Affirmative action’s fatal flaw

Say what you like about progressives in America and their nebulous calls for “racial equity”, but they got one thing right: college admissions have always been a zero-sum game. With limited places at the prestigious universities and tens of millions of applicants, some sort of discrimination in deciding who gets accepted is inevitable. The question is: on what grounds?

Since the Sixties, the answer on campuses from Harvard down has been race-based affirmative action — a policy dedicated to increasing racial diversity on campuses. Until today, that is, when the...