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Beyond race-based affirmative action

October 10, 2012 by

After oral arguments today in Fisher vs. University of Texas, many think the U.S. Supreme Court will limit, if not eliminate, universities’ ability to use race in admissions. The plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, argues UT has achieved diversity by admitting the top 10 percent graduates at each high school and doesn’t need to use a race-conscious policy to admit more blacks and Hispanics.

A loss for affirmative action would be good for ethnic and racial diversity in the long run, argues Thomas J. Espenshade, in Moving Beyond Affirmative Action, a New York Times commentary. Americans would have to address “the deeply entrenched disadvantages that lower-income and minority children face from the beginning of life,” writes Espenshade, a professor of sociology at Princeton and a co-author of  No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life.

Race-based affirmative action affects only 1 percent of all black and Hispanic 18-year-olds, the students who apply to more selective colleges and universities, he writes. Eliminating the preference would cut black admissions by 60 percent and Hispanics by one-third at selective private schools. Giving preferences to low-income students wouldn’t make up the difference, “given the large numbers of working-class non-Hispanic whites and Asians in the applicant pool.”

Without affirmative action, racial diversity on selective college campuses could be preserved only by closing the racial achievement gap, Espenshade writes.

 If affirmative action is abolished, selective colleges and universities will face a stark choice. They can try to manufacture diversity by giving more weight in admissions to those factors that are sometimes close substitutes for race — for example, having overcome disadvantage in a poor urban neighborhood. Or they can take a far bolder step: putting their endowments and influence behind a comprehensive effort to close the learning gap that starts at birth.

That would be a long, hard struggle, but it would benefit many more people. “However the court decides the Fisher case, affirmative action’s days appear numbered,” Espenshade predicts. ”In 2003, in the Grutter decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that she expected such preferences to disappear within 25 years — by 2028. The children who would go off to college that year are already 2 years old.”

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Study: Education doesn’t liberalize views

February 23, 2012 by

Highly educated whites and minorities are no more likely to support workplace affirmative action programs than are their less educated peers, according to a new study in Social Psychology Quarterly.  Education does increase support for race-targeted job training, said Geoffrey T. Wodtke, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Michigan, who wrote the study.

“I think that some of the values that are promoted through education, such as individualism and meritocracy, are just much more consistent with opportunity-enhancing policies like job training than they are with redistributive or outcome-equalizing policies like affirmative action.”

While educated blacks and Hispanics are believed to be the most likely to benefit from affirmative action, they don’t support it.  They may feel stigmatized, speculated Wodtke.

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Don’t check Asian

December 17, 2011 by

College applicants now identify as white rather than Asian, if they can, to increase their admissions chances. That’s inspired Next Media Animation’s  Don’t check Asian.

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Administration: Diversity justifies race-conscious policies

December 11, 2011 by

 Schools and colleges can consider consider race and ethnicity to promote diversity, advises the Education and Justice Departments in new “guidances” that reverse Bush Administration policy.

“Diverse learning environments promote development of analytical skills, dismantle stereotypes, and prepare students to succeed in an increasingly interconnected world,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in announcing the guidance Dec. 2 with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Race-neutral policies should be considered first, but need not be tried before being deemed “unworkable,” according to the administration. And race or ethnicity can be a “plus factor,” but not a “defining” factor.

“A school district should not evaluate student applicants in a way that makes a student’s race his or her defining factor,” says the K-12 guidance, in reference to decisions on competitive academic programs, for example.

Civil rights groups have been lobbying for the changes.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide in January whether to consider a white student’s challenge of the use of race in University of Texas admissions policy.

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1-hour exercise raises blacks’ GPAs

March 21, 2011 by

After an hour discussing the fact that the college transition is tough for everyone, black students earned significantly higher grades, shrinking the minority achievement gap by 52 percent, report Greg Walton and Geoffrey Cohen, Stanford psychologists, in a paper published in the March 18 Science. The exercise stressed that it’s normal for new college students to worry that they don’t belong and that it gets better over time.

“When your group is in the minority, being rejected by a classmate or having a teacher say something negative to you could seem like proof that you don’t belong, and maybe evidence that your group doesn’t belong either. That feeling could lead you to work less hard and ultimately do less well.”

Twenty-two percent of black freshmen who participated ended up in the top 25 percent of their graduating class, compared to 5 percent of blacks in the control group. One third of blacks in the experimental group graduated in the bottom 25 percent compared to half of the control group.

