The end of college racial quotas is already making America more just

At least one aspect of US higher education is shifting back toward sanity: The Supreme Court has successfully killed blatant racial quotas in college admissions, a boon to all students.

Yes, lefties are dismayed that black and Latino enrollment is down at the highest tier of American universities, but that ignores serious good news: Academic “mismatch” is over as students of all races are now going to the schools they are best qualified for.

The Hispanic and African-American teens who no longer get waved into Yale or MIT don’t simply sit at home or take a burger-flipping job; they head for excellent public universities or private second-tier colleges, where their admission rates have gone up significantly.

What exactly is the mismatch now being unwound? Essentially, as colleges made having more black and Latino students a vital measure of their (supposed) virtue, they quietly adopted extreme admissions preferences in the name of fueling “campus diversity.”

To be clear, this went far beyond affirmative action — that is, giving a slight break to certain categories of applicants on the margins.

No: It was wholesale, blatant discrimination, with the “favored” kids averaging markedly lower academic preparedness than the “disfavored” ones; in other words, an Asian-American applicant had to score hundreds of points higher on the SATs than an otherwise-similar black one to have any hope of admission.

Incidentally, this didn’t produce much economic diversity: The Hispanics and African-Americans who benefited tended to come from higher-income backgrounds, not poor ones.

Yes, the whites and Asians who lost out could still go to fine colleges; that wasn’t the worst injustice.

But the social engineers didn’t consider the effect of putting under-qualified students into the hypercompetitive hothouse environment of the Ivies and comparable institutions, where they’d go up against some indisputably brilliant and better-prepared classmates.

Consider a talented black aspiring chemist who’s in the top 5% of all high-school grads nationwide: She’s clearly gifted, but when she takes a tough class like Organic Chem — a notorious screen to weed-out first-year students who can’t cut the mustard — competing at MIT with kids in the top 0.1% nationally, she’s all too likely to get discouraged.

Maybe she drops out, or perhaps switches majors to something less challenging — and more politicized.

Yet the same kid who dropped a chem major at MIT might have excelled in the subject at Penn State, and gone on to a lucrative, successful career as a chemist.

And the “mismatch” was far worse at not-quite-as-high-ranking schools: The top 10 schools accepted the minority students who could’ve thrived at the next 30, so to meet their own quotas the second level had to drop standards even more.

By the time you get to the 100 third-level schools, it was almost two entirely distinct student bodies.

This is the essence of mismatch, a well-documented phenomenon in academia where elite institutions treated minority students like commodities, using them to serve the institution’s vanity with no honest regard for the young people’s actual best interests.

So the 2023 Supreme Court decisions that effectively ended race-conscious admissions were a huge blow for justice, even if some schools have continued to evade the law.

Yes, the number of black and Latino students at the most competitive colleges has dropped, though not as precipitously as some had predicted — but superb schools such as the University of Mississippi, the University of Miami and Syracuse University have seen substantial upticks in non-white, non-Asian enrollment.

The folks who run the Ivy League may resent the loss of a disgraceful practice that let them feel morally superior, but everyone else wins.