Last week the NY Times published an article citing a critic of affirmative action who suggested that some of the admissions results we’ve seen this year don’t add up.
Black students make up about 3 percent of the top tenth of high school students academically, according to data collected by Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has long studied the effects of racial preferences and who is a critic of race-based admissions.
With preferences based on factors like parental income, wealth and level of education, as well as neighborhood poverty and school quality, and strong outreach, the share of Black students who qualify for admission to top schools grows to 5 percent, Mr. Sander said.
He believes some of the declines in Black students’ numbers — to 5 percent from 15 percent at M.I.T., or to 3 percent from 11 percent at Amherst — have…
