Arguments about affirmative action have often been based on misinformation about how applicants are selected in the "real" world. Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier are doing important work in developing an argument for affirmative action that is based on more accurate information about how selection works. Their argument focuses on the selection decisions used in hiring, in admissions to education, and in promotions, and it begins by challenging the implicit assumption that those who are selecting applicants know what they are doing.

It is certainly reasonable to argue that organizations have a right to select the best and most capable applicants. But in many cases, they make no rigorous attempt to do so. Most organizations (including university faculties) make hiring decisions based on unstructured interviews, despite the documented fact that interviews are about the worst method for determining which candidates will make good employees. Perceptions of applicant ability based on the typical method of unstructured interviews have roughly zero correlation with subsequent performance in jobs. Many employers appear to have no systematic arrangements for selecting among applicants.

What may be more surprising is that even systematic attempts to determine who will be a good employee or a successful student are far from accurate. Selection tests and college admission tests are limited to predicting performance in first jobs and first-semester grade point averages, respectively. Even the very best of these tests correlate at levels less than 50 percent with actual performance and most predict far less (even 50 percent correlational relationships translate into predicting only 25 percent of the variance in performance). If employers or higher education institutions cannot tell which applicants are going to be good, then the common objection to affirmative action–that giving preference in admissions or hiring to members of a protected group will in some way hurt the organization by excluding better applicants–is substantially weakened.

The argument that affirmative action is at a minimum no worse than the alternative from the perspective of employers seems on solid ground. If the methods that employers are using now have an adverse impact on protected groups, as Sturm and Guinier assert, and employers are not getting much from those methods, then the argument for affirmative action, which has the considerable advantage of enhancing distributive justice, is very powerful.

Their other recommendations may be harder to swallow, at least for most employers, because they do not seem to be based on how most employers operate. For example, it is no doubt true that some individuals may be able to perform jobs well in ways other than recruiters and employment-test designers envision. But it is also difficult to ask organizations to let people who do not appear to be qualified try out jobs to see if they can succeed at them in different ways. The costs of failure for most jobs are big, not only the turnover costs if someone does not work out but also the potential costs of accidents and mistakes. The law also makes employers liable for hiring unqualified employees, for example, who cause accidents, if the employers did not take reasonable steps to screen them. Arrangements where otherwise unqualified applicants are hired and then trained and developed to handle jobs are a great idea for expanding opportunity, but are also a significant operating expense that not all employers are equipped to bear, especially in a just-in-time economy. Nor is there any reason to think that team-based, self-managed work systems will result in less discrimination. If employers discriminate, despite economic incentives to hire the best people and human resource departments trained to do otherwise, then there is no reason to think that individual employees will behave better. And while it is true that there are some advantages to a diverse workforce from the perspective of performance, there are also costs, and it is not obvious that the net effect is such that it will necessarily encourage decision-makers to act in the interests of diversity.

It is worth bearing in mind that predicting who is going to be a good employee or a successful student or a good citizen is an enormously complicated exercise. It is difficult to do even after the fact, as anyone who has ever struggled with writing a performance appraisal can attest. There are other issues associated with hiring employees and admitting college students in addition to predicting who will succeed, of course, and these concern the issue of who gets ahead in society. As Sturm and Guinier make clear, it is much easier to argue for affirmative action to advance distributive justice if it does not conflict with the right of employers or other institutions to select individuals that serve the institutions purpose. And more valid arrangements that also advance affirmative action would be highly desirable.