HOW OTHERS SEE US. At Blackfive, Uncle Jimbo tosses a provocative charge at higher education.

Universities discriminate because a merit-based entrance system would not match the rainbow diversity required by the left. Once you accept that as fact, there are two paths you can take. One is the current system of using racial preferences to elevate chosen victim groups until the rainbow is duplicated, the second is the much tougher choice to admit that racism is not the reason there are too few qualified black and Hispanic applicants, poverty and single parent households are.

The left enjoys the current system as it allows them to mother the victims who need their assistance to overcome the racism inherent in the patriarchal, pale preeminence. It fulfills their belief that unequal outcomes are caused by unfair systems or rules. So they feel justified in elevating those underperforming above the level they achieved and fail to notice that they really haven't done them much of a favor.

In a Madison newspaper column he links to some research on the deleterious effects of preferences on retention in law schools. The conclusion ought to be staggeringly obvious.

Taking a B student and forcing them to compete against A students doesn't help the B student at all. The hope was that the B students would be inspired and raise their game, the fact is they were overwhelmed and under performed.

The research, by Stanford's Rick Sander, who discussed some of his work as a guest at Volokh Conspiracy, is an interesting twist on the research that uncovered the Spielberg Effect. In the latter research, the lifetime earnings of students who were admitted to Harvard or the like but enrolled elsewhere compared favorably with the lifetime earnings of Harvard graduates. Professor Sander's research follows the law school completion rates of students who might have received preferential admission but enrolled at less famous law schools. Such students were more likely to finish.

The Madison column includes an observation about university being too late to address many of the disadvantages students face.

If artificially raising specific groups to the level we want them to achieve doesn't work, we might just have to look at the real problem and address the fact that it is not racism that holds back qualified minorities it is a lack of qualified minorities. That is addressed at the primary school level in the childs formative years. If they are not nurtured and motivated at home and school then no amount of bar lowering will change the outcome.

Those, however, are a tougher set of problems.