Color and Money

Harvard and Princeton Reinstate Admission Policies that Favor the Wealthy

2011-03-01T19:55:00.003-05:00

Both Harvard and Princeton have announced that they are reinstating early admission programs, despite their admission in dropping the programs five years ago that such policies favor the wealthy, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

Both institutions announced their policy change on the same day. They said that going without early admission programs had put them at a disadvantage because other colleges that compete for the same students had not followed their lead in dumping such policies. (The University of Virginia had done so, but it reinstated early admissions last fall.)

As Richard Kahlenberg notes in a blog post about the change, research on early admission programs has found that the students who apply early-action are disproportionately economically advantaged and white.

Federal Investigation Finds Naval Academy Swatted Affirmative-Action Gadfly

2011-01-29T13:44:00.004-05:00

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel has announced that its investigators found evidence that the U.S. Naval Academy punished an English professor for his public criticisms of its affirmative-action policies by denying him a pay raise.

In a press release announcing its conclusions, covered in depth by Peter Schmidt in a Chronicle of Higher Education article, the federal investigative office said the Naval Academy had agreed to a legal settlement with the professor, Bruce E. Fleming, thus avoiding litigation in the matter.

The terms of the settlement are confidential, but Mr. Fleming said he was happy with it--an assessment that suggests he got his raise.

Judge Rejects the Latest Legal Challenge to California's Proposition 209

2010-12-12T16:31:00.002-05:00

A U.S. District Court judge in San Francisco has dismissed the latest lawsuit challenging California's Proposition 209 ban on the use of racial and ethnic preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies.

As discussed in depth in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Judge Samuel Conti did not buy the plaintiff's argument that the legal landscape had changed significantly in the 13 years since the federal courts last upheld the ban passed by California in 1996.

The activist group that filed the latest California lawsuit, as well as a similar lawsuit challenging the preference ban adopted by Michigan's voters, had said its efforts in the court were motivated partly by a desire to throw a wrench into campaigns for similar referenda. Here, too, they appear to have been thwarted; about 60 percent of Arizona voters approved a preference ban there in last month's elections.

Arizona Vote Leaves Well Over 4 in 10 U.S. Hispanics in States with Affirmative Action Bans

2010-12-02T17:39:00.003-05:00

With last month's adoption of Proposition 107 by Arizona voters, well over 4 in 10 Hispanic residents of the United States live in states where public colleges are banned from considering race or ethnicity in admission decisions.

Based on U.S. Census Bureau data from 2008, the most recent year for which the bureau offers detailed population estimates for individual states, about 43.6 percent of the nation's Hispanic residents reside in the six states that have such bans in effect: Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, and Washington. Before Arizona joined the column of states with such prohibitions, about 39.4 percent of the nation's Hispanic residents lived in states where colleges could not consider race or ethnicity in deciding which applicants to admit.

Given the relatively small size of Arizona's black population, the state's adoption of Proposition 107, which passed with about 60 percent of the vote, did not significantly change the picture for blacks nationally. The share living in states where public colleges are legally barred from considering applicants' ethnicity or race rose only slightly, from about 18.2 percent to about 18.3 percent, based on 2008 Census numbers.

New Book Contains a History of Legacy Admissions Written by Peter Schmidt

2010-09-16T14:29:00.003-04:00

Peter Schmidt has written a chapter on the history of legacy preferences at American colleges for the new book Affirmative Action for the Rich? Legacy Preferences in College Admissions, published by the Century Foundation.

The Century Foundation's description of the book says:

The use of race-based affirmative action in higher education has given rise to hundreds of books and law review articles, numerous court decisions, and several state initiatives to ban the practice. However, surprisingly little has been said or written or done to challenge a larger, longstanding "affirmative action" program that tends to benefit wealthy whites: legacy preferences for the children of alumni.

Affirmative Action for the Rich sketches the origins of legacy preferences, examines the philosophical issues they raise, outlines the extent of their use today, studies their impact on university fundraising, and reviews their implications for civil rights. In addition, the book outlines two new theories challenging the legality of legacy preferences, examines how a judge might review those claims, and assesses public policy options for curtailing alumni preferences.

The book includes chapters by Michael Lind of the New America Foundation; Peter Schmidt of the Chronicle of Higher Education; former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden; Chad Coffman of Winnemac Consulting, attorney Tara O'Neil, and student Brian Starr; John Brittain of the University of the District of Columbia Law School and attorney Eric Bloom; Carlton Larson of the University of California—Davis School of Law; attorneys Steve Shadowen and Sozi Tulante; Sixth Circuit Court Judge Boyce F. Martin Jr. and attorney Donya Khalili; and education writer Peter Sacks.

Although Peter Schmidt's contribution is a straightforward history, other chapters in the book make the case that legacy preferences should be abolished and the courts should strike them down as unconstitutional. The Century Foundation is hosting a forum on the book on September 22 at the National Press Club.

California's Proposition 209 Upheld By State's Supreme Court

2010-08-03T11:50:00.002-04:00

As discussed at more length here in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the California Supreme Court has upheld that state's Proposition 209 ban on affirmative-action preferences, in a case involving public contracting by the city of San Francisco. In a 6-to-1 ruling, the state's highest court rejected San Francisco's argument that Proposition 209 violates the U.S. Constitution's Equal Protection Clause because it creates barriers for minority and female contractors that are not faced by other constituencies seeking favored treatment. The decision that left open the possibility that San Francisco can show its preferential contracting program is necessary to remedy discrimination.

Are Elite Colleges Biased Against Poor, White, Conservative Christians? Sorting Fact from Fiction

2010-08-02T18:25:00.019-04:00

It has been a heady few weeks for those who pay attention to the admission policies and enrollments of the nation's elite colleges. First, several right-leaning opinion writers sounded alarms about new research purportedly showing that such institutions are culturally biased against applicants who are white, working-class, Christian, and denizens of rural, Republican-leaning states. A chorus of pundits then challenged such claims, with one, American Prospect columnist Monica Potts, asserting that whites "have a large advantage over people of color in almost every way possible in every area of life, regardless of income." Finally, apparently tired of the whole controversy, several others argued that the debate over fairness in admission to elite colleges is mainly the concern of self-absorbed, upper-middle-class whites, and a distraction from the nation's real educational problems.

Although most such arguments contained kernels of truth, one had so sift through an awful lot of overstatement and false assumption find them. What follows is a discussion of what the research on the subject actually says, and why it matters.

As discussed in detail here on a Chronicle of Higher Education blog on academic publishing, the book that was erroneously credited with providing the smoking gun of elite-college bias against working-class, Christian, red-state, white kids is No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. It was written by Thomas J. Espenshade, professor of sociology at Princeton University, and Alexandria Walton Radford, a research associate at the Washington-based consulting firm MPR Associates, based on their exhaustive analysis of federal data and of institutional records and student survey results from eight unnamed elite colleges.

Espenshade and Radford conclude in their book that coming from an economically disadvantaged background appears, in itself, to hurt a white student's chances of gaining admission to an elite private college. That's hardly news to anyone who follows such research. The likely explanation for much--or maybe even all--of the uphill climb faced by competitive low-income and working-class white applicants lies in the fact that they generally are denied any sort of admission preference, and they are competing for a finite number of freshman class seats against several populations for whom the bar is lowered. Confirming other research discussed at length in Color and Money, Espenshade and Radford found that such colleges show favoritism toward, for example, blacks and Hispanics, legacies, and graduates of prestigious high schools. By definition, white kids from humble backgrounds do not qualify for minority preferences. And, by virtue of their background, they are unlikely to be legacies, or to have graduated from expensive private high schools or from well-financed and well-regarded public high schools in wealthy communities. They may qualify for another type of admissions preferences widely used by colleges--preferences for recruited athletes. But here they often are hindered by inequities in high schools' athletic programs, as well as the challenges their families likely faced in financing their kids' involvement in sports that cannot be played at advanced levels without club memberships, travel, or expensive equipment. (See, for example, Chapter 5 of Dan Golden's The Price of Admission, titled "Title IX and the Rise of the Upper Class Athlete.")

Being unlikely to benefit from favoritism does not necessarily equate to being the target of outright bias, and Espenshade and Radford do not claim to have any evidence that elite private colleges are specifically biased against white students from humble backgrounds. That is not to say conclusively that no such bias exists. Color and Money summarizes research showing that faculty members disproportionately are the children of professionals, and that tenured faculty members and college administrators generally earn salaries that put them at or above the middle-class level. (Many college presidents and high-level administrators earn enough to be classified as nothing less than filthy rich.) But, while a lot of anecdotal evidence and qualitative research suggests that elite colleges can seem like unwelcoming environments to faculty members and students from the working class, there exists, at this point, no smoking gun showing that the institutions' systematic exclusion of many working-class students is based on cultural or political antipathy. It might well be the case, instead, that the backgrounds of many people at such institutions leave them without much sympathy for white people who are not as well off, or personally invested in the status quo and the belief (inscribed on many of Austria's community beer-drinking tables) that the people who belong there are the people who are there. Many college admissions officers characterize the problem as structural: They say they bend over backwards to recruit--and urge their institutions to admit--white kids from humble backgrounds, only to find many such applicants getting bumped out of the running to make room for admission candidates championed by the athletics director, the diversity office, and people using the admission process to do favors for college employees, donors, and the politically powerful.

Where did those taking the conclusions of Espenshade and Radford a step further--and alleging bias against white, Christian, working-class, rural, red-state America--lay hands on their purported smoking gun? It was a finding by the two researchers that high levels of involvement in career-oriented extracurricular activities—such as the 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of America, the ROTC, and co-op work programs—are all associated with lower admission odds.

Their book does not offer any explanation for the finding. In interviews with The Chronicle, the researchers pointed out that the types of activities they classified as "career-oriented" included Model United Nations, mock trial groups, and clubs for young entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, because their book left out those other activities and specifically cited the ROTC and farming-oriented organizations, it was seized upon as offering evidence that elite colleges are biased against applicants who love their country and come from the countryside. Although Espenshade and Radford did not examine the relative admissions prospects of students from different religious groups, their book also was cited as providing evidence that elite colleges discriminate against Christians.

Russell K. Neili, a lecturer in Princeton University's political science department, first argued the existence of such biases in a July 12 essay on the Manhattan Institute's blog, Minding the Campus. As part of a broader critique of affirmative action, Neili's essay said No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal shows elite colleges are biased against participants in "Red State activities" in a way that is "truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars." The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat then spread the word with a July 18 New York Times essay titled "The Roots of White Anxiety." Patrick Buchanan got on board a day later with "Bias and Bigotry in Academia."

The columnists making such claims clearly touched a nerve. And, to be fair, Douthat was on to something in asserting that the political gap between the nation's elite and its working class is at least partly attributable to elite colleges' admission policies, and, in particular, the institutions' use of affirmative action. As Color and Money notes, many white people who lack the cash and connections to get their children an edge in elite college admissions perceive such institutions as biased against them. And, since the days of George Wallace, conservative politicians and pundits have been exploiting such suspicions by scapegoating affirmative-action preferences as the chief force keeping many white applicants out of elite colleges, even though such applicants are far more likely to lose their seat to an unqualified white kid who received favoritism than a minority beneficiary of racial or ethnic preferences. The writings of Neili, Douthat, and Buchanan--and the significant buzz they generated--can be seen as exhibit A in support of the argument, made in Color and Money and elsewhere, that support for affirmative action carries substantial political cost for liberals, making it harder for them to hold positions of power long and tackle the broader societal problems that leave many minority and lower-income students educationally disadvantaged.

Even if there was nothing in No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal to support it, the assertion that elite colleges are biased against Christians was not entirely off the mark. There are, in fact, some Christian religions whose members once faced bias in applying to elite colleges, in many cases because their religions are associated with certain ethnic groups that were the victims of bias. (Think Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics.) Up until about World War II, many of our nation's top colleges, especially those of the Ivy League, were dominated by old-money families that tended to be Congregationalist, Episcopalian, or Presbyterian, and, on a related note, could trace their lineage to northern European countries that played a key role in colonizing the United States, such as England and Holland. To retain their hold on America's top colleges, these populations persuaded the administrations of many such institutions to actively discriminate against certain populations--such as people who were Jewish, black, or Catholic--and in favor of certain populations with insider status, such as the children of alumni. Blatant anti-Semitism went out of fashion at such institutions after World War II. The civil rights movement, a desire to quell the rioting of the 60s, and corporate America's willingness to bestow money upon colleges that help diversify workforces all led to colleges to go from discriminating against black, Hispanic, and Native American applicants to actively favoring such populations in admission decisions. But legacy preferences and other policies that favored applicants with insider status remained largely in place, working to the benefit of those groups that had gotten through the door and the disadvantage of those groups that remained largely shut out. This--and the enormous correlation between wealth and preparation for college admissions--helps explain why some of the Christian populations that once dominated such institutions continue to account for a disproportionate share of their enrollments, while many of the Christian populations that historically were shut out of such institutions remain under-represented at them to this day. (For more on old-money Christian families, see this article on the Social Register.)

