The affirmative action myth
By 
One of the consequences of the elite obsession with a handful of colleges and universities is that people get a very distorted view of the practical effects of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions.
In fact only about 5% of the nation’s higher ed institutions engage in race-conscious affirmative action:
Fewer than 200 selective universities are thought to practice race-conscious admissions, conferring degrees on about 10,000 to 15,000 students each year who might not otherwise have been accepted, according to a rough estimate by Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford University. That represents about 2 percent of all Black, Hispanic or Native American students in four-year colleges.
One of the most ridiculous narratives in American life is the idea that a critical aspect of racial justice in this country is how many non-white students get into selective colleges. If there’s a silver lining to the Supreme Court’s attempt to make that number lower, it’s that it might become clearer that the wildly disproportionate attention this question gets is a product of the obsessions of white elites, not of any actual rational calculation of what’s most important to creating a more egalitarian society in this nation.