Thomas Sowell

About the author: Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California.

In the past, affirmative action programs often placed good, but illprepared, minority students in elite schools for the sake of diversity. These students, who were capable of excelling in good colleges, were transformed into failures by being placed in high-pressure schools where only the most exemplary students can succeed. Since the elimination of affirmative action in the University of California system, minority students have been redistributed to respectable schools that better serve their capabilities.

Crucial facts have been left out in much of the hysteria about declining black enrollments at the University of California at Berkeley, in the wake of the end of affirmative action policies there. This compounds the misconceptions that existed before such policies were ended. During the...