The assertion that elite colleges are biased against politically conservative students provides interesting food for thought. Certainly, college faculties generally have been shown to a larger percentages of liberals and Democrats in their midst than American society in general. One can imagine your typical Ivy League admissions committee reacting coldly to an applicant who rejects the theory of evolution and thinks any gay professors or students on campus are bound for hell. But there is no research showing that politically conservative students are disadvantaged in the admissions process, and certainly no evidence of deliberate decisions by elite colleges to screen them out of the applicant pool. If one wants to use "red" state residency as a proxy for political conservatism, Espenshade and Radford's research actually might provide evidence of favoritism toward such students. They found that coming from such "red" states as Alabama, Montana, and Utah actually appears to give applicants to elite colleges an advantage, because such colleges receive relatively few applications from those states and like to boast that their entering freshman classes are so geographically diverse they represent every state in the union. Given, however, that it is entirely possible to find expensive private schools and liberal families in any state in the union, it seems like folly to assume an applicant's political leanings or socioeconomic backgrounds based on their state of residence.

Espenshade and Radford were able to clarify what their book said in radio interviews and in articles published in Newsweek , Time, and elsewhere. Douthat, to his credit, gave the two researchers an opportunity to respond in a blog post. And a host of other bloggers jumped in to help set the record straight on what the research by Espenshade and Radford actually found.

Those seeking to refute Douthat, Neili, et. al. were themselves sometimes guilty of overreaching, however.

Take, for example, the assertion by Monica Potts of the American Prospect that whites "have a large advantage over people of color in almost every way possible in every area of life, regardless of income." While race in itself plays a role in determining educational opportunity, and race and class status are often interrelated due to current discrimination and the residual effects of discrimination in the past, the truth is that socioeconomic status is a bigger shaper of educational destinies than race these days. Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, attempt to quantify the influences of race and class on one's college admissions prospects through research presented in the new book Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College. Their analysis found that being black, in itself, was associated with an average loss of 56 out of 1600 possible points on the combined verbal and math portions of the SAT. The gap between the poorest and wealthiest SAT takers, by contrast, was more than 780 points. Given such data, the notion that the child of two black Park Avenue physicians faces longer odds than a white child raised in Appalachian poverty is at least a little absurd.

More commonly, people have argued that low-income whites are under-represented at elite colleges simply because they are unqualified for admission or fail to apply. It certainly is true that many white people of modest means are not well prepared for elite colleges, and research has, indeed, shown that those who are prepared for admission to such colleges are less likely to apply to them than other students from wealthier backgrounds. But the research by Espenshade and Radford looked at students in the applicant pool and controlled for academic qualification in reaching the conclusion that low-income white students are less likely to gain admission. In focusing on low-income students who both applied and were qualified, they show the argument that such students are held back solely by a lack of initiative or academic ability to be both a lie and a slur.

Finally, several pundits made the argument that the entire debate over the influence of affirmative action and other preferences on elite college admissions is a distraction from the nation's real educational problems, the product of angst by a self-absorbed white upper-middle class. Heather Horn of The Atlantic offered a solid roundup of essays making such arguments.

Polls discussed in Color and Money do, indeed, suggest that whites in the upper-middle-class are more preoccupied with elite college admissions, and more likely to oppose affirmative action, than white people who are flat-out wealthy or of modest means. And, indeed, there is no question that the nation has many other educational and social problems it can be focused on, and probably needs to tackle if it is to bring about major improvement in access to elite colleges for all segments of society.

Nevertheless, there are many, very good reasons why all Americans, and not just members of the upper-middle-class, should be worried about the lack of socioeconomic diversity in our top colleges. Here are just a few:

The lack of socioeconomic diversity at elite colleges and the nation's broader educational and social problems are interconnected. The former is caused largely the latter. It is entirely possible to be concerned about both issues, and we would do a lot to improve education broadly if we tried to ensure more young people from middle- or lower-income communities were prepared to go to top colleges.
Top colleges play a huge role in determining the composition of our nation's leadership class, and the vast majority of Americans who are not rich are poorly served by a leadership class whose members come from wealthy backgrounds, went to college insulated from the rest of society, and are completely out of touch with middle- and working-class America's concerns.
On a related note, shutting the non-wealthy out from elite colleges and the leadership class is a recipe for social unrest. Let us not forget that those who devised college affirmative-action preferences in the late 60s did so largely because a large number of the nation's cities were burning, and they believed that giving black Americans more access to elite colleges would send a signal to African Americans, generally, that they did not need to resort to rioting and other forms of violence to break down the barriers to their advancement.

On a final note, one has to wonder how many of the pundits who see no problem with the lack of socioeconomic diversity in elite colleges are themselves the products of such institutions, and have a self-interest in preserving admissions policies that worked in their favor and stand to favor their own children. Are they, perhaps, a little like the Wizard of Oz, in that they know recognize how much they stand to lose if others go snooping around behind the curtain surrounding elite college admissions, and see the mechanisms by which this nation's elite gains its power?

New Research on Diversity Yields Surprising Findings

2010-05-13T17:32:00.006-04:00

The success of minority college students and students' perceptions of race relations on their campuses are influenced by factors that actually have little direct connection with ethnicity or race, according to a new set of studies discussed in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article.

Among the studies, all published in the spring issue of New Directions for Institutional Research:

An analysis of University of California student survey data that concludes that students' choice of academic major plays a greater role than their race in determining how much discrimination they perceive on campus. Moreover, having large numbers of racially and culturally sensitive students might paradoxically cause a campus's reputation for tolerance to suffer, because such students are more likely to perceive and report bigotry around them.
Another study, unusual in that it focuses on a campus where white students are outnumbered, concluded that high minority enrollments do not necessarily lead to increased perceptions of tolerance. At the public university that the study focused on, the share of all students on the campus who reported occasionally or frequently witnessing one or more forms of insensitive behavior rose as the institution became more diverse, with the increase being driven partly by increases in both the number of minority students responding to the survey and in the share of minority students reporting such behavior.
A third study, examining the educational progress of freshmen at several institutions, concludes that first-generation college students experience some events on the campus differently than do other students. For example, they appear not to reap the same educational gains from out-of-classroom interactions with faculty members as do their peers with at least one college-educated parent, perhaps because the first-generation students may be somewhat rattled and put off by such interactions, which leave their peers feeling more intellectually engaged, the Chronicle article says.

Ed Dept.'s Civil Rights Chief Signals New Approach to Race

2010-04-27T19:31:00.002-04:00

The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights is reviewing its approach to complaints of anti-Semitism and its guidance to colleges on race-conscious admission policies and gender equity in athletics, the office's chief, Russlynn H. Ali, told The Chronicle this month in an exclusive interview.

The Chronicle story also reports:

The Obama administration's intent to be much more supportive of race-conscious admissions than the Bush administration became clear last month, when top lawyers from the Education and Justice Departments joined in submitting a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the University of Texas at Austin in a lawsuit pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The brief reinforces the university's defense of its race-conscious admission policies.
Whereas the Bush administration had sided against the University of Michigan in a Supreme Court case challenging that institution's consideration of applicants' race, the brief the Obama administration lawyers filed last month strongly endorsed Texas's argument that only race-conscious admissions policies would provide it with sufficient levels of diversity to reap the educational benefits it sought.

"In view of the importance of diversity in educational institutions," the brief said, "the United States, through the Departments of Education and Justice, supports the efforts of school systems and postsecondary educational institutions that wish to develop admission polices that endeavor to achieve the educational benefits of diversity" in accordance with the Supreme Court ruling upholding Michigan's consideration of race.

Affirmative-Action Scholars Denied Access to California Bar Data

2010-04-21T17:33:00.002-04:00

A California state judge has rejected a bid by two researchers examining affirmative action to gain access to California Bar Association data on the long-term success of law-school graduates.

As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Judge Curtis E.A. Karnow of the California Superior Court for San Francisco County ruled last month that the state bar is not legally obliged to release the data sought by Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Joe Hicks, a former governor of the California state bar. The judge held that the researchers' argument for access to the data under public-records laws relied on a definition of "public document" that was overly broad, and could be interpreted as covering judges' rough notes, grand-jury transcripts, and other documents that the courts have long held to be exempt.

March Madness Brings News of Widening Black-White Gap in Players' Graduation Rates

2010-03-24T19:26:00.005-04:00

Although the black members of the basketball teams of colleges represented in the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament appear to be doing slightly better academically than they did in the past, the gap between their graduation rate and the graduation rate of white players on those teams has grown, according to a new report.

The report by the The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida says 84 percent of white and 56 percent of black basketball players at those colleges graduate--a 6 percentage-point increase for white basketball players and a 2 percentage-point increase for black players over last year's study.

Utah Drive for Preference Ban Stalls in Legislature

2010-03-19T12:00:00.002-04:00

An effort to amend Utah's state constitution to ban the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and state and local agencies has been put off a year after meeting resistance in the state legislature.

As reported in the Salt Lake Tribune, the backers of the proposed amendment were just shy of getting enough legislative votes to put the measure on the ballot this fall. They needed 50 votes in the state House of Representatives, but, as a result of four Republicans representatives' refusal to join other GOP members in supporting the bill, they appeared to have just 49 votes locked down as lawmakers wrapped up their 2010 session..

Legislative leaders have agreed to study the issue, and it appears likely the measure will come up again next year.

Obama Administration Announces New Effort to Enforce Civil Rights in Education

2010-03-12T17:34:00.002-05:00

As reported here in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Obama administration pledged this week to expand enforcement of civil-rights laws in education. At a press conference held in Selma, Ala., on the 45th anniversary of the historic civil-rights march there, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights "has not been as vigilant as it should have been" over the past decade, and plans to undertake investigations at six colleges and 30 school districts to determine whether they are complying with the law.

The assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlynn H. Ali, angered conservatives by saying the department would start using "disparate-impact" analysis, which attempts to prove discrimination not through direct evidence of racist acts, but through numerical data showing that policies have a disproportionate impact on certain groups of people. The approach is controversial because numerical gaps in educational participation often can be linked to factors other than deliberate discrimination, such as gaps in educational preparation linked to culture, immigrant status, or socioeconomic class.

The U.S. Supreme Court barred the use of disparate-impact analysis as the basis of private lawsuits against federally supported state agencies in a 2001 decision. The majority opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, said the civil-rights law at issue in the case, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, does not specifically give private citizens the right to sue to ensure that its provisions are enforced. As discussed at length in Color and Money, the Clinton administration came under intense criticism for--and eventually abandoned--proposed regulations warning college admissions offices not to rely too heavily on standardized tests that were thought to be biased against minority students or women based on disparate-impact analysis.

California Preference Ban Challenged in Bid to Thwart Similar Measures

2010-03-06T16:21:00.003-05:00

An activist group has filed a federal lawsuit challenging California's Proposition 209 ban on affirmative-action preferences in a bid to keep similar measures from being passed elsewhere.

As reportered by Color and Money author Peter Schmidt in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the lawsuit argues that the California measure, adopted by that state's voters in 1996, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution by placing a distinct set of legal hurdles in front of minority groups seeking to increase their representation on the university system's campuses. The group behind the lawsuit--the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary--is seeking through the lawsuit not just to get the California measure overturned, but to raise questions about the legality of similar measures that will be on the ballot in Arizona, and perhaps Utah, this fall.

A similar legal challenge to Proposition 209 failed in 1997, but the lawyers behind the new lawsuit say the legal landscape has changed enough since then that they feel they have a good chance of prevailing this time around.

Sandra Day O'Connor Accused of Hedging on Her Grutter Decision

2010-01-24T19:25:00.003-05:00

When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark 2003 decision upholding race-conscious college admissions as constitutional, the controlling opinion said that the educational benefits of diversity had been proven by research but the majority of justices did not think colleges would need to use racial preferences to achieve diverse enrollments 25 years down the road.

In a new essay discussed here in The Chronicle of Higher Education, retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor revisits the majority opinion she wrote in that case, Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan's Law School. What she has to say in her new essay has stirred anger in many of the critics of affirmative action who lamented the Grutter decision. She seems both to characterize the research underlying the majority opinion as "speculative" and to say that the court really did not mean anything with its talk of racial preferences ending a quarter century down the road.

Lawyers on all side of the affirmative action debate stress that it is the court's opinion itself, and not the subsequent musings of a retired justice, that will serve as precedent for the lower courts and likely help shape any later Supreme Court discussions of the issue. Still, the exact meaning of Supreme Court rulings often is hotly debated in subsequent legal battles, as evident when the justices hearing the Grutter case sparred over the exact meaning of the majority opinion that Justice Lewis Powell wrote the last time the high court considered such admissions preferences, in the Bakke decision of 1978. Justice O'Connor's new essay makes the meaning of two elements of her 2003 opinion seem a lot more ambiguous than had widely been assumed.

The Chronicle article, available to nonsubscribers, offers more on her essay and the reactions it has stirred.

U. of Minnesota Remains Under Fire for Plan to Promote Sensitivity Among Teachers

2009-12-21T17:44:00.004-05:00

The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities has come under heavy fire from conservative pundits and a prominent free-speech advocacy group over a task force's plan to ensure that graduates of its teacher training program are culturally sensitive.

As reported in a Chronicle of Higher Education article, the plan by a faculty panel called the Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group is chock full of language that pushes conservative buttons, including a call for prospective teachers to"be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression."

Some of its critics have themselves turned to fairly strong language, with one local radio host alleging that the education school is "one step away from advocating gas chambers for conservatives." Using much more measured language, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has said the changes called for by the plan would violate the U.S. Constitution by imposing ideological requirements on students at the education school.

Jean K. Quam, dean of the university's College of Education and Human Development, has stressed that the plan simply represents a set of ideas that the university has yet to act upon. Its basic goal, she says, is simply to ensure that tomorrow's teachers are equipped to handle the many forms of diversity they are likely to encounter in classrooms.

