caused by him being raised in a privileged social environment. The cause is that successful people are, on average, more intelligent than unsuccessful people and they transmit their intelligence genetically to their children. That is clear from studies of children adopted in infancy, not one of which has found any correlation between the SES of the adopting parents and the performance of their adopted children in school or on mental tests. (I discuss some of these studies in my book, on pages 67-8 and 266 and in note 33 on page 346. I cite others in note 46, on page 349. I discuss them at greater length in my "Lecture on Genetic Determinism" on the More Information page.)

The unimportance of social environment is also obvious from comparisons of ethnic and racial groups with different gene pools. I compare American Blacks and Whites on pages 78-94 of my book. Other examples abound. In my monograph Prejudice Is Free, but Discrimination Has Costs: The Holocaust and Its Parallels, which I mention above, I point out that the British brought unskilled, illiterate Chinese laborers into Malaysia because they worked for less pay than native Malays and did jobs that native Malays would not do because they were too strenuous, dangerous, and/or dirty. However, despite vicious, all-pervasive anti-Chinese discrimination and recurrent lethal anti-Chinese mob violence, the children and grandchildren of those illiterate, unskilled Chinese immigrants were incomparably more successful than native Malays academically, occupationally, and financially. Bizarrely, according to Karabel’s criteria, it is the savagely persecuted Chinese minority that is the "dominant social group" in Malaysia. Also according to Karabel’s criteria, Jews were the dominant group in early twentieth century America. (Karabel discusses the "Jewish problem" at American universities in great detail.) Indeed, that is exactly what the Nazis thought. I point out in my Prejudice Is Free monograph that the Nazis constantly cited statistics of Jewish hyper-success to prove that Jews dominated Aryans, who were, by the same criteria, "underprivileged." For the same reason, the Nazis assumed that Jews controlled the government of every country except their own. Why else did no other government solve the problem of Jewish domination and privilege?