The University of Michigan, in its effort to achieve racial diversity in its student body, gives preference to black, Hispanic and American Indian applicants. Without such consideration, it says, these minority groups would practically vanish from campus.

So here's a quiz: If you're applying for undergraduate admission to the school, is it better to have (a) a perfect score on the SAT, or (b) a dark complexion?

The answer, of course, is (b). On Michigan's 150-point scale, a perfect board score gets you 12 points. Being black or Hispanic gets you 20.

That helps explain why President Bush decided last week to support a constitutional challenge to the program, calling it "a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based solely on their race." The president obviously doesn't like to take actions that can be construed as racially insensitive, especially right after Trent Lott got caught waxing nostalgic for segregation. But the Michigan program is so blatant in its reverse discrimination that Bush didn't really have much choice.

Advocates of preferences in higher education give the impression that they're a matter of just a slight thumb on the scale. In fact, these policies essentially require two entirely different scales. They mean appreciably lowering admissions standards for minority applicants. Among students with board scores and grades in the middle range of Michigan Law School applicants, one appeals court judge noted, nearly four out of five whites were rejected. But 100 percent of blacks were accepted.

The university used to judge different races by explicitly different standards, with the law school operating a "special admissions program" to ensure that at least 10 percent of each class would be black, Hispanic or Native American. It abandoned that system because it was vulnerable to legal challenge, replacing it with a stress on "diversity" that is designed to achieve a "critical mass" of minority students.

In practice, though, the new approach bears a striking resemblance to the old one. It virtually guarantees admission to minority students with academic credentials that would usually disqualify a white candidate. And it has an impressive habit of keeping minority representation high. "Critical mass" seems to mean a quota with a little fuzz around the edges.

There is no dispute that for blacks and Hispanics, Michigan greatly de-emphasizes grades and board scores. It's not hard to understand why. Administrators want a substantial number of minority students, but there aren't a lot of minority students with the stellar academic credentials that the university normally demands. The law school says that each year, it gets about 900 applications from white students in the top range of grades and test scores -- but only about 35 from minority candidates.

What the whole affirmative action debate passes over is the unpleasant fact behind it: the racial gulf in academic achievement. Asian-Americans don't need special help in university admissions because they have no trouble competing with whites in the classroom. But on average, blacks and Hispanics lag behind.

You might assume that's the lingering consequence of racism. But Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and co-author of the book "America in Black and White," points out that from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, the gap shrank between blacks and whites, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress test -- and since then, it's widened. Does anyone think racism has more impact today than it did 15 years ago?

Nor is poverty a convincing excuse. "Black students from families with incomes above $70,000 a year score lower on the SAT than white students from families with incomes of less than $10,000 a year," notes Shelby Steele, an African-American scholar at the Hoover Institution.

So how can the gap be explained? Elementary and secondary schools are obviously not adequately preparing many students for higher education. The breakdown of the black family -- two out of three black children are born out of wedlock, compared to 27 percent of whites -- puts African-American youngsters at a great disadvantage. And African-Americans in general place less importance on education than more successful ethnic groups.

The widespread use of preferences is a policy of pretense. It pretends, against all evidence, that the racial gap in academic performance doesn't really matter. It tells blacks and Hispanics that they don't need to meet the same standards as everyone else.

The policy is supposed to be a boon to minorities that would otherwise be "under-represented" on university campuses. But if racial preferences have failed to close the gap, maybe it's because they're part of the problem.

© 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.