Federal Appeals Court Hears Challenge to Affirmative Action Preference Bans

2009-12-02T09:30:00.003-05:00

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit heard oral arguments last month in a legal challenge to the ban on affirmative-action preferences adopted by Michigan voters in 2006.

The case involves two lawsuits that have been consolidated into one. One of the two was filed on behalf of students, faculty members, and prospective applicants to Michigan's public universities, with the plaintiffs' legal team including lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Detroit branch of the NAACP, and the American Civil Liberties Union. The other lawsuit was brought by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary, an activist group, known as BAMN, that played a significant role in fighting both Michigan's Proposal 2 and California's Proposition 209.

As discussed in depth here in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the plaintiffs appear to stand a good chance of success, at least initially. Two of the three judges handling the case at this level--Ransey Guy Cole Jr. and Martha Craig Daughtrey--are nominees of President Bill Clinton who have liberal reputations and were members of the Sixth Circuit majority that upheld the Michigan law school's policies in Grutter. The third member of the panel, Judge Julia Smith Gibbons, was nominated by President George W. Bush but has a reputation as one of the court's more moderate Republican nominees.

How the plaintiffs will fare in the long run is another matter. Regardless of how it rules, the three-judge panel's decision is almost certain to be appealed to the full Sixth Circuit, whose membership tilts conservative.

Both of the joined lawsuits argue that the Michigan measure discriminates against minorities by leaving them uniquely burdened in the political process. While other Michigan constituencies, such as Upper Peninsula residents, can seek greater access to universities by merely appealing to officials of those institutions to favor them, minority residents who seek the reinstatement of race-conscious admissions policies to gain greater access must first pull off the difficult feat of getting voters in that predominantly white state to repeal its preference ban.

Naval Academy Accused of Illegally Retaliating Against Affirmative Action Critic

2009-10-08T18:52:00.005-04:00

As reported at length today in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the U.S. Naval Academy has been accused by one of its professors of illegally retaliating against him for publicly alleging its affirmative-action policies violate the law.

Bruce E. Fleming, a civilian who works at the academy as a professor of English, says he has filed a federal whistleblower complaint alleging that top administrators there denied him a deserved merit-pay raise in retaliation for his criticisms of the institution's minority admissions policies. Mr. Fleming drew widespread media attention after arguing in an editorial published in a local newspaper that the academy essentially operates a separate, less-demanding admissions track for minority applicants, in violation of legal guidelines set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mr. Fleming's complaint he was not given a deserved raise is not simply a matter of having a different subjective asssessment than top academy officials of his worth. He is claiming that his colleagues and department chair recommended him for a substantial raise, and higher-ups disregarded normal procedures--and his solid performance review and high performance ranking among his colleagues--to avoid giving him any raise at all.

The Naval Academy, which has denied Mr. Fleming's past criticisms of its admissions policies, is not commenting on his allegations of retaliation, saying that as a matter of policy it does not discuss such personnel matters.

Plaintiffs in Lawsuit Against U. of Texas Take Their Case to the Fifth Circuit

2009-09-22T17:44:00.006-04:00

The plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the revival of race-conscious admissions policy at the University of Texas at Austin have taken their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

A terse formal notice of appeal filed in the Fifth Circuit Court this month says simply that the two plaintiffs--white students that the university had rejected--are appealing the August 17 decision by U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks to throw out their challenge to the university's admissions policy. Lawyers for the two students are expected to file briefs giving their reasoning for the appeal in the coming weeks.

As discussed in greater depth in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Judge Sparks held in his August 17 ruling that he was dismissing the lawsuit because the university's race-conscious policy was narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest, and therefore constitutional. The lawsuit argues that the university should not be allowed to return to considering applicants' race because it already has in place a race-neutral means of achieving diversity on campus, a requirement under state law that it admit any Texas student in the top 10 percent of his or her high school class.

Lawyers for the students had been characterizing Judge Sparks as unfriendly to their side since May of 2008, when he refused to order the university to re-evaluate the two students' application in a race-neutral manner based on his belief that they had little chance of prevailing. The Fifth Circuit appeals court, by contrast, in 1996 issued one of the harshest judicial denunciations of race-conscious admissions produced by a federal court so far, its Hopwood decision striking down race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas law school with language repudiating the idea that such admissions were constitutionally justified by the diversity they produced. As recounted in detail in Color and Money, Texas lawmakers adopted the 10-percent law in response to the Hopwood ruling, which was subsequently overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 Grutter decision upholding the diversity rationale for such policies (but holding that race-neutral alternatives must be considered.)

The so-called "Texas Ten Percent Law" was watered down somewhat in May, when state lawmakers voted to cap the number of students automatically admitted to UT-Austin under it at 75 percent of each entering freshman class. If the challenge to race-conscious admissions prevails, state lawmakers will likely come under renewed pressure to preserve the 10-percent law. That measure is widely supported by many black, Hispanic, and rural legislators, but it is strongly opposed by many representatives of wealthy suburbs where competition from others from privileged backgrounds makes it harder for students to rank in the top tenth of their classes.

New Study Appears Likely to Complicate the Debate Over Legacy Admissions

2009-07-27T19:06:00.004-04:00

A new study of alumni of a selective research university concludes that families can feel inclined to donate to such institutions for reasons that extend well beyond simply trying to increase the likelihood of their children getting in.

Having a child approaching college age does appear to make alumni predisposed toward generosity toward their alma maters: The probability of alumni's making gifts increased by 12.9 percentage points if a child of theirs attended, and those gifts were about 48 percent larger than the ones given by alumni without family connections.

But other family ties also appeared to influence giving, in ways that could not easily be attributed to a desire to secure an applicant an advantage. Having a parent, aunt or uncle, or mother-in-law or father-in-law who graduated from the same institution all appeared to make alumni significantly more likely to donate, and those with a sibling who attended the same college, while no more likely than others to donate, tended on average donate more.

See the Chronicle of Higher Education Web site for a full summary of the study by Jonathan Meer, a Stanford University doctoral student who recently accepted a position as an assistant professor of economics at Texas A&M University at College Station, and Harvey S. Rosen, a professor of economics and business policy at Princeton University and co-director of Princeton's Center for Economic Policy Studies.

Arizona to Vote on a Ban on Affirmative-Action Preferences in 2010

2009-07-08T20:51:00.003-04:00

Arizona lawmakers have agreed to put a proposed constitutional amendment curtailing the use of affirmative-action preferences on the ballot next year.

With the state legislature's decision last month to put the measure before voters, Arizona becomes the first state to have such a measure put on the ballot through legislative action rather than a citizen petition drive. The campaign on behalf of the measure had tried using the petition-gathering route to put it before voters last November, but they failed to gather enough signatures by a state-imposed deadline.

The Arizona referendum calls for the state Constitution to be amended to ban public colleges and other state and local agencies from granting preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in employment, contracting, and education-related decisions. It is very similar in its wording to the measures that have been adopted by California, Michigan, Nebraska, and Washington State and to a measure which failed narrowly in Colorado last fall.

Many political analysts believe the Arizona measure should pass easily, especially given that state's fairly conservative political climate and tensions there over immigration.

U. of Illinois Takes Heat for Lowering the Bar for Applicants with Clout

2009-06-02T10:58:00.006-04:00

Officials at the University of Illinois are scrambling to deal with the fallout from a series of Chicago Tribune articles exposing how the institution maintained a "shadow admissions system" opening its doors to subpar applicants backed by lawmakers and university trustees.

As the book Color and Money makes clear, the University of Illinois is hardly alone in systematically lowering the bar on behalf of applicants with political connections. College lobbyists in state capitals say they must routinely accept requests to grease the skids for certain applicants from the state lawmakers that their institutions rely on for funds. College lobbyists in Washington similarly field requests from members of Congress to help applicants who might not gain admission on their own.

Two of the university administrators who oversaw the admissions practices examined in the Tribune investigation--the current president of the University of Illinois, B. Joseph White, and the former chancellor of university's Champaign-Urbana campus, Nancy Cantor--had maintained a similar mechanism for helping favored applicants circumvent merit-based admissions in their previous positions at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Under the point-based undergraduate admissions system ultimately rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2003 Gratz v. Bollinger decision, Michigan reserved the right to award any applicant a 20-point bonus--the equivalent of the different between a 3.0 GPA and a 4.0 GPA--on its 150-point scale. No formal justification for the bonus awards was given.

The Chicago Tribune first exposed clout-based admissions at the University of Illinois in an article published May 29. That article, based on an examination of university records obtained through the state's Freedom of Information Act, described how the university classified applicants with the backing of powerful people as "Category I," and admitted some of the objections of its own admissions officers while quietly reversing the rejections of others.

In summarizing its key findings, the newspaper said:

--University officials recognized that certain students were underqualified--but admitted them anyway.
--Admissions officers complained in vain as their recommendations were overruled.
--Trustees pushed for preferred students, some of whom were friends, neighbors and relatives.
--Lawmakers delivered admission requests to U. of I. lobbyists, whose jobs depend on pleasing the lawmakers.
--University officials delayed admissions notifications to weak candidates until the end of the school year to minimize the fallout at top feeder high schools.

The article noted that about half of this year's 160 Category I applicants have ties to state lawmakers, and "a 2009 log managed by the university's government affairs office tracked nearly 80 applicants pushed by politicians."

Accompanying the article were internal university e-mails revealing that administrators regarded many of the applicants they were admitting as well below par, and that the university's law school also admitted subpar applicants with clout. Among the undergraduate applicants who had rejections reversed was a relative of convicted influence peddler Tony Rezko whose case was championed by then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

In a separate article published on May 31, the Tribune described how former governors Blagojevich and James Thompson leaned on gubernatorially appointed trustees to get applicants admitted. A related May 31 article describing the mechanisms through which politicians got applicants admitted tells of "an ongoing power struggle between educators who want to protect the integrity of the state's most prestigious public university and administrators who also feel compelled to appease powerful lawmakers."

University officials initially downplayed the role that the so-called "clout list" played in admissions. In the face of widespread outrage, however, they quickly pledged to clean up the process. On June 1 the university told the newspaper it was suspending the use of a clout list in the admissions process and setting up a task force to find ways to rid the admissions process of undue political influence.

Peter Schmidt's AlterNet Essay--and His Response to Its Critics

2009-05-25T22:34:00.021-04:00

From Peter Schmidt:

On Saturday, May 23, the Web site AlterNet published an essay in which I argued that selective colleges bear some responsibility for our current economic crisis because their admissions policies reward and encourage unethical behavior and their graduates account for a disproportionate share of those in positions of economic or political power. The essay was widely e-mailed and republished and generated a lot of discussion on the Internet. The responses to it included amens and applause, ad hominem attacks on me and my educational background by people who know little about me and absolutely nothing about my educational background, and critiques that, in some cases, were thoughtful.

The ad hominem attacks don't deserve a response other than to say it is sad to see people who claim Ivy League degrees or positions as tenured professors incapable of coming up with anything better.

Common courtesy demands that I give those who applauded my essay my thanks.

The criticisms that I found relevant and at least somewhat worth taking seriously deserve an answer. The AlterNet piece is reprinted immediately below, and my response to its critics follows.

Elite Colleges Are Promoting a Culture of Selfish, Cutthroat Behavior and We Are All Paying the Price

By Peter Schmidt
Like many of us, the nation's elite colleges and universities have taken a financial beating over the past year.

Among them, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford all watched their endowments shrink by about 20 percent as a result of investment losses.

Despite all their brainpower, such institutions appear to have failed to learn what every simple farmer knows: you reap what you sow. Elite colleges and professional schools bear a share of the blame for the economic crisis that now plagues them, because it is they who educated and bestowed academic credentials upon many of those who got us into this mess.

It should come as no surprise to them that many on Wall Street and in Washington have proven ethically bankrupt and without regard for people of lesser means, because their admissions policies have done much to ensure such a result.

In determining which applicants they will admit and put on the fast track, most elite higher-education institutions systematically favor people from privileged backgrounds who display selfish, cutthroat behavior. The results are campus environments where disregard for society is socially accepted, where bad people are encouraged to become worse.

Consider, for starters, how most such institutions rely on standardized admissions tests such as the SAT, even though they know perfectly well that the nation's massive test-preparation industry has severely compromised the reliability of such instruments, turning them into tools for measuring, as much as anything, wealth and willingness to seek unfair advantage.

Test-preparation programs make people better test-takers not better prospective students. They raise scores mainly by teaching various test-taking tricks, such as how to quickly spot the "sucker" answers to a multiple-choice question to improve the odds of guessing correctly. Yet many are effective enough to offer those families that can afford their fees -- typically, $500 to $1,000 -- a chance to buy their children enough extra points to transform many from also-rans into shoo-ins.

In turning a blind eye to the widespread tainting of admissions test scores, higher-education institutions argue that they lack better mechanisms for efficiently judging applicants from high schools of sharply varying quality. But many education researchers disagree and say some alternatives to such tests, such as admissions systems that give substantial weight to class rank or samples of each applicant's work, are more reliable predictors of applicants' academic performance.

Moreover, selective colleges have ulterior motives for relying on standardized admissions tests that have nothing to do with academic considerations and everything to do with their bottom lines. The more high-scoring students they admit, the higher their "selectivity" ratings in the college-ranking guides that help determine how many applicants knock on their doors each year. And not only is sifting through applications based on test scores a lot cheaper than hiring enough people to consider each candidate carefully, but relying on such scores helps skew the process in favor of wealthier applicants, who will not need financial assistance and are likely to donate generously down the road.

If young people find that artificially inflating their test scores isn't enough to get them into a choice college, they always have the option of having someone bribe their way in with a big donation.

Selective colleges are so happy to have their palms greased in such a manner that some make little effort to hide how much they lower the bar for applicants connected to generous alumni and other contributors. To improve their odds of having favors done for them by people in positions of power, many selective higher-education institutions also admit mediocre applicants at the request of state and federal officials.

They let their professors and administrators in on the game by lowering the bar for the children of employees, as a job perk. Despite all of their talk about operating athletics programs to promote sportsmanship, they assure recruited athletes the playing field will be tilted in their favor in the competition for freshman-class seats.

Through such admissions policies, colleges end up giving the nation's high school students crash courses in cynicism. They teach young people that money talks, fairness is for losers, who you know matters more than what you know, and some people are simply entitled to what others may never attain, no matter how hard they work.

Considering how much selective colleges and universities favor applicants who take such lessons to heart, should it surprise anyone that about half of all graduate- and professional-school students admit on surveys to having recently cheated?

Investors take note: MBA candidates have been found to be the biggest cheaters of all, with 56 percent admitting to having cheated in the past year, in a 2006 survey published by the Academy of Management Learning and Education. Many business schools have responded to the latest economic crisis by broadcasting their intent to beef up their ethics classes, but they might as well be promoting sobriety in a bar.

Give George W. Bush credit for this much: He admits to having gotten into Yale through his family connections, and he is quite capable of self-effacing humor. In delivering Yale's 2001 commencement address, he declared: "And to the C students I say, You, too, can be president of the United States."
Although he meant the remark as a joke, he stood as living proof that he was absolutely right, that students who have gotten through the doors of a top college need not perform well there to have other doors opened to them.

Historians of education say the Great Depression shook the nation's faith in its leadership and helped inspire many selective colleges to reform their admissions policies to do more to take in the best students and not just the best-connected.

Our latest economic crisis could inspire similar soul-searching and a renewed emphasis on meritocracy in higher education. But it also could have the opposite effect, prompting selective colleges and universities to even more heavily favor those applicants with cash and connections in an effort to repair their own finances.

If the recent devastation of their endowments should teach such institutions anything, it is that basing their admissions policies on the short-term pursuit of monetary gain is likely to cost them -- and the rest of American society -- dearly down the road.

So far, at least, the more serious critiques of the essay have taken one of four forms: 1) assertions that it places too much faith in meritocracy 2) complaints that it paints elite colleges and their students with too broad a brush 3) allegations of faulty logic 4) allegations that it makes assertions based on no evidence. I'll pick them off here one by one. (Full disclosure: I'll get a marginal commission from Amazon every time you buy a book through one of the links I provide below.)

Re: the assertion the essay places too much faith in meritocracy

I take this criticism more to heart than any. I'm a huge fan of Michael Young's landmark satirical essay, The Rise of the Meritocracy, which makes abundantly clear how a society ruled by those considered "the best"--and therefore confident of their superiority--could indeed be a very brutal place. I'm also well aware that most definitions of "academic merit" in college admissions also tend to be measures of economic and cultural advantage and, in some cases, the willingness of parents to give their children an edge by any means necessary--basic fairness and the good of society be damned. (The second chapter of my book gives a thorough overview of research on this topic.)

But I fail to see how admissions decisions based solely on academic merit would be worse for society than admissions practices that suspend considerations of academic merit in the case of people who have displayed unethical behavior. With a merit-only approach, you get some mixture of people who are smart/essentially decent and people who are smart/unethical and, if Young is right, run the risk of everyone involved being corrupted by belief in their own superiority. With our current admissions policies, you have people who are dim/unethical bumping the smart and ethical out of seats in freshmen classes, thereby enlarging the unethical population on campuses and reducing the enrollments of smart/ethical people who might go on to help hold the unethical in check. Meanwhile, the colleges insist everyone on their campus actually belongs there based on merit, so the perceptions of superiority that Young worries about exist anyway.

It's entirely possible that society may be well-served by selective colleges bending or expanding their definitions of academic merit to accommodate certain populations, such as people who have some unusual talent not measured by traditional academic criteria or people who have done remarkably well given their life circumstances. But I'm not sure I see much societal interest in bending or expanding definitions of merit to accommodate people who pull strings, offer bribes, or might perform well enough on the athletic field to help sell stadium seats. Selective colleges often argue that the money derived through such practices can help fund scholarships for the needy, but I am hard-pressed to think of another American institution that tries to justify accepting bribes or giving in to undue political influence on the grounds that whatever it gains by doing so it uses for some societal good.

Re: complaints that the essay paints elite colleges and their students with too broad a brush

Any careful reader will see that the essay does not argue that all students at elite colleges engage in selfish, cutthroat behavior or that all elite colleges engage in every admissions practice cited as favoring the ethically challenged. To suggest otherwise is to construct a straw man. Plenty of elite college students and graduates who profess idealism and concern for the best interests of society have agreed with my characterization of many students on such campuses without taking my essay the least bit personally.

Critics of the essay likewise themselves grasp at too broad a brush in asserting that I argue that all political leaders or business people responsible for our current economic crisis came out of elite colleges. I simply don't.

Based on research to be discussed later in this blog entry, I will say this much, though: Elite higher education institutions credentialed a disproportionate share of the political leaders and business people responsible for our current economic crisis. Nearly all selective colleges engage in at least a few of the admissions practices my essay describes. And the population of selfish, cutthroat, entitled students found on most such campuses is large to provide considerable social support for such thinking and behavior.

Re: allegations of faulty logic

Every allegation of faulty logic so far directed at this piece has been based on straw men constructed by misconstruing my statements. For example, people have claimed the essay argues that all unethical people come out of elite colleges and therefore everyone enrolled at an elite college is unethical. That's nonsense.

At the core of my essay is a sound deductive argument. It goes like this:

Premise 1 (based on extensive research): Elite higher education institutions educate and credential a disproportionate share of our society's leaders and influence even those who do not pass through their doors.

Premise 2 (also based on extensive research): Many of the admissions practices of elite higher education institutions favor applicants based on displays of unethical behavior and send the clear message that those institutions regard at least some unethical behavior as acceptable.

Conclusion: Elite higher education institutions therefore bear some responsibility for the presence of unethical people in our society's leadership positions.

Re: allegations that the essay makes assertions based on no evidence

I'll acknowledge offhand that the essay makes several assertions without expressly citing the research and data they are based on.

This was partly a function of necessity. The article was a journalistic op-ed, not a book or submission to an academic journal. It is a roughly 1,000-word essay in a world where many newspapers and magazines will not print essays over 600 words. Buttressing every assertion with a full discussion of its factual basis likely would have caused the essay to grow to 5,000 words or more, making it unpublishable and damn near unreadable.

For the record, however, every single assertion in the essay is fully supported by extensive research, much of it discussed in the book Color and Money and on this Web site.

Here's a breakdown of how the essay's key assertions are backed:

The assertion that elite colleges train a disproportionate share of people in positions of economic or political power is supported by several books, studies, and legal documents cited in Color and Money, including:

Michael Useem and Jerome Karabel, “Pathways to Top Corporate Management,” 175–207; Charles L. Cappell and Ronald M. Pipkin, “The Inside Tracks: Status Distinctions in Allocations to Elite Law Schools,” 211–30; both in The High Status Track: Studies of Elite Schools and Stratification (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990)

Paul W. Kingston and John C. Smart, “The Economic Pay-Off of Prestigious Colleges,” in The High Status Track

Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose, “Socioeconomic Status, Race/Ethnicity, and Selective College Admissions,” in America’s Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education, ed. Richard D. Kahlenberg (New York: Century Foundation, 2003).

Briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court by a long list of top corporations, business and professional associations, and retired military leaders in the cases Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger.

(To update one set of figures given in my book, it is worth nothing that seven of the 19 presidents inaugurated since 1900 earned their bachelor’s degrees from Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, and all but three attended prestigious colleges or professional schools.)

My assertions regarding selective colleges disproportionately serving students from privileged backgrounds are supported by extensive reporting for The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Carnevale and Rose study cited above, and several reports and books cited in the Chapter 1 of Color and Money, including:

Douglas S. Massey, Camille Z. Charles, Garvey F. Lundy, and Mary J. Fischer. The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)

Danette Gerald and Kati Haycock, Engines of Inequality: Diminishing Equity in the Nation’s Premier Public Universities (Washington, DC: Education Trust, 2006).

My assertions regarding student attitudes at selective higher education institutions are supported by extensive reporting by me and other Chronicle reporters, The Source of the River (cited above), several studies cited in Chapter 5 of Color and Money, and by research conducted for the Center for Academic Integrity.

My assertions regarding selective colleges' reliance on the SAT are backed by extensive Chronicle reporting, research presented at the American Educational Research Association's 2008 annual conference, a recent National Association of College Admissions Conference report, and the following authoritative history of the SAT test:

Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999)

Lemann's book also includes a discussion of the SAT test preparation industry and its impact on scores. For more information on that subject, see David Owen's book None of the Above.

My characterizations of selective college admissions policies are backed by extensive Chronicle reporting and nearly all of the studies and books cited in Chapter 1 of Color and Money (see the links under "Chapter 1" on the right side of the screen). Perhaps the best recent work examining how people use cash and connections to get into specific elite colleges was done by Dan Golden, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, for the Wall Street Journal and the book The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges, and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates. William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, has co-authored several exhaustive studies of the impact of various admissions preferences. They include:

William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005).

William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin, Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

The research cited above provides just a smattering of the data supporting the AlterNet essay's assertions, which rest on a wide body of empirical data gathered in recent decades. Those interested in locating more can find it by surfing around this Web site.

New Report on SAT Test Prep's Effects Is: A) Flawed B) Suspect C) Damning D) All of the Above

2009-05-20T21:27:00.022-04:00

A new report on programs that prepare students for college entrance examinations has garnered a lot of attention in the media for two key reasons: It concludes that commercial SAT test preparation programs really don't raise scores all that much, and it finds that many colleges--against the advice of the testing companies and many experts in the college admissions field--are giving substantial weight to small score differences, with some even using certain scores as a cutoff in processing applications.

Colleges themselves might want to ask next year's applicants to download a copy of the report and write an essay responding to it. What conclusions the applicants draw will say a lot about their critical thinking skills. If an applicant wholeheartedly accept its assertion that the average SAT gains derived from enrolling in commercial test preparation programs likely are "in the neighborhood of 30 points," perhaps an elite college is not the best fit for him, and he would be better off somewhere close to home, maybe within bicycling distance.

The author of the report is Derek C. Briggs, an associate professor of quantitative methods and policy analysis at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the chairman of the university's Research and Evaluation Methodology Program. The report was commissioned by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, a Virginia-based organization representing high school counselors, for-profit college counseling providers, and college employees involved in admissions and financial-aid decisions. The association tacked onto the report's cover the caveat that its conclusions are Mr. Briggs' own, but it nonetheless has publicized the report as part of NACAC's efforts to advance "the knowledge base and dialogue about test preparation."

The NACAC press release announcing the report declares: "Report Highlights Test Prep Paradox—Paying for Test Prep Doesn’t Yield Big Returns, But Returns May Still Matter in Light of Admission Practice." Among the major media outlets which ran with the "no big return" assertion were the Washington Post (headline: "Study Sees Small Average Gains from College Test Coaching") and the Wall Street Journal (headline: "SAT Coaching Found to Boost Scores--Barely").

Briggs concludes that SAT test preparation increases scores on the math portion of the test by just 10 to 20 points, and on the verbal portion of the test by just 5 to 10 points. He does not base that conclusion on any new research, but on a review of a tall stack of past studies of the impact of test coaching. Actually, to be precise, he bases his conclusion on just three studies in the stack. He discounted the rest--some of which found score increases from coaching of 100 points or more--as based on small samples that were not representative of the nation's population or as otherwise methodologically flawed.

Two of the three studies that Derek C. Briggs characterizes as valid and pointing to "a consensus position" on the effects of SAT test coaching were performed by none other than Derek C. Briggs. (If his name is otherwise recognizable to people in the field, it is because, far from being a neutral arbiter of such research, he already has established himself as a prominent critic of the idea that SAT coaching works.) Briggs not only put himself in a position to pass judgment on his own research and (surprise surprise) declared his own work rock solid, but he also has declared a consensus based on me-myself-and-I vote counting. The third study that he counts toward that consensus, by Donald Rock and Donald Powers, unsurprisingly reaches the same conclusion he had.

About that only other study in the stack that Briggs found methodologically acceptable: It was sponsored by two organizations which are highly invested, financially and otherwise, in the idea that SAT scores cannot be raised significantly by coaching--the College Board, which owns the SAT, and the Educational Testing Service, which administers it. Powers was a principle research scientist at ETS, and, as the book Color and Money shows, both ETS and the College Board have a history of promoting research that makes their case and squelching research that doesn't.

Powers and Rock identified those students who had received SAT test coaching based on whether the students owned up to it in response to a questionnaire on ETS letterhead sent to them after they had taken the SAT and before they got their scores back. Based on their choice of methodology, one wonders if they would have published a study concluding that married men seldom cheat based on a surveys administered to husbands by wives with revolvers in their hands. As Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for the watchdog group FairTest, noted in an e-mail:

"The notion that students would respond accurately to a testing company's questionnaire asking whether they had been coaching, especially during the period after they had taken the exam and before scores were reported, is ludicrous. At a minimum, they would wonder how that information would be used. Given fears about the secrecy with which ETS/College Board handle data, might have even believed that ETS could 'flag' scores being sent to colleges to indicate that an applicant had been coached, just as they then did for tests taken with extended time."

To his credit, Briggs acknowledges--albeit in a subtle, after-the-fact sort of way--that the three studies he cites, in talking about the average gains derived from SAT coaching by nationwide samples of students of all backgrounds, mask differences in the effectiveness of programs based on their quality, setting, and duration. He also acknowledges the two cited studies of his own that he cites "suggest that coaching is more effective for students with strong academic backgrounds and high economic status who underperformed on the PSAT."

The implications of this concession are huge. His new report, and the hype surrounding it, are wrongly leading the nation to believe that high-priced SAT test preparation services do not substantially raise the scores of students who participate in them in earnest, when, in fact, the average gains produced by some coaching services quite possibly may be the 100 points or more that other studies have claimed. The "average gains" Briggs' report cites are based on studies that included slackers who dropped out of coaching programs or repeatedly skipped sessions or screwed around and paid no attention to their instructors at all, as well as people who enrolled in ineffective, disreputable programs. If one wants to determine how much weight people lose on Weight Watchers, one should base that study on the weight changes of people who enrolled in Weight Watchers and took it seriously, not on the entire universe of people who have ever declared they are going on a diet and, in some cases, sat down to wolf down that "one last piece of pie."

The idea that families should not waste their money on coaching programs that won't raise scores is a perfectly fine one to get out. But, while NACAC may be well-intentioned in trying especially hard this week to get word out to families who are low- or middle-income (and presumably don't have money to spare), one wonders if the group will be contributing to class-linked gaps in access to selective higher education by so targetting its message. After all, its report, read carefully, suggests the rich might in fact be wise to enroll their children in reputable programs costing $1,000 or more, because such programs are likely to produce gains that will make a difference in the admissions office. SAT coaching already is giving the children of the wealthy enough of an unfair edge in getting into top colleges without broadcasting the message that those of lesser means should not bothering trying to put their children on equal footing.

The results of a survey of colleges contained in the new NACAC report makes clear that, even if the gains derived from test coaching are only in the neighborhood of 30 points on a 1600 point scale, those 30 points can make a lot of difference at some colleges and among students who were high scorers to begin with. Of colleges that use the SAT in evaluating applicants, 21 percent have a rigid cut-off scores. And, at the upper end of the SAT score range, well over a third of colleges said a 20 point increase in an applicant's SAT math score or a 10 point increase in an applicant's SAT verbal score would "significantly improve" their likelihood of gaining admission. Although NACAC and the College Board have advised colleges against giving small differences in SAT scores much weight in admissions decisions, their admonitions appear to be falling against deaf ears. Why? Relying heavily on SAT scores offers selective colleges an inexpensive way to sort through an annual barrage of applications. Taking in high scorers helps colleges boost their rankings in U.S. News and World Report and other college guides. And colleges have an additional, and powerful, financial incentive to depend heavily on the SAT, in that the strong correlation between SAT scores and family wealth means that high scorers are more likely than other applicants to get through college without needing financial aid and to donate generously to their alma maters down the road.

The problem with nearly all research on SAT preparation is that it is hard to find a disinterested party to do it. The College Board and ETS, which make huge sums of money off administering the SAT, know that its very existence is threatened by research showing that the test can be beaten by coaching. The test preparation industry has a financial incentive to argue the SAT can in fact be beaten by coaching and their services will give college applicants a big bounce in their scores. Selective colleges--and the members of organizations like NACAC--have incentives, financial and otherwise, to keep the test around. Advocates of low-income minority students see the SAT as a screening device that favors the white and wealthy, even without SAT coaching being factored into the equation.

It is possible to construct an experiment empirically measuring whether SAT coaching works. Doing so would require randomly assigning students to experimental and control groups and comparing test-to-test changes in the scores of those who had gone through coaching and those who had not. Unfortunately, no such experiment has yet been performed, leaving the nation's parents having to base their decisions on advertisements by test-preparation companies and "research" that may be no more trustworthy.

UPDATE: Bob Schaeffer of FairTest points out that a study involving experimental and control groups of students actually was done back in 1988. It was for a Ph.D. dissertation, and, although it had a fairly small sample, the fact a doctoral student pulled it off suggests the possibility of conducting other such studies on a broader scale. A link to it is here.

Study Finds the Brightest and Wealthiest Increasing Concentrated at Top Colleges

2009-05-19T17:50:00.002-04:00

Research findings presented last month show that intensifying competition for admission to selective colleges has led to a rising concentration of top students at such institutions.

As discussed in depth in an article on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog, the new study, presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, found that students who are high achievers or from high-income families have become scarcer at two-year colleges and noncompetitive four-year institutions in recent decades as they have focused their attention on getting into the best colleges possible.

Michael N. Bastedo, an assistant professor of education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Ozan Jaquette, a doctoral candidate at Michigan, based their analysis on data from three nationally representative, long-term surveys: the High School and Beyond Survey of 1980, the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988, and the Educational Longitudinal Survey of 2002. They focused on students who completed high school in 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2004, analyzing changes over time in the relationship between socioeconomic stratification, precollege academic preparation, and the colleges where students end up.

The researchers’ analysis was rooted in “signaling” theory, which holds that education credentials distinguish their holders from competitors for jobs, and the value of a credential is inversely related to the proportion of job applicants possessing it.

How Researchers Classify Biracial Subjects Skews Study Results

2009-05-12T16:42:00.002-04:00

The manner in which researchers classify biracial subjects can seriously skew their results, according to a study presented last month at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference and discussed in depth in a Chronicle of Higher Education article.

The authors of the study are Karen Kurotsuchi Inkelas, an associate professor of college-student personnel at the University of Maryland at College Park; Matthew Soldner, a doctoral student at Maryland; and Katalin Szelényi, an assistant professor of education at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. They conducted their analysis using data on more than 22,000 undergraduate students at 49 colleges gathered as part of the 2007 National Study of Living-Learning Programs, which uses a survey instrument that lets students identify with as many races and ethnicities as they please.

The researchers crunched their numbers using three commonly used approaches to classifying biracial and multiracial students.With one approach, they classified subjects who belong to two or more racial or ethnic groups as simply being “biracial” or “multiracial.” With a second approach, subjects who identity with two groups are classified as belonging to the least prevalent one, so that a student who reports being both white and black is designated as black.

Under a third approach, used by the federal Office of Management and Budget, they gave biracial research subjects dual classifications reflecting their backgrounds, such as “white-black” or “white-Hispanic.” For the sake of keeping the number of categories manageable, they disregarded data from any biracial subset that accounts for less than 1 percent of the total sample studied, with the result being that all dual classifications that did not have "white" on one side of the hyphen were excluded from their analysis.

The researchers found that their choice of classification scheme had a profound impact on their results, with some schemes painting a much bleaker picture than others for certain racial or ethnic groups. In using the second approach, for example, and classifying students who had identified themselves as white and Native American as being Native American, they drastically overestimated the percentage of Native American students who were receiving merit-based aid.

Because each classification scheme had strengths and weaknesses, the researchers concluded “there is no single solution to this empirical dilemma."

Asian Americans Rebel Against New U. of California Admissions Policy

2009-04-25T15:10:00.002-04:00

University of California officials have angered many Asian Americans in that state by adopting an admissions policy tentatively projected to decrease their share of students admitted to UC campuses. As discussed in depth here in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Asian American activists have responded to the change by mounting a campaign of resistance involving legislative pressure, threats of litigation, and angry letters and phone calls to the university from Asian-American parents and alumni. The university continued last week to insist that Asian Americans' fears of being disadvantaged by the new admissions policy are overblown, but Asian American activists and the state legislature's Asian American and Pacific Islander caucus weren't buying it.

Color and Money Author Wins National Award for Writing on Education Research

2009-03-04T18:23:00.002-05:00

The Education Writers Association has given a national award to Color and Money author Peter Schmidt for his reporting on education research as a Senior Writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The association gave Schmidt a special citation for beat reporting for 2008 articles on education research dealing with black men in college, colleges' increased reliance on part-time instructors, affirmative action, remedial education, and selective colleges' reliance on the SAT test.

Yale Plans to Halt "Ethnic Counselor" Program

2009-03-02T17:24:00.003-05:00

Yale University’s undergraduate college plans to cease maintaining a force of “ethnic counselors” to help minority freshmen adjust to their first year of college.

Yale College now assigns 13 seniors to work with freshmen from racial or ethnic minority groups, while an additional 78 seniors serve as residential student counselors for the broader freshmen population. The planned overhaul of its counseling efforts calls for the ethnic counselors to be merged into the broader counseling force, which will be provided with intercultural training and expanded. University officials have said the new counseling force will be better able to serve students who are not necessarily members of minority groups but face challenges in adjusting to Yale.

An article on The Chronicle of Higher Education news blog discusses the move, and student reactions to it, in more depth. It includes a prediction by Gwendolyn Dungy, executive director of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, that other colleges will cut back on their ethnic counselor forces in the coming months. Unlike Yale, however, many of the others will make such moves as part of efforts to shrink their payrolls in response to financial pressures.

Economics Coverage Dropped from a Silver Spoon

2009-02-18T18:07:00.022-05:00

Few newspapers have as much influence on American opinion as The New York Times, and few reporters have risen to positions at the Times as quickly as Catherine Rampell, the economics editor at nytimes.com and a frequent contributor to economics coverage in the paper's A section. She landed the gig less than two years out of college, after brief stints at The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Washington Post. While in college, she interned for NPR and was a researcher for NBC. Even before she started college at Princeton, her work had been published in newspapers such as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Palm Beach Jewish Times.

What put her on such a fast track? And what kind of background does she bring to covering a national economic crisis brought about largely by corporate executives who make more in a day than many Americans do in a year?

Her profile on the New York Times Web site jokingly says she "grew up in South Florida (the New York part)." A closer look at her background shows that, to be specific, she came from the "Upper East Side" part of South Florida, Palm Beach. She attended one of the most elite East Coast boarding schools, Phillips (Andover) Academy, before going on to Princeton.*

There is nothing in her background to suggest she is not hard-working and bright--as are many journalists who are not afforded nearly the same opportunities. But it is an column she wrote for Princeton's student paper, later reprinted in The Chicago Tribune, that may offer the best clues as to her edge in life and her current mindset. In it, Rampell, a Princton legacy, gives a full-throated defense of legacy preferences and the use of family connections and wealth to gain advantage.

Admitting to being a "possible beneficiary"** of a legacy preference, Rampell suggests--contrary to social-science research readily available in Princeton's library--that such preferences serve only as tie-breakers, "never to the exclusion of more qualified non-legacy candidates." She then offers the following argument:

"Suppose your cousin and a total stranger get into a no-fault traffic accident. Both need one pint of blood, which you, a strapping young thing of over 110 lb and high iron levels, can supply to only one person. You would not hesitate to give the blood to your cousin — even if she needs it no more and no less than the otherwise indistinguishable stranger — because she is family.
"Princeton faces a parallel moral choice in its admissions. Princeton is more than a temporary aging vat; it is also a family, and its alumni are its kin. By definition, the quality of the student body does not suffer in taking a legacy over an equally qualified non-legacy, but there is a moral opportunity cost, a disloyalty, in not doing so. Loyalty to family, especially when there is no greater principle at risk, is important.
"Even if the school felt it bore no loyalty to its alumni, it still has the duty to minimize harm; the school knows that a rejection letter will likely cause greater trauma to a family that has been emotionally investing in the next generation's admission to Princeton for decades than to a family of an equally qualified but less invested candidate."

Her piece goes on to call legacy preferences "a benign gesture that can help grease Annual Giving's wheels" and to characterize those who object to them as "anti-capitalist snobs." It ends by calling legacy preferences "a moral means to a moral end."

*A 2003 New York Times article offers insight into how much she has been helped by her family's wealth. It describes how her parents interrupted a Mediterranean cruise and dropped $100,000 battling to get her promptly reinstated at Phillips after she was suspended following a meltdown over a boyfriend. Phillips ended up bending its rules to reinstate her much faster than it otherwise would have, but the family nonetheless took its beef with the school to a Times writer. A spokeswoman for Phillips characterized the family's approach to the dispute as "shock and awe" and told the Times writer "you're part of it."

**Her father was a 1974 graduate of Princeton, currently serves as chairman of annual giving to Princeton for his graduating class, and has been president of the Princeton alumni association.

(Full disclosure: The author of this blog post, Peter Schmidt, is a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. He did not work directly with Ms. Rampell during her stint there and recalls any interactions they had as professional and cordial.)

Public College Presidents Put on Notice They Might Be Held Personally Liable for Illegal Speech Codes

2009-02-16T11:08:00.003-05:00

A prominent free-speech advocacy group has stepped up its campaign to limit the speech codes that many colleges rely on partly to ensure their minority students feel comfortable on campus.

As discussed in detail in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is turning the heat up on public colleges' presidents and chancellors by warning them that they can be held personally liable by the courts if their institution's speech code violates the First Amendment.

FIRE has sent registered letters to officials at 266 public colleges telling them it regards their speech codes as problematic. The letters cite 1982 Supreme Court ruling, in the case Harlow v. Fitzgerald, which held that government officials have immunity from personal liability for their actions only "insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." Having, through standard certified mail procedures, formally acknowledged receipt of the letters in their hands, the college officials can no longer claim ignorance if sued over their speech policies, the letters say.

