I’m reviewing the IRS guidelines for 501(c)(3) educational institutions, in preparation for registering my own organization for educational non-profit status. I think I’ve figured out why affirmative action is alive and well:

The IRS mandates something akin to this notice to be sent to a school’s community periodically:

“The M School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.” (IRS Publication 557)

This sounds great! Exactly the sorts of policies I hope to implement, except the IRS forgot to include gender in there (perhaps because athletics are already segregated by gender).

Then they say this:

“The IRS recognizes that the failure by a school drawing its students from local communities to enroll racial minority group students may not necessarily indicate the absence of a racially nondiscriminatory policy when there are relatively few or no such students in these communities. Actual enrollment is, however, a meaningful indication of a racially nondiscriminatory policy in a community in which a public school or schools became subject to a desegregation order of a federal court or are otherwise expressly obligated to implement a desegregation plan under the terms of any written contract or other commitment to which any federal agency was a party.”

And, even worse:

“A policy of a school that favors racial minority groups with respect to admissions, facilities and programs, and financial assistance is not discrimination on the basis of race when the purpose and effect of this policy is to promote establishing and maintaining the school’s nondiscriminatory policy.”

Now the “diversity committees” and differing admissions standards I’ve observed in existing universities start to make more sense. If minorities do not enroll in the school in approximately the same proportion that they exist in the community, the IRS immediately assumes something is wrong (rather than the more likely explanation that the university just doesn’t interest said students for some reason or another). Schools are then pushed into the position of being more lenient to minority students, because they basically have to fill a quota to avoid angering the IRS.

Now, this would be ok if not for some incorrect statistical assumptions. If the sampling of students from the general population were random (and taken exclusively from the local community), the proportions would be about the same as the local community and we’d be more or less fine.

Unfortunately, the sampling is not random. Certain majors will have certain racial compositions; others will have different ones. The majors that the school offers will thus affect the bias of the admissions process of the institution as a whole.

So there you go. Couched in the language of a “nondiscriminatory policy” lies a policy that very much discriminates. While it’s unjust, it’s unfortunately the law, so follow it I will.