‘Tis the pre-season for college enrollment.

This is when our friends on the left – the cheerfully permanently aggrieved — argue that race-based admissions are the only way to even the racial score a century and a half after slavery ended.

How timely.

Sounds nice.

The left operates on sound and feel.

But you cannot run a university on sound.

Trouble is that decades of data show that a huge swath of blacks, chosen for anti-academic reasons, merely their skin color, flunk out and vanish.

Says The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (http://www.jbhe.com/features/50_blackstudent_gradrates.html):

According to the most recent statistics, the nationwide college graduation rate for black students stands at an appallingly low rate of 42 percent. This figure is 20 percentage points below the 62 percent rate for white students. Here, the only positive news we have to report is that over the past two years the black student graduation rate has improved by three percentage points.

Ignoring mountains and decades of evidence demonstrating that most boy and girl students tapped for their coloring instead of their minds are wildly unqualified, leftists stubbornly fall back on fatuous, long-disproven, dust-caked claims.

Derrick Johnson, CEO of an organization with the politically incorrect phrase “Colored People” in the title, hooks arms with his left-wing colleague in scorning academics – achievements and potential – as a primary consideration for universities.

Academics?

Ugh. So yesterday.

Affirmative action should be the key college qualifier, says Mr. Johnson, because “it’s a mechanism to level the playing field and create equal opportunity for people of color following decades of oppression.”

Walk into a classroom and say that.

Come back and talk to me, Mr. Johnson, when you are convinced academics rather than social experimentation should be the main college qualifier.