Obama Announces Surprise Pick to Enforce Civil-Rights Laws in Education

2009-02-09T20:38:00.002-05:00

When the Education Department last week announced President Obama's nominee to head up its enforcement of civil-rights laws, the reaction from some lawyers for colleges or civil-rights groups was a puzzled "Who?"

His pick as the department's assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlynn Ali, is known mainly for her work with organizations focused on trying to reform K-12 education. As discussed in detail in an article on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog, she is vice president of the Education Trust and executive director of its West Coast-based partner organization, Education Trust-West. Although both groups are focused on helping Hispanic, black, Native American, and low-income students, they do so by promoting high academic achievement, not by advocating civil rights.

Ms. Ali previously served as liaison to the president of the Children's Defense Fund and as chief of staff to the president of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education. Her last major stint focusing on civil-rights laws was a position as deputy co-director of the Advancement Project, a Washington-based advocacy group that describes itself as dedicated to promoting racial justice.

Despite her having much less of a reputation as a civil-rights advocate than as an education activist, William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, told the Chronicle he welcomed the selection of Ms. Ali, saying "I think she is a strong advocate for children."

Nebraska Ban on Affirmative-Action Preferences Upheld in State Court

2009-01-29T20:28:00.002-05:00

A state court has upheld Nebraska's new ban on the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and other state agencies.

As reported on The Chronicle of Higher Education news blog, Judge Karen Flowers of Lancaster County court ruled against Nebraskans United, a group that led opposition to the measure, in a lawsuit alleging improprieties in how signatures were gathered to get it on the ballot. She held that, contrary to Nebraskans United’s claims, “the facts do not support a finding that there was any pervasive pattern and practice of fraud, misinterpretation, or deception” in the petition-gathering process.

The Nebraska measure was approved by 58 percent of the state's voters in the November election.

Many Qualified Low-Income Students Don't Apply to Selective Colleges, Study Finds

2009-01-25T19:13:00.002-05:00

Thousands of students from low-income families fail every year to apply to selective colleges that would accept them and likely offer them aid, according to the results of a study described recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The researchers behind the study--Caroline M. Hoxby, a professor of economics at Stanford University, and Christopher N. Avery, a professor of public policy at Harvard University--based their analysis on five years of data on SAT-takers, as well other information that enabled them to roughly ascertain students' incomes. In one typical year, they found, about 21,000 students from low-income families achieved at high enough levels to gain admission to a college classified as selective, but fewer than 40 percent applied to one.

The researchers are tentatively pointing a finger at geography as one of the major forces holding students back. They have found indications that the high-achieving, low-income students least likely to apply to selective colleges are those living in small towns and rural areas where their families, teachers, and counselors are less likely to have easy access to information about selective colleges.

Colleges Accused of Shirking Obligation to Seek Alternatives to Affirmative Action

2009-01-05T18:39:00.004-05:00

An article slated for publication in the Catholic University Law Review argues that many colleges have largely disregarded the U.S. Supreme Court’s admonition to seriously consider other options before using race-conscious admissions policies.

As summarized in a posting on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog, the article notes that the majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan’s law school, held that colleges must first give “serious, good-faith consideration” to “workable, race-neutral” alternatives to achieving diversity if their race-conscious admissions policies are to be considered narrowly tailored to promoting a compelling government interest.

But colleges have received little or no guidance from the courts or federal government on how to meet such a requirement, and as a result they “appear to be floundering,” the article says.

The authors are George R. LaNoue, a professor of political science and public policy at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and Kenneth L. Marcus, a visiting professor at the City University of New York’s Baruch College who served as staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 2004 until this year and as a top lawyer in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights before that. —Peter Schmidt

Color and Money Gets Positive Review in International Education Journal

2008-12-09T19:40:00.003-05:00

The new issue of the International Journal of Educational Advancement has a favorable review of Color and Money.

The reviewer, Christine M. Luce of Vanderbilt University, praises Color and Money for including "novel critiques of the arguments both for and against affirmative action" and says it "realistically portrays the theoretical arguments, research data, and political motivations of the winners and loses in affirmative action policy without regard to political correctness."

She writes: "I find it both rare and refreshing to read such an honest, insightful book, which boldly challenges the status quo." Her review predicts that Color and Money "will certainly shape future debates" on the affirmative action issue.

New Study Suggests Poverty Takes Toll on Children's Brains

2008-12-02T21:10:00.003-05:00

A new neurological study of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds has found evidence that being raised in poverty may hurt the development of the brain region responsible for problem solving and creativity.

The researchers behind the study, slated for publication in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, say they are hopeful that the lower brain function they have identified in many low-income children can be prevented or reversed. Accordingly, they are collaborating with other neuroscientists who use games and other stimuli to improve the functioning of the brain region in question--the prefrontal cortex--in school-age children.

Nonetheless, the researchers--all from the University of California at Berkeley--say their study's findings provide reason to worry that the environmental conditions experienced by low-income children pose a serious risk to their educational development.

"This is a wake-up call," says one of the study's co-authors, Robert Knight, the director of Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. "It is not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums."

The researchers conducted the study by using electroencephalograph, or EEG, to measure the brain activity of two groups of 9- and 10-year-olds--one from low-income backgrounds, the other from high-income backgrounds. None of the children involved had neurological damage or prenatal exposure to drugs and alchohol, but the brains of those from lower-income backgrounds were slower to exhibit responses to stimuli flashed on a screen in front of them.

Mark Kishiyama, a cognitive psychologist who is the study's lead author, says the electrical activity in the brains of many of the children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds actually bore some resemblance to the activity in the brains of adults whose prefrontal lobes have been damaged by strokes. "This difference may manifest itself in problem solving and school peformance," he says.

Studies of animals have shown that their prefrontal cortexes can be affected by stress and environmental deprivation. And other studies of humans have shown that children from lower-income backgrounds tend to get significantly less stimulation in early childhood than those who are more privileged.

The good news offered by one study co-author--Thomas Boyce, a pediatrician and developmental psychobiologist--is that it might be possible to improve the brain development of low-income children through steps as simple as encouraging their parents to engage them in conversation more often.

Study: Blacks Reap Smaller Gains from Majors in Lucrative Fields

2008-11-23T12:46:00.004-05:00

A new study that tracked minority college students over time found that black students who majored in high-paying fields reaped smaller financial gains than comparable Asian- and Hispanic-American students when they entered the job market.

As discussed in more depth in an article on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog, the study tracked about 350 students who had applied for the Gates Millennium Scholars Program for low-income minority students and had gone through its selection process. If found that the salary premium that Asian- and Hispanic-American students received from majoring in science, technology, mathematics, or engineering was 50 percent higher than what black students who had majored in those fields were earning soon after college. Asian- and Hispanic-American students also reaped a higher salary premium than did black students for majoring in professional fields such as business or law.

The researchers behind the study--Tatiana Melguizo, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, and Gregory C. Wolniak, a research scientist at the National Opinion Research Center--found some evidence that variations in occupational choices might help explain the gaps. They did not look into whether discrimination played a role because they did not have sufficient data matching students with their employers.

Conservative Advocacy Group Demands Admissions Data from UCLA

2008-11-18T17:20:00.003-05:00

The Pacific Legal Foundation--a prominent conservative advocacy group--is demanding that the University of California at Los Angeles produce applicant data that might show whether it is considering race in admissions, in violation of a state ban on the practice.

As reported in an article on The Chronicle of Higher Education news blog, the foundation sent a letter to UCLA last month demanding a host of information under the state's open records laws. Among the documents that it requests in its letter are undergraduate applications (with all personally identifying information removed) from students seeking admission to the Classes of 2005 through 2008; records giving the identities of all applications readers, the scores they gave each application, and their reasons for deciding to admit or reject each candidate; and all handbooks and other documents designed to guide applications readers.

Post-Election Analyses: Obama's Coattails Saved Affirmative-Action Preferences in Colorado

2008-11-10T16:25:00.006-05:00

Ward Connerly's crusade against affirmative-action preferences suffered its first major defeat at the polls on election day, as Colorado voters narrowly rejected his proposed ban on the use of such preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies.

A look back at what happened in Colorado suggests that Connerly's opponents would be mistaken in concluding they have clearly turned the tide against him, however.

For starters, the measure was defeated by an extremely narrow margin: 50.7 percent against, 49.3 percent for. It was not until several days after the election that state election officials concluded that it had, in fact, lost.

More importantly, as a Chronicle of Higher Education analysis of the election results points out, political scientists and other experts believe Barack Obama's campaign played a substantial role in the measure's defeat. Not only did the Obama campaign's formidable advertising blitz and ground game turn Colorado from red to blue--allowing him to win 53 percent of the popular vote--it also brought to the polls a lot of people who had not voted in past elections. They included black and Hispanic voters and college students, populations that have been strongholds of support for affirmative-action preferences when similar measures were voted on in other states.

Kenneth Bickers, a political-science professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told the Chronicle: “This election brought out people who in most typical elections wouldn’t be voting.”

For his part, Connerly told the newspaper: “If the vote was held tomorrow with no Obama money and no Obama on the ballot, we’d win, 60 to 40."

A similar measure easily passed with nearly 58 percent of the vote in Nebraska, which remained solidly red as 57 percent of its voters backed McCain.

Connerly's opponents managed to keep such measures off the ballot in Arizona, Missouri, and Oklahoma, through concerted efforts to block his petition-gathering efforts and to challenge the legitimacy of the petitions he submitted. He told the Chronicle he already has a new effort underway to get such a measure on the Missouri ballot, in 2010. He said he also may give Arizona and Colorado another shot down the road.

Report: Disadvantaged College Students Least Likely to Be Exposed to Best Education Practices

2008-10-28T18:39:00.003-04:00

The Association of American Colleges and Universities has issued a report concluding that the students most likely to benefit from several highly effective educational practices--those who are black, Hispanic, and "first generation"--are the least likely to be exposed to such practices while in college.

The report, discussed here in The Chronicle of Higher Education, notes that while 57 percent of white students have internships their employers view as highly desirable, only 46 percent of black and Hispanic students have comparable internship experiences. And while 36 percent of seniors whose parents had gone to college say they had to complete a capstone course or project integrating and applying what they have learned, just 29 percent of first-generation college students report having a capstone assignment. The lower a student's achievement levels when beginning college, the report says, the greater benefit he will get from the practices it describes.

Carol Geary Schneider, AACU's president, says the research contained in the new report shows that "we know what works, but we just aren't providing it to all students who could benefit."

Only 17 percent of all college freshmen take part in "learning communities," in which they take two or more linked courses together, even though involvement in such groups has been shown to improve retention, the report says. Just 19 percent of college seniors report having worked with a faculty member on a research project, even though students who have had such an experience report educational benefits such as a greater capacity for deep, integrative learning.

The author of the report is George D. Kuh, director of Indiana University's Center for Postsecondary Research.

Hear Peter Schmidt Interviewed by the San Diego Union Tribune

2008-10-20T18:56:00.002-04:00

Color and Money author Peter Schmidt was extensively interviewed by Chris Reed, an editorial writer for the San Diego Union Tribune, in September. A recording of the interview has now been posted online here.

New Efforts to Help Black Males Focus on the Positive

2008-10-15T16:16:00.002-04:00

Color and Money author Peter Schmidt extensively documents pragmatic, research-based efforts to help black males succeed in college in a new article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The article does not gloss over the educational problems of black boys and men. It notes that black males graduate from high school and attend and complete college at disproportionately low rates and that black men are outnumbered by black women in colleges by a ratio nearly two to one, the highest level of gender imbalance of any racial or ethnic group. It cites a recent analysis by Shaun R. Harper, an assistant professor of higher-education management at the University of Pennsylvania, finding that fewer than a third of black men who enter four-year colleges as freshmen graduate within six years. Tellingly, Sterling H. Hudson III, dean of admissions and records at Morehouse College, is quoted saying "We really have to scour the entire country to seat a freshman class of 750 to 800 students."

But the article also offers plenty of reason for hope, documenting several efforts to research programs billed as helping black males succeed and to replicate those that are found to be having an impact.

It notes, for example, that University System of Georgia reports that its African American Male Initiative helped increase the system's enrollment of black male students by nearly 25 percent from 2002 to 2007, and that efforts are underway to determine which of several programs established as part of the initiative are having an impact.

Meanwhile, the Student African American Brotherhood, a national group that promotes mentor relationships and has chapters at more than 100 two-year and four-year colleges, is evaluating its programs' effectiveness with the help of a $725,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation for Education.

Mr. Harper of the University of Pennsylvania is involved in two separate ambitious undertakings. With a Lumnia grant he is overseeing a four-year effort by six yet-to-be named colleges to collaboratively work to improve the education outcomes for their black male students. On top of that, he has spent much of the past three years studying the attitudes and habits of more than 200 academically successful black male undergraduates at 42 public and private colleges.

One of the article's key conclusions is that efforts to help black males succeed in education institutions need to be mindful of the importance of support from their homes. It cites research by Mr. Harper and by Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, showing that most academically successful black males share a common background trait: parents who consistently express high expectations.

Public Law Schools in Arizona and Nebraska Accused of Bias Against White Applicants

2008-10-13T17:54:00.002-04:00

The Center for Equal Opportunity has issued reports accusing the law schools of the Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Nebraska of systematically rejecting white applicants in favor of much weaker applicants from certain minority groups.

