Why the French can't test ethnic quotas in only one university:

Purported tough guy French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has long advocated introducing American-style affirmative action to help out Muslims. He now plans to try it in one university. A reader writes:

If only one university in France decides to test affirmative action, the results will not be meaningful to those considering a nationwide program. This is because the one school testing affirmative action would only have to lower its standards slightly and gain access to its entire region's pool of minorities who are just a little below the cutoff. So the program will appear to be a success since the minorities admitted would only be slightly less intelligent than the white Frenchmen.

If every university in the country institutes affirmative action, then those minorities who are only slightly below normal admissions standards would be spread so thin among the different universities that standards would have to be lowered much more in order to increase minority representation appreciably everywhere.

Right. This is a near universal misconception about how affirmative action should work. Everybody assumes that they would be the only college in the universe to use affirmative action, so the impact wouldn't that bad. But the essential problem is a finite supply of smart individuals from the privileged group.

In the end all this may not matter. As I understand it, most French universities typically have low standards of admissions, but the exams are so difficult that dumber students are weeded out in very large numbers in the first two years.

That's how the University of California system worked before Proposition 209 made quotas illegal. Lots of fairly smart black and Hispanic students were accepted into Berkeley under quotas, and then a huge fraction were quickly flunked out (Berkeley is a tough school, especially during the first two years, with huge class sizes, and many lecturers with incomprehensible accents.)

They were then replaced by graduates of community colleges who hadn't been smart enough to get into a four year college out of high school. The black and Hispanic kids who would have been smart enough to graduate from UC Davis or UC Riverside, but instead got lured into flunking out of Berkeley and UCLA, well, who knows what happened to them.

This was a ridiculous system, but it was fiercely defended by liberal politicians, who didn't care what actually happened to fairly smart black and Hispanic students after they got admitted under a quota.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer