People see black students from elite schools as beneficiaries of affirmative action, and therefore not deserving of their professional qualifications

An experiment designed to test perceptions of affirmative action found that independent observers rated companies significantly lower when they were told that the top executives were African-American graduates of prestigious universities, instead of white. The difference went away when the executives were said to have graduated from less selective schools, and when the evaluators were told that the more selective schools exercised race-blind admissions.