Jason Riley
speaker
125 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 18 Feb
Jason Riley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And we've learned the hard way that that was simply the wrong way to go.
Well, you laid it out pretty well, and it's good to see you again, Megan. What prompted me to write this book was all the chatter around the Supreme Court decision in 2023, Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard. And there was a lot of anticipation that the court would rule the way it eventually did, that racial preferences violated.
the 14th Amendment, Equal Protection Clause, and were unconstitutional. But the talk in the media, particularly among the left-wing elites, black and white, was that this would be a devastating blow to the black middle class, that these policies that the Supreme Court was about to strike down had created
the black middle class and that without special treatment, without racial favoritism, the black middle class would be decimated. And I said, wait a minute, that is not what the historical record shows. There was a black middle class well before affirmative action policies took effect in the 1970s. And in fact, that black middle class was growing at a significantly faster rate
than it grew during the era of affirmative action. So that's why I wrote the book, to take on some of these false narratives out there that want to credit government programs and expanded welfare state, racial preferences, and so forth with Black uplift, when in fact that is not what drove Black uplift in this country historically.
Well, it's what it does to any student, Megan, that is admitted without the credentials of the surrounding students at the same institution. That's the issue here. As I've said before, if you admitted to Harvard left-handed redheads, With SAT scores that were 300 points below those of the average Harvard student, you would see left-handed redheads pooling at the bottom of the class.
You'd see them dropping out at higher rates. You'd see them switching from harder majors to easier majors. That's just the way it works. The most important credential for a student going to any institution is that they have to match the academic preparation of the surrounding kids at that school. And when there's a gap,
That is what, that's when you run into trouble and affirmative action mismatches kids with schools. And we often speak of it in racial terms, but the same could be true of children of alumni. The same could be true of student athletes, the children of donors and so forth. Anytime there's a mismatch of the child and the institution, you're going to see those kids pooling at the bottom of the class.
And we have a ton. of evidence showing this. One of my favorite studies that point this out is one done by an economist at Duke University who interviewed freshmen at Duke and asked them what they wanted to major in. And the students that were black Black men in particular were asked whether they wanted to major in the STEM fields or in, I should say, the natural sciences and economics.
And what happened was about 75% or so of Black freshman males at Duke said they wanted to major in natural sciences or economics. But only about 35% ended up with a degree in those fields. So you had a 35-point attrition rate. Among white males, it was four points, the attrition rate. And what the economists showed was that
What produced this result, what accounted for this disparity entirely was whether the student had been admitted to the school with the same credentials as other kids at Duke. In other words, Duke admits some black kids that do meet the standards of other kids and some black kids who don't. And that attrition rate could be explained entirely by which black student we were talking about.
Those blacks that had been admitted to Duke with the same credentials as everyone else at Duke ended up with a degree in that major. Those who didn't switched out of the major. And so that shows you the mismatch effect of affirmative action.
Right, and what it also shows is, again, how counterproductive the policy is. So when, for instance, California banned racial admissions back in the mid-90s, and by the way, a number of states, nine or 10 states, even prior to the Supreme Court's decision, had already done this. Big states, Texas, Florida, California. So we have some idea of what's gonna happen in the absence of these policies.
And what happened in California is that, yes, For a period immediately after the ban went into effect, the most selective schools in the California system, Berkeley and UCLA, saw a reduction in Black and Hispanic enrollment. But the University of California system overall saw an increase in enrollment because kids were going to schools where they were better matched.
And more importantly, what California saw was a sharp increase in the graduation rates of Black and Hispanic students throughout the system, including in those more difficult STEM fields, computer science, engineering, physics, and so forth. Much, much higher GPAs, much, much higher graduation rates because kids were being better matched with schools.
And so my point is that a policy that was put in place to help increase the ranks of the Black middle class, at the end of the day, was resulting in fewer Black doctors and Black lawyers and Black engineers than we would have had in the absence of the policy.
And I think one of the real tragedies here, Megan, is that when you look at these Black kids who are admitted to some of these selective schools with lower standards, what you find is that they have higher standards than the average college student in this country. They're just lower than they are for students at those more selective schools. So these kids would be hitting it out of the park
academically at a less selective institution. I mean, if they're going to Michigan State instead of Michigan, if they're going to North Carolina State instead of UNC, exactly, you're gonna have them graduating with the degrees they want. It's not that these kids are unqualified for college, it's just they have been put into a situation where they're in over their head
academically, where the pace that classes are taught at is much faster than they're used to. So you're turning really smart kids into artificial failures in the name of helping them. Oh, so interesting. And so good riddance to affirmative action is what I say.
Yeah, exactly. You have not only turned a lot of kids into artificial failures, the ones who are successful on their own merit, their success is somehow tainted by these policies. No one wants to be, and what self-respecting person wants to be the token on campus or in the workplace? And that is what affirmative action has done.
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