A remark on color-blind affirmative action

Faced with legal challenges to explicitly race-contingent ad-missions policies, elite educational institutions have turned to criteria that meet diversity goals without being formally contingent on applicant identity. We establish that under weak conditions that apply generically, such color-blind af-firmative action policies must be nonmonotone, in the sense that within each social group, some students with lower scores are admitted while others with higher scores are denied. In addition, we argue that blind rules can generate greater disparities in mean scores across groups conditional on acceptance than would arise if explicitly race-contingent policies were permitted. Elite colleges and universities in the United States have recently faced a num-ber of legal challenges that restrict their use of explicitly race-contingent admissions policies.1 Because these institutions continue to seek broad rep-resentation from different social groups (and to view campus diversity as an essential ingredient in the provision of a first-rate education), they face strong incentives to adjust their admissions criteria in order to attain diver-sity goals through less direct means. There is considerable evidence that thi