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Stanford’s Class of 2026 Doesn’t ‘Look Like America’

By NATE HOCHMAN
February 25, 2023 1:13 PM
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The demographic profile of Stanford University’s class of 2026 is out,
with 1,736 matriculated students in the freshman class of one of the
world’s most prestigious universities. But as some perceptive critics
were quick to notice, one key demographic is disproportionately
underrepresented: While whites make up more than 50 percent of the
nation’s adolescent population, per 2019 Office of Population Affairs
numbers, they were only 22 percent of Stanford’s class of 2026. A
Twitter user by the name of Fischer King was one of the first to flag
the disparity, adding: “Now I’m speculating, but admitted white men are
likely connected — legacies, or just bought way in. The rural math
genius like John Nash — he has no chance.”

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Progressive journalist Elizabeth Spiers, on the other hand, suggests
this is simply meritocracy at work:

Of course, if Spiers and her counterparts believe that the
underrepresentation of whites is simply the result of merit, they would
ostensibly be fine with ending affirmative action — after all, the
stated purpose of affirmative action was “to further a compelling
interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse
student body,” as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in the majority
opinion for the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling on the matter, Grutter v.
Bollinger. Now that said “diversity” is apparently attainable without
the artificial engineering of race-conscious admissions, we can return
to colorblind candidate selection. Right?

Spiers, for her part, goes on to attribute the fact that there are more
women than men in Stanford’s class of 2026 — 54 to 46 percent — to the
fact “that girls outperform boys in school,” maintaining: “Given that we
know that empirically, anyone who is confused about why there might be
slightly more women than men is just asserting their own biases.”
Excellent: We’ve relegated Ibram X. Kendi’s “all disparities are proof
of discrimination” — “when I see racial disparities, I see racism” — to
the dustbin of history where it belongs. Overrepresentation of one
group, and underrepresentation of another, in a particular institution
is no longer proof, in and of itself, of systemic bias. I look forward
to Spiers extending that logic to the nation’s prison system, policing,
crime, income inequality, marriage rates, Fortune 500 C-suites, the
so-called “wage gap,” and heavily male-dominated careers in STEM.

Of course, she won’t, because that’s never really what this was about
anyway. We’ve been told for decades that affirmative action is simply an
effort to make colleges more proportionally representative of the
nation’s demographics writ large: “The diversity justification allows
admissions departments to put a thumb on the scale to increase the
representation of some minority students whose academic credentials
would otherwise be insufficient. That means campuses look more like
America,” a New York Times interchange beamed in 2015. But when
Stanford’s share of the white population is decisively out of step with
national demographics, suddenly it’s simply a question of merit. What
should be clear, by now, is that affirmative action’s apologists were
never going to take their ball and go home when they got a student body
that matched the U.S. census numbers.

“White men have always had unfair advantages and allocations,” Spiers
argued last year. “If you take your finger off the scale, the outcome
might not be the one you wanted when you put it there.” Great. So let’s
take our fingers off the scale, and see what happens. Maybe then the
results will actually look more like America.

Nate Hochman
NATE HOCHMAN is a staff writer at National Review. @njhochman

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