The center’s analysis of student data from the Arizona law schools concludes that — controlling for year of admission, test scores, grades, state residency, and sex — the odds ratio favoring black applicants over white ones at Arizona State’s law school exceeds 1,100 to 1, while the ratio favoring black applicants over white ones at the University of Arizona’s school exceeds 250 to 1. (More details are available here on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog.) The center's analysis of data from the Nebraska law school, discussed in more detail here, says the odds favoring black applicants to the law school over white applicants with the same academic profiles are 442 to 1.

Peter Schmidt in USA Today: The Affirmative Action "Wedge" Splits the GOP, Too

2008-09-30T18:41:00.002-04:00

When John McCain voiced opposition to affirmative action preferences last summer in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, the conventional wisdom among many pundits was that he was bringing up a wedge issue long used to divide Democrats along racial lines.

In an analysis recently published in USA Today, Peter Schmidt, the author of Color and Money, makes the case that the affirmative action issue divides Republicans as well--enough so to discourage the McCain campaign from drawing much attention to his stand.

Did Elite College Lacrosse Contribute to Our Economic Crisis?

2008-09-27T18:26:00.005-04:00

One of the key findings of Color and Money is that selective colleges serve as a sorting machine, playing a key role in determining who rises to positions of leadership and makes big bucks in places such as Wall Street. In examining the inefficiencies of that sorting machine, Color and Money cites a wealth of research showing how selective colleges lower the bar for students who have cash or connections or can play a sport well. Left largely unexplored by the book is the question of what mayhem can result when elite college degrees are conferred upon people who really are not very bright, helping them go on to land jobs where they can do things like, well, make decisions that will profoundly effect our economy and help determine whether our retirement funds will grow or disappear.

With our economy being described as teetering on disaster, it is instructive, therefore, to read this Wall Street Journal article, passed along by an appreciative and alert Color and Money reader. It describes how many major Wall Street investment firms, including Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, maintain their own lacrosse teams and are happy to recruit young men skilled in the sport. It cites the old joke "the only way to get a job on Wall Street is to have high test scores or play lacrosse," suggesting that skill in the sport not only opens the doors of selective colleges, but the doors of firms that recruit employees from them.

Given how much investment bankers make, one suspects that Wall Street lacrosse players have plenty of cash on hand should they choose to hire strippers for their team parties.

Feds to Colleges: Don't Consider Applicants' Race Unless Diversity Is "Essential" to Your Mission

2008-09-23T18:01:00.002-04:00

As discussed in depth here on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights has sent colleges a letter telling them they may not consider race in admissions unless it is “essential” to their “mission and stated goals.”

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has responded by accusing the federal government of overstating the limitations placed on race-conscious admissions policies by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2003 rulings involving the University of Michigan's chief undergraduate program and law school. “There is no reason for such clarification at this time,” a statement issued by the group says. “Rather, it seems that more than five years after those decisions, OCR is issuing this letter to further its efforts to subvert and give unnecessary pause to higher-education institutions that are pursuing a racially diverse student population in a constitutional manner."

For their part, few college lawyers have said much in protest of the new federal guidance, which they generally see as reflecting their own interpretation of the Supreme Court's rulings.

New Congressional Caucus To Advocate for Colleges Serving Black Students

2008-09-19T17:00:00.002-04:00

More than two dozen members of the U.S. House of Representatives have banded together in a new caucus to promote the interests of historically black colleges and universities and other higher-education institutions classified as predominantly black. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Democrat of Texas, says she and two colleagues, Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, a Democrat, and Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. of Tennessee, a Republican, founded the group “in order to create a bipartisan dialogue in Congress that will focus on the legislative priorities of our nation’s HBCU’s.” Full Chronicle of Higher Education news blog coverage of this development is available here. The new effort was announced this month at a breakfast staged by the United Negro College Fund.

Researchers Sue California Bar for Data on Law School Graduates

2008-09-17T20:56:00.002-04:00

Two researchers who question the benefits of affirmative action are asking the California Supreme Court to force that state’s bar to release years of data showing how law-school graduates of different races and ethnicities perform on their bar exams. The lead plaintiff in the suit, filed last month, is Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles who has already produced controversial research concluding that race-conscious admissions policies hurt many black law students and lawyers, by setting them up to perform poorly in their chosen field. Full Chronicle of Higher Education blog coverage of the suit is available here.

Study Finds Blacks, Hispanics, Women Take Longer to Earn Doctorates

2008-09-15T19:52:00.003-04:00

A new report from the Council of Graduate Schools suggests that blacks, Hispanics, and women are less likely to earn their PhDs partly because they end up taking longer to get through doctoral programs.

While 23 percent of whites or Asian Americans who earned doctorates within 10 years did so after the seventh year in doctoral programs, 27 percent of blacks and 36 percent of Hispanics who earned doctorates within a seven-year period.

Women are three percentage points less likely than men to complete their doctorates than men in 10 years, but the gap would be even wider if not for women's persistence in such programs. Six years into such programs, women are nine percentage points less likely to have earned their PhDs. The gap narrows as women stick it out and finish sometime after the seven-year mark.

William B. Russel, dean of Princeton University's Graduate School, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that a disproportionate share of minority students enter doctoral programs academically and, in some cases, culturally unprepared for the demands that will be placed on them, causing them to fall behind early on.

Pamela J. Benoit, dean of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri at Columbia, told the newspaper that the report's findings highlight the need for student-retention efforts to take into account where students are in their doctoral studies. "There is a real difference between issues that have to do with early attrition and late attrition," she said. Students who drop out of such programs early on may do so because they chose the wrong programs or lacked access to strong mentors, while students who abandon their quest for a doctorate late in the process often do so because of some conflict with a faculty adviser or a dissertation committee.

The report is titled Ph.D. Completion and Attrition: Analysis of Baseline Demographic Data From the Ph.D. Completion Project. A Chronicle of Higher Education article on it is available to Chronicle subscribers here.

Election Year Reality Check: Here's a Formula for Measuring the Political Clout of the Rich

2008-09-01T19:49:00.007-04:00

We sometimes hear people lament that our federal government does not care much about the little guy, that a rich man’s vote seems to carry a lot more weight than a poor man’s. Candidates for Congress and the presidency often claim they will look out for ordinary Americans, but, once in office, they are almost always accused of catering to the mansion-and-Mercedes crowd.

Are complaints that the rich rule the nation the product of excessive cynicism? How much truth is there to them?

Martin Gilens, an associate professor of politics at Princeton University, sought to find out in a study first released as a working paper in August 2004 and later published in the Public Opinion Quarterly. He looked at the views Americans expressed toward various possible changes in federal policy in surveys conducted from 1992 and 1998 and checked whether the federal government ended up heeding the survey respondents’ wishes. He then broke down the results by income group, focusing his attention mainly on those whose incomes were at the 10th percentile (meaning they had less money than about nine out of ten Americans), those at the 90th percentile (who had more money than about nine out of ten), and those who were squarely in the middle, at the 50th percentile.

In aggregate, Gilens found, a policy that was overwhelmingly favored by people with incomes in the 10th through 50th percentile was about twice as likely to be implemented as a policy that was overwhelmingly opposed by them. A policy that was overwhelmingly favored by people at the 90th percentile was, by comparison, four times as likely to be implemented as a policy that they overwhelmingly opposed.

It’s wrong, however, to look at such numbers and conclude that the wealthy had about twice as much clout as those who are working- or solidly middle-class. That’s because on many questions—such as whether the federal budget should be balanced—both the rich and the poor held very similar views. It’s entirely possible that the government was carrying out the wishes of the poor simply because the rich wanted the same thing.

To get a clearer picture of which income groups had how much clout, Gilens looked at about 300 survey questions dealing with areas of substantial disagreement between the wealthy and poor. They included, for example, questions such as whether the government should enter free trade pacts like NAFTA, and whether it should cut capital gains and inheritance taxes. On such questions, Gilens found, the government’s actions were strongly correlated with the desires of the wealthy, but largely ignored the views of both the poor and middle class. A policy strongly supported by the wealthy was six times as likely to be implemented as a policy that the wealthy strongly opposed. A policy strongly supported by middle-income Americans was only 1.3 times as likely to be implemented as a policy they strongly opposed, and the views of the poor appeared to have almost no bearing on the government’s decisions at all.

Of course, it was possible something besides money was at work. Because both wealthy people and key decision-makers in government tend to be highly educated, maybe what they had in common was being smart and well-informed. But when Gilens tweaked his analysis to compare the highly educated of every income group, he found that money, in itself, still played a key role in determining whether people’s wishes were heard.

Gilens says the key advantage the wealthy have in shaping policy is the wherewithal to donate to parties, candidates, and interest organization. One might wonder, however, if the vast personal wealth of many in top positions in government also plays a role, and the picture would be different if more lower- and middle-income Americans stood a chance of rising to positions of power.

Gilens writes: “There has never been a democratic society in which citizens’ influence over government policy was unrelated to their financial resources. In this sense, the difference between democracy and plutocracy is one of degree. But, by this same token, a government that is democratic in form but is in practice only responsive to its most affluent citizens is a democracy in name only.”

A footnote of interest to readers of Color and Money: Gilens found that the poor were more likely to support affirmative action than the wealthy. The finding, he says, is not simply a reflection of the fact that black people are disproportionately represented at the bottom of the economic ladder. Other studies have found that poor white people are more likely to support affirmative action than people who are white and wealthy.

Ballot Measures to Ban Preferences Certified in Nebraska, Rejected in Arizona

2008-08-26T18:52:00.006-04:00

As discussed in depth here on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog, Arizona's secretary of state has decided that the backers of a proposed ballot measure curtailing the use of affirmative-action preferences have failed to gather enough valid petition signatures to get it on the ballot. The campaign on behalf of the measure is combing through the rejected signatures to try to find enough good ones to challenge the state official's decision.

Meanwhile, Nebraska's secretary of state has determined that the campaign on behalf of such a measure in his state has indeed gathered enough valid signatures for it to be on the ballot in November.

Barack Obama Praised for Nuance in His Views on Affirmative Action

2008-08-20T19:39:00.002-04:00

As discussed by Peter Schmidt here on the Chronicle of Higher Education Campaign U blog, Barack Obama has been winning praise from both the right and the left for his willingness to inject the issue of class into the affirmative action debate. Among those giving him credit for raising the level of the debate are the anti-affirmative-action crusader Ward Connerly and John Payton, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

On the Republican side, John McCain has declared his support for a proposed Arizona ballot measure that would ban the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies. But, in explaining his position, he has said he is opposed to "quotas", which the Supreme Court took off the table 30 years ago. As Color and Money makes abundantly clear, an awful lot has happened since that time.

Watch Peter Schmidt on C-Span's Book TV

2008-08-19T15:31:00.004-04:00

C-Span's Book TV interviewed Peter Schmidt last fall at the National Press Club's book fair. C-Span now has the interview posted in its video archives, available for viewing here.

"Learning Communities" Found to Help Disadvantaged Students

2008-08-11T18:35:00.002-04:00

A recently published study says community-college students who are low-income and academically unprepared appear to benefit from being placed in effective "learning communities" where they take classes together and can give each other support.

Two Syracuse University-based researchers--Cathy McHugh Engstrom, an associate professor of higher education, and Vincent Tinto, a professor of education--conducted the study by surveying and tracking the progress of students at 13 community colleges around the nation. They compared 1,600 low-income and unprepared freshmen who been placed in learning communities, taking remedial classes together, with nearly 2,300 who had not been placed in such groups.

In an article published in the journal Opportunity Matters the two researchers say they found that the learning-community students were more likely than the others to report feeling engaged in their studies, and were more positive than the others in their perceptions of how much encouragement they received on their campus and how much they had intellectually progressed.

The researchers caution in their article that the learning-community programs they studied were by no means representative of all such programs. To be included in the study, the programs had to focus on teaching basic skills and had to serve the full spectrum of students widely regarded as "at risk," including those who had low incomes, or were members of minority groups, immigrants, or members of the first generation of their families to attend college. Perhaps more importantly, all of the community colleges involved had previously gathered some evidence demonstrating that the programs on their campuses were effective in helping academically unprepared students.

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers more details on the study, as well as similar research dealing with four-year colleges, here.

New Report Looks at How Lack of Accumulated Wealth Hurts Black Families

2008-08-06T18:07:00.002-04:00

A new report from the Center for American Progress suggests that the United States' black population has much less upward economic mobility than its white population largely because it has more trouble accumulating wealth from one generation to the next..

Much other research on economic mobility has focused on income, but that's only part of the picture. When it comes to dealing with dealing with economic setbacks such as the loss of a job, or making a long-term investment in your child's future by ponying up money for college tuition, it matters to have money in the bank or other forms of built up equity.

Moreover, wealth, education, and income all build on each other. The more money families have saved to finance tuition, the more likely children are to get a degree that will land them a lucrative job, enabling them to sock away money to send their kids off to college.

The center based its analysis on family-wealth data gathered from 1984 to 2003 as part of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a national study that follows families and individuals over time. The researchers looked at people who were from 6 to 21 in 1984 and measured their family wealth then and their own wealth in the 1999-to-2003 period, when they were 24 to 40 years old.

As discussed in more depth in a Chronicle of Higher Education article, white children born to wealthy families are much more likely to become wealthy adults than black children born to such families, the center's analysis found. Among those born to families in the top fourth of society in terms of accumulated wealth, 55 percent of white children and 37 percent of black children grow up to be in the top fourth as adults. At the other end of wealth distribution, 35 percent of white children and 44 percent of black children born to families in the bottom fourth end up in the bottom fourth as adults, the report says.