The experiment was conducted at a “top university,” presumably Stanford, so these were very competent students. But it’s scary to go from being a star student in high school to being nothing special in college. I faced that as a Stanford freshman — without having to worry that I’d been held to lower standards because of affirmative action.

Black and white students in the experimental group “read surveys and essays written by upperclassmen of different races and ethnicities describing the difficulties they had fitting in during their first year at school.” The upperclassmen emphasized that they grew more confident eventually and were able to make good friends and develop  strong relationships with professors.

“Everybody feels they are different freshman year from everybody else, when really in at least some ways we are all pretty similar,” one older student – a black woman – was quoted as saying. “Since I realized that, my experience . . . has been almost 100 percent positive.”

The test subjects in the treatment group were then asked to write essays about why they thought the older college students’ experiences changed. The researchers asked them to illustrate their essays with stories of their own lives, and then rewrite their essays into speeches that would be videotaped and could be shown to future students. The point was to have the test subjects internalize and personalize the idea that adjustments are tough for everyone.

The exercise had virtually no impact on white students’ academic careers, but made a significant difference for blacks. In addition to higher grades, blacks who participated reported being happier, healthier and less likely to think about negative racial stereotypes compared to the control group.

Walton and Cohen believe similar exercises may help first-generation college students and immigrants succeed in college.

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A scholarship for white males

March 2, 2011 by

Texas State students are raising money to offer scholarships to white males, reports the Austin American-Statesman. “If everyone else can find scholarships, why are we left out?” asks Colby Bohannan, a communication major and Iraq war veteran, who is president of the Former Majority Association for Equality in San Marcos.

Non-Hispanic whites aren’t a majority in Texas; they make up about 45 percent of the population.

To qualify for a $500 scholarship, applicants must have a GPA over 3.0, demonstrate financial need and be at least 25 percent Caucasian and male.

The nine-member scholarship board includes three women, one Hispanic and one African-American, Bohannan told the American-Statesman.

A white guy is a terrible thing to waste, writes Darren.

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Admissions edge cuts chances

December 30, 2010 by

Going to the toughest college you can get into isn’t necessarily the best strategy, writes Gail Heriot, a University of San Diego law professor and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. According to a report by the commission, “accepting an affirmative action leg-up probably hurts a student’s chances of becoming a doctor, scientist or engineer.” Students are more likely to achieve their goals if they attend a school at which their academic credentials are roughly average.

College-bound African-Americans are just as likely as whites to plan science and engineering majors, but much more likely to switch to easier majors along the way, Heriot writes. While black students earn lower science-related standardized test scores than Asians or whites, that’s not the whole explanation.

As three independent scholarly studies show, part of the problem appears to be relative. A student who attends a college at which his entering credentials put him near the bottom of the class — which is where a student who needed an affirmative action preference will be — is less likely to persevere in science or engineering than an otherwise identical student attending a school at which those same credentials put him in the middle of the class or higher.

. . . A good student can get in over his head and end up learning little or nothing if he is placed in a classroom with students whose level of academic preparation is much higher than his own, even though he is fully capable of mastering the material when presented at a more moderate pace. Discouraged, he may even give up — even though he would have persevered and ultimately succeeded in a somewhat less competitive environment.

Frederick Smyth, a University of Virginia psychology professor,  and John McArdle, a University of Southern California psychology professor, estimate that 45 percent more minority women and 35 percent more minority men would have persisted in science and engineering if they had attended schools where their academic credentials matched their peers.

With only 20 percent of total African-American enrollment, historically black colleges and universities produce 40 percent of the African-Americans graduating with a bachelor’s degree in the natural sciences, Heriot writes.

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Few black, Hispanic students at elite public school

November 6, 2010 by

Few black or Hispanic students qualify for an elite magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in northern Virginia. While blacks and Hispanics make up 33 percent of public school students in the region,  they comprise less than 4 percent of TJ’s student body. “Initiatives to enlarge the pipeline of qualified black and Hispanic students in elementary and middle school have flopped,” reports the Washington Post.  Asian-Americans are now the largest group of students.

Like other public schools with competitive admissions, TJ screens applicants through grades and test scores. A key requirement is that students take Algebra 1 by eighth grade. Many disadvantaged students don’t clear that threshold, which presents a national challenge for science and math instruction.

Competition to get into TJ is fierce. Some private companies charge hundreds of dollars to prepare students for the school’s entrance exam, a two-hour test of math and verbal-reasoning skills. For those who get in, the payoff is clear. The school has an array of laboratories in fields such as biotechnology and microelectronics, and students follow a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum that culminates in a senior research project.

