Surprising: Most Americans against colleges using race in admissions

Are the American people gradually realizing that affirmative action is a failed policy? It seems so, at least according to a new survey from Gallup.

The polling institution released the results of a new study that found a majority of Americans oppose colleges using race as a factor in admissions. Seventy percent are in favor of colleges admitting applicants solely based on merit instead of focusing on the individual’s ethnicity. In fact, only 26 percent support this type of affirmative action.

This isn’t just a white thing either. The study found that half of blacks were in support of merit approach, while more than two-thirds of Hispanics were also in favor of the merit road.

What is surprising, as the chart below highlights, is that these findings have been the norm for the last 12 years. In other words, the American people have been against affirmative action for a long time, though post-secondary institutions keep implementing such dubious policies, which have gone into overdrive in the last few years.

Here is the chart:

Affirmative action is racist to minorities and an insult to women. Here is what the legendary free market economist recently opined about affirmative action:

“The human tragedy, amid all the legal evasions and frauds is that, while many laws and policies sacrifice some people for the sake of other people, affirmative action manages to harm blacks, whites, Asians and others, even if in different ways.

Students who are kept out of a college because other students are admitted instead, under racial quotas, obviously lose opportunities they would otherwise have had.

But minority students admitted to institutions whose academic standards they do not meet are all too often needlessly turned into failures, even when they have the prerequisites for success in some other institution whose normal standards they do meet.

When black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math were admitted to MIT, where the other students scored at the 99th percentile, a significant number of black students failed to graduate there, even though they could have graduated with honors at most other academic institutions.”

Aren’t we supposed to be living in a meritocracy?