This campus admissions season was the first under the new rule of SSFA v. Harvard, banning the use of racial preferences in admissions. Predictions of disaster permeated the campus debates. After all, without racial preferences, how would colleges fulfill their self-imposed goals of diversity, equity and inclusion? While some colleges desperately sought ways to circumvent, even ignore, the law, others complied. Did the sky fall?

The percentage of Black freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, declined from 15 percent last fall to 5 percent for this fall. At Amherst College the number fell from 11 percent to 3 percent. Other schools have reported less precipitous but still noticeable drops, such as from 18 percent to 14 percent at Harvard, 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a taxpayer-supported public university in a state where 23 percent of the population is Black — and 15 percent to 9 percent at Brown University, a school that has spent considerable energy looking at its early ties to the slave trade. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady, but an overall trend is clear.

It’s curious how Yale and Princeton held steady, given that other schools showed a precipitous drop. Of course, they can’t help it if they’re lucky. But I digress.

The conventional wisdom is that this is alarming, but I’m not seeing it that way. We are trained to regard news on racial preferences in a way that makes us see tragedy where, through different glasses, we might just see change.

That’s Columbia linguistics prof John McWhorter, making lemonade out of black lemons. Initially, he notes that black students who don’t manage to get in the tippy top schools somehow manage to not just get a decent education at the “lesser” schools, but manage to do quite well in life.

As regards that student’s future success, time has borne out that intuition. A study by the Berkeley economist Zachary Bleemer found that the ban had no effect on the post-college wages of Black applicants to University of California schools. (There was, however, a differential for Latinos, an effect that was difficult to explain.)

Of course, that came out of the University of California, which has long had its own peculiarities, as have the socio-economic circumstances of Hispanic students on the left coast.

McWhorter next addresses the long-standing rationale that a racially diverse student population contributes to the education of all students. This was the underlying justification for affirmative action since Bakke.

A second question to ask is whether the universities themselves are OK. There seems to be an assumption that they suffer if Black students are represented at less than our 14 percent presence in the population. But it is difficult to specify just what that assumption is based on.

While the “goal,” but never the quota, was to achieve parity between the percentage of black people in the United States and the percentage admitted to any given college, it was based on the assumption that in the absence of discrimination, the percentages would align. After all, if no race is inferior to any other, how could it be otherwise? Since then, activists like Kendi have argued that any difference between the percentages must, by definition, proved anti-black racial discrimination which required pro-black racial discrimination to remedy. McWhorter isn’t buying.

For example, at Brown, almost one in 10 freshmen is Black (and that doesn’t count applicants who did not specify their race). Black America has suffered too much genuine tragedy for it to be considered ominous that “only” one in 10 students in a matriculating class at an Ivy League school is Black.

Nevertheless we are told to bemoan the decrease in general diversity. But wait — how many Black students do the white ones need in order to get an acceptable dose of diversity?

But of course, while that addressed the Supreme Court’s rationale, it falls short of the progressive demand for equity in order to create a “welcoming” community. What about that?

The same question applies to whether Black students will feel there are enough people who look like them to feel at home at the school. I would think that at Chapel Hill, for example, 7.8 percent — about one in 12 freshmen — is enough to build a healthy community.

Whether minority students are entitled to a “healthy community” of people who “look like them” is distinct from whether they are welcome at a college, but the “look like them” mantra has grown long legs, so it’s taken seriously. Even so, is the difference between 7.8% and 14% sufficiently material to present a problem? McWhorter says nah.

Lastly, McWhorter takes on the Supreme Court’s initial rationale for affirmative action.

Plus, there is no real evidence that diversity enhances a good college education. No reasonable person is seeking lily-white campuses. But the idea that diversity means, specifically, better learning has turned out to be difficult to prove. Terrance Sandalow and others observe that what are considered Black views — on topics like police conduct or the availability of quality schooling — are as likely to be aired by non-Black students as by Black ones (a good thing, by the way).

As someone who believes that a racially diverse student population provided a worthy educational benefit, it’s problematic that this cannot be empirically proven. That doesn’t make it false, but it doesn’t make it true either.

So why isn’t McWhorter alarmed by the precipitous drop in black student admissions following SSFA v. Harvard?

Here’s a proposal, radical though it may (unfortunately) seem: Colleges should be very happy with the new numbers. Brown, for example, should be saying, “Hey look — even without that outdated and condescending Blackness bonus, we’re still at 9 percent!” Getting into an elite college is hard, and we should celebrate Black applicants pulling it off in such high numbers, even if they don’t happen to fall precisely at 14 percent.

Not only does the elimination of racial preferences end the sense of foul play suffered by Asian students, the primary losers in the campus race war even though they suffered grave discrimination here. But more importantly, the black students who get admitted to these elite universities, where they are far more likely to make bank than those who attend third tier toilets, will be understood to have fully earned whatever they got. And as McWhorter says, even though the numbers don’t align perfectly, they’re still pretty damn good, and that’s a good thing.