Racial preferences, or "affirmative action" policies at U.S. universities, are intended to help minorities in a bid to right historical injustices and help those who are supposedly disadvantaged. White and Asian students tend not to qualify for special treatment under affirmative action polices.

But Russell K. Nieli, author of the newly released book Wounds That Will Not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide, argued that those policies tend to benefit those who are already well off -- middle-class African Americans and Hispanics -- whereas the original intent was to help those in poverty.

Moreover, affirmative action policies can have the effect of putting students in an academic environment for which their high school education has not prepared them, leading at times to failure.

"What racial preferences do is upwardly ratchet the beneficiaries into schools one or two levels of selectivity above where they would have gotten into had there been no special boost," said Nieli, a senior preceptor at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.

For example, if a beneficiary of affirmative action admission policies scores at a mid-range in the SAT test, that student might be accepted into a higher tier school.

"So, if you're white or Asian, and you get a 500 on the SATs, you're likely to get into a school where the other students also got 500 on their SATs," he said. "If you're black or Latino, there's a good chance you'll wind up in a school one or two tiers above."

For students of rigid disciplines such as law and medicine, that can be a recipe for academic disaster, as some students can end up in over their heads in a top school, whereas they would have fared better at a school a tier or two lower.

"It's not a good strategy to be in a university where you're over your head, where everybody is more advanced than you are in terms of their intellectual development, where instruction is often too advanced for your individual needs," he said.

Another problem is that racial preference policies reinforce the worst racial stereotypes, Nieli said.

"You're creating a system that reinforces in the most powerful way the most harmful negative stigmas and negative stereotypes," he said.