The Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action is a setback for opportunity in education.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in the “Students for Fair Admissions” cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina has essentially ended the use of affirmative action in college admissions.

I am not a lawyer, let alone a judge, and have no opinion regarding the constitutional tradeoffs at the heart of these cases. But I am an economist, and I have strong opinions about the practical implications of these rulings. The Court’s decisions will complicate efforts to achieve a modicum of racial equity in our country.

The reason is that affirmative action in college admissions is a highly effective means of addressing disparities in educational opportunity. Economists Harry Holzer and David Neumark published a comprehensive review of the extensive research on affirmative action back in 2006. They found that it benefits all of us: “Overall, the evidence suggests that affirmative action improves both opportunities and outcomes for the minority students. In addition, affirmative action seems to generate positive external benefits to others – such as minority and poor communities more broadly, and even perhaps white students.”

These conclusions contradict anecdotal observations you may have heard that students accepted under affirmative action programs struggle to survive in hyper-competitive elite schools.

To understand why the anecdotes are wrong and the statistics are right, it is important to appreciate what it means when a university gives admission preference to minority applicants. What is really happening is that a few minority students just below the admissions cut-off replace a few white or Asian students who are just above that cut-off. In other words, the students involved are nearly identical in terms of academic ability.

Not surprisingly, students around the cut-offs for acceptance are much more likely to struggle academically than average, let alone top, applicants. Hence, the anecdotes. Students replaced through affirmative action were also close to the cut-off – it was likely that they too would struggle at elite schools.

Why does it make sense to replace one struggling student with another? Minority students accepted under affirmative action, even while struggling in school, tend to do better than the students they replace, and their attendance at elite schools contributes to better outcomes for them – and even their white classmates – later in life.

As to why students accepted under affirmative action tend to do relatively well, no one knows for sure, but I can offer a conjecture. Students accepted to elite universities through affirmative action feel an obligation to work especially hard to overcome the academic challenges faced by any borderline student – because their efforts speak not only to their own personal hopes and dreams, but to those of their ethnic group and our country as a whole.

JONATHAN LIPOW is a professor of economics at the Defense Resources Management Institute located at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.