Although the researchers did not specifically study what factors account for the black-white gap in wealth accumulation, their report suggests that discrimination in housing, employment, and other areas plays a role. The report also notes that black families in the top fourth tend to be in the bottom of that category, making it more likely, simply as a statistical matter, that they would fall into a lower bracket if they lost any wealth at all.

Similar conclusions were contained in a recent report on upward mobility published by the Economic Mobility Project—a collaborative involving the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the Urban Institute.

That report, by Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist, said the entire black-white gap in upward economic mobility can be explained by gaps in academic-test scores. Both black and white children with the same test scores experienced similar rates of upward mobility, and there was no racial gap in economic mobility among white and black people who had finished four years of college.

Don't Count on Remedial Programs to Help Minority Students Catch Up

2008-08-04T16:41:00.002-04:00

Two yet-unpublished studies hold bad news for anyone looking to college remedial programs to help minority students overcome whatever education deficits they may have.

Based on examinations of the long-term educational success of students who entered college with comparable levels of academic preparation, both studies found that going through remedial programs really does not make much of a difference. Students who were thrown straight into regular academic classes where they were likely to feel over their heads were about as likely as students in remedial classes to achieve key educational goals such as earning a four-year degree.

The studies, discussed here in a Chronicle of Higher Education article, focus on students who were at or near the cut-off for assignment to remedial education programs. In doing so, they avoid a conundrum that has undermined several other similar studies: Simply comparing the academic fates of all students in remedial programs with those of all students not in such programs is unfair to the programs themselves, because most members of the first group enter college in much worse shape than most members of the second.

Such a research approach had one key drawback: It prevented the researchers from determining whether remedial classes help those students who enter college so academically unprepared they stand virtually no chance of going straight into regular academic classes.

Moreover, because the studies use statewide data and base their conclusions on average performance levels for the different populations studied, they likely obscure substantial variation in the quality of remedial programs. Their conclusions that remedial programs do not make much difference is likely based on data from some programs that actually do help students, as well as some programs that do harm.

One of the studies, of nearly 100,000 Florida community-college students, was conducted by Bridget Terry Long, an associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University, and Juan Carlos Calcagno, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College. Among its findings, it concluded that students who took remedial classes ended up earning more credits over all, but not significantly more credits that were college-level.

The second study, based on Texas data, was conducted by Isaac McFarlin Jr., a research scientist at the University of Texas at Dallas and a visiting scholar at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Francisco (Paco) Martorell, an associate economist at the RAND Corporation. It did not find any evidence that students who took remedial reading or mathematics classes were more likely to earn a college degree than comparably prepared students who went straight into academic classes.

In a third study discussed in the same Chronicle article, Ms. Long and Eric P. Bettinger, an associate professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University, tracked the long-term progress of 28,000 Ohio college students and actually did find benefits from participation in remedial classes. Ms. Long told the Chronicle that the discrepancies between the Ohio study and the others may be due to the narrower subset of the population that the Ohio study covered. It was limited to traditional-age, full-time students who had taken the ACT and either attended a four-year college or indicated on their application to a two-year institution that they planned to complete a four-year degree. The bottom-line conclusions she derived from both of her studies, as well as the Florida research, was that the effect of college remedial programs on most students "is either slightly positive, slightly negative, or zero."

Campaigns for Preference Bans in Arizona and Nebraska Submit Petitions

2008-07-08T18:28:00.002-04:00

As reported in some depth here on The Chronicle of Higher Education news blog, the campaigns for ballot measures to curtail affirmative-action preferences in Arizona and Nebraska say they have gathered enough petition signatures to put the proposals before voters. If elections officials declare enough of the petition signatures valid, both states will likely join Colorado in voting this fall on measures barring public colleges and other state and local agencies from granting preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity, and gender. As discussed extensively in the book Color and Money, similar measures have passed easily in California, Michigan, and Washington State.

Looking Back on Bakke

2008-07-08T18:09:00.002-04:00

Color and Money author Peter Schmidt has commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Bakke affirmative action decision with two articles that have generated a lot of discussion in higher-education circles.

In an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "'Bakke' Set a New Path to Diversity for Colleges," he takes on the question of whether the Bakke ruling diverted colleges onto a dead-end path by forcing them to adopt a new rationale for race-conscious admissions policies--the purported educational benefits of diversity--that would prove difficult to defend in the legal and political arenas as time went on.

In an article published in The Wall Street Journal, "America's Universities Are Living a Diversity Lie," he describes how most colleges continue to have race-conscious admissions policies for reasons the Bakke decision was supposed to have taken off the table, such as a desire to promote social justice. He also discusses how colleges have yet to produce solid research conclusively demonstrating that such policies have educational benefits for all students.

University of Michigan Avoids Any Big Diversity Drop from Preference Ban

2008-06-25T09:49:00.003-04:00

Back in 2006, when Michiganders were voting on a proposal to ban public colleges and other state and local agencies from using affirmative-action preferences, the University of Michigan warned that the passage of such a measure would lead to a huge drop in black, Hispanic, and Native American enrollments on its Ann Arbor campus. The university issued similar warnings in previous years when its ability to use affirmative-action preferences was being challenged in court.

Preliminary admissions numbers for the coming fall recently released by U of M show that such predictions have not come true. In the first full admissions cycle after it was precluded from considering applicants' race, the share of its incoming freshman class that is black, Hispanic, or Native American fell from 10.85 percent to 10.47 percent--a decline, yes, but small enough to go largely unnoticed.

A statement issued by the university described several steps it had taken to try to maintain racial and ethnic diversity. Its undergraduate-admissions office hired additional employees, expanded its hours of operation, and used Descriptor PLUS, a geodemographic search tool developed by the College Board, to identify high schools and neighborhoods that are underrepresented on its campus. The university also stepped up its outreach in communities such as Detroit. (See full Chronicle of Higher Education blog coverage, with a link to the university's statement, here.)

Given that the University of Michigan's enrollment has never been as racially diverse as the state it serves, it's worth asking why Michigan did not take such steps earlier. As the book Color and Money discusses in depth, it often has taken the shock to the system delivered by ban on affirmative-action preferences to get colleges to get serious about finding workable alternatives. When they do get serious, the workable alternatives suddenly appear.

Special News Bulletin: Not All Asian Americans Are Alike!!!

2008-06-25T09:26:00.004-04:00

A report released this month by a collaborative involving the College Board and two New York University institutes tells the world what just about anyone who reads a newspaper or even leaves their house has known for decades: the stereotype of Asian Americans as the "model minority" is horribly simplistic. While some segments of the Asian American population, such as those whose families came over from Japan or India, are doing incredibly well in educational and economic terms, others, such as Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian Americans, are struggling with low education levels and high levels of poverty.

The report offers valuable demographic information about various segments of the Asian American population, but it is also missing a few things. It says little about how colleges tend to lump all Asian American populations together--by giving them just one "Asian American" box to check on applications--and then, often, hold them to admissions standards that are every bit as high as, if not higher than, those applied to white students. In its discussion of affirmative action, the report made no reference to a recent study (discussed here) that found Asian American enrollments rose at several elite public universities after they were barred from considering applicants' race.

Chronicle of Higher Education coverage of the report is available to subscribers here.

A Dissident Voice Roils a Disney World Diversity Conference

2008-06-25T09:14:00.002-04:00

This year's National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education witnessed some excitement beyond what was promised by its locale, Disney World.

One of the nation's leading proponents of diversity in higher education, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, director of Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, delivered a speech taking conference attendees to task for not doing more to advocate for black, Hispanic, and Native American students and faculty members. She went so far as to suggest that colleges let people attend this attend this annual conference—typically held in family-friendly tourist destinations—to reward them for not making waves.

Calling herself "a hard-nosed critic from the inside," Ms. Hu-DeHart said, "Let's face it: Diversity has created jobs for all of us. It is a career. It is an industry."

"We do what we need to keep our jobs," she said. "But as long as we keep doing our job the way we are told to do it, we are covering up for our universities."

"You all are covering up," she said. "You all are complicit in this."

She alleged that people who work in college offices dealing with diversity and minority issues help their institutions create the impression that they are far more concerned with diversity and equity than is actually the case. Her advice to the college chief diversity officers in the crowd? Quit and renegotate your contract to give you more power.

Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers can find full coverage of her speech here and an analytical story following up on the conference here.

New Federal Report Sheds Light on Hispanic Immigrants' Education Problems

2008-06-05T11:37:00.005-04:00

A new report from the U.S. Department of Education finds that the nation's rapidly growing Hispanic population is having some serious academic problems, mainly due to the difficulties many Hispanic immigrants are having in assimilating.

As of 2007, just 34 percent of the nation's Hispanic population in the 25-to-29 age bracket had completed at least some college, compared with 66 percent of white and 50 percent of black U.S. residents in the same age group, the report found. Although Hispanic people have made some gains in this area since the early 1970s, their progress has been slower than that of other groups, so that gaps between white and Hispanic students have widened.

Where the report differentiates between native and foreign-born Hispanics, its findings make clear that many of the educational problems being broadly attributed to the Hispanic population are mainly the problems of Hispanic immigrants. In looking at the Hispanic population in the 16-to-24 age range, for example, the report finds that 12 percent of those born here, and 36 percent of those born abroad, have left high school with neither a diploma or GED.

Hispanics born outside the United States account for 7 percent of the nation's 16- to 24-year-old population, but they make up 28 percent of all U.S. residents in that age group who are not enrolled in high school and have not earned a high-school diploma.

Report from Women's Advocacy Group Threatens to Derail Efforts to Help Troubled Boys

2008-05-23T03:51:00.010-04:00

The American Association of University Women, an advocacy group, made a big splash in the national media this week with a report arguing that the "boys' crisis" in education is a myth.

Instead of offering new research, the report provided the AAUW's take on research already out there. It omitted any discussion of statistics showing that boys are far more likely than girls to be suspended or placed in special education or to commit suicide. It did not find much cause for alarm in data showing that men now account for just 43 percent of bachelor's degree and 41 percent of master's degree recipients, that boys and have significantly lower grade-point averages than girls, and that black women outnumber black men on selective college campuses by a factor of about 2 to 1. Noting that there is not much of a gap in the academic performance of upper-middle-class white boys and girls (the children of much of its membership), it suggested that the gender gaps in other segments of the population should be attributed to class and race. It cited rises in the raw numbers of boys achieving at certain levels to say we should not fret over drops in the percentages achieving at certain thresholds, and cited increases in the grade point averages of boys in asserting that the persistent gap in the grades of boys and girls is not an issue.

Many journalists wrote stories publicizing the report's findings without much in the way of rebuttal or critical analysis. Among the high-profile pieces drawing public attention to it were a front-page story written by Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post, as well as stories by Tamar Lewin of the New York Times and Queenie Wong of the McClatchy Newspapers.

Other education journalists chose to ignore the report as a work of advocacy with dubious scientific value. Instead of giving the report news coverage, USA Today published an editorial saying the AAUW "seems intent on trying to debunk something that's virtually irrefutable: that men are falling behind women at all levels of education, and that this is creating societal problems that need to be addressed." (Richard Whitmire, an editorial writer at USA Today and president of the National Education Writers Association, subsequently explained his objections to the report--and criticized much of the coverage of it--here in an online review of journalism published by USC's School of Communications.)

Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine wrote a blog post suggesting that the AAUW objects to the idea of a boys' crisis because it "threatens the perks and programs of entrenched victims groups." Among the other bloggers who criticized the study were Marty Nemko, a contributing editor at U.S. News and World Report, and Alexander Russo of This Week in Education, who threatened to trigger a gender war among education writers with a post titled "Women's Group Says Boys Not In Crisis; Female Reporters Agree."

Sorting through this controversy is important. Not only has the AAUW's report received a lot of public attention, the group has wielded a lot of influence over education policymakers in Washington in the past and, depending on what happens in the November elections, could do so in the future.

Back in the early-to-mid 1990s, the American Association of University Women was known mainly as the driving force behind widespread fears that girls were the ones in crisis. As a reporter for Education Week, Color and Money author Peter Schmidt not only analyzed the AAUW's research on schoolgirls, but obtained many of the group's internal documents shedding light on its motives and methods. His reporting on the subject for Education Week is available only to its subscribers, but he holds the rights to reproduce an article summarizing his findings which he wrote for The Weekly Standard. Given its potential to inform the current debate, it's published in full below:

THE PHONY WAR ON SCHOOLGIRLS: A MYTH EXPOSED by Peter Schmidt 07/08/1996, Volume 001, Issue 42

America's girls are said to face a grave threat: their schools. Word has it that hordes of sexual harassers prey on girls in classrooms and corridors; that teachers routinely ignore or mistreat them; that sexist textbooks degrade them; that gender-biased tests underrate them; and that the entire elementary and secondary education system conspires to break their spirits, cripple their self-esteem, and curtail their careers.

This is the news that certain feminist advocates, with the help of the media, have spread. As a result, "gender bias" has emerged as one of the main concerns of the school-reform movement. School districts have come under pressure to eliminate policies and practices that cannot be deemed "gender neutral." Colleges and universities have been overhauling their education departments to ensure that they are not training tomorrow's teachers in the use of gender-biased instructional methods. States have passed laws designed to promote gender equity and crack