The school adopted race-blind admissions in 1997. In 2004, officials decided to let race and ethnicity be considered as a factor, along with essays and teacher recommendations, once applicants had been screened by test scores and grades. But the admissions rate for blacks and Hispanics continued to fall.

Other selective regional schools have stopped using affirmative action, the Post reports.

Fairfax school officials say that diversifying TJ requires more than making admissions criteria more flexible. It means helping black and Hispanic students keep up with their white and Asian American counterparts at an early age, especially in math and science.

Since 2000, a county program known as Young Scholars has tried to recruit elementary students who might one day attend TJ. More than half of the program’s 3,776 students between kindergarten and eighth grade are black or Hispanic. Next spring, the first 30 Young Scholars will graduate from high school. Only one will be a TJ graduate.

The school’s Parent Teacher Student Association also offers free test-preparation courses for minority students.

Because there’s little diversity, students “are missing out on a critical part of their education,” says Melissa Schoeplein, a history teacher who complains of teaching about race and poverty in classes with no blacks or Hispanics.

In California, many high-achieving Asian-American students come from low-income and working-class immigrant families. I’d bet that’s true in Virginia too.

Via Education Gadfly

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Affirmative action for males

November 7, 2009 by

With women earning 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees, some private liberal arts colleges are practicing affirmative action for male applicants to preserve a gender balance in enrollment. Private colleges have the legal right to discriminate against women, but don’t like to publicize it.  Now the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is investigating whether the practice is widespread. From Inside Higher Education:

. . . the Civil Rights Commission’s inquiry is based on concerns about another part of Title IX — its requirement that colleges provide equitable athletic opportunities to male and female athletes. A theory behind the inquiry, outlined in the proposal used to launch the probe, is that colleges may be favoring men in admissions because they are worried about gender-neutral changes they might otherwise use to attract more male students. Foremost among such strategies would be adding more male athletic teams, a move some colleges may be reluctant to make out of fear of the expense of then being required to add more women’s teams.

Look at the underlying issue, Richard Whitmire at Why Boys Fail. Too many boys do so poorly in school that they’re not prepared for college or not motivated to try it. Why?

Update: Dr. Helen has more, plus a plug for Whitmire’s upcoming book, Why Boys Fail.

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Color counts

August 6, 2009 by

Work, study, get rejected for medical school: Discriminations posts Association of American Medical Colleges’ data for med school applicants from 2005 to 2007.

1. An Asian American with a GPA of 2.8 to 2.99 and a MCAT score of 36 to 38 has a 36.8% chance of being admitted to a U.S. medical school.

2. A White with a GPA of 2.8 to 2.99 and a MCAT score of 36 to 38 has a 40.7% chance of being admitted to a U.S. medical school.

3. An African American with a GPA of 2.8 to 2.99 and a MCAT score of 36 to 38 has a 100% chance of being admitted to a U.S. medical school.

Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., now summering on Martha’s Vineyard, opposes race-based affirmative action, Discriminations notes. Affirmative action served as a “class escalator” for some black people, who now use it to perpetuate their status, Gates told the Vineyard Gazette.

“I think we need a class-based affirmative action. I grew up in the hills of West Virginia with poor white people and I can testify from my own experience the culture of poverty is color-blind,” Professor Gates said.

Many of those rejected Asian-American applicants grew up in struggling immigrant families, but they weren’t raised in a culture of poverty.

Update: Readers point out that the AAMC data show only one black applicant with a 2.8-2.99 GPA in the 36-38 MCAT range. However, 100 percent of the 44 black applicants with grades of 3.2-4.0 were accepted, while acceptance rates ranged from 64.1 percent to 94.2 percent for Asians with the same scores and GPAs above 3.2.

I also looked at a larger category:  Applicants with grades from 3.0 to 4.0 and scores in the 27 to 29 range, Wikipedia says 28.1 is the median score. Asians with 3.8 to 4.0 grades had a 72 percent acceptance rate, compared to 76 percent for whites and 95.9 percent for blacks.  At 3.6 to 3.79, the rate was 56.7 percent for Asians, 60.8 percent for whites and 92.1 percent for blacks. At 3.4 to 3.59, 42.9 percent of Asians, 45.8 percent of whites and 90 percent of blacks were admitted. 3.2 to 3.39: 27.3 percent Asian, 31.8 percent white, 83.6 percent black. 3.0 to 3.19: 15.6 percent Asian, 23 percent white, 76.3 percent black admitted.

I think it’s fair to say that Asian-American medical school applicants are held to slightly higher standards than whites and much higher standards than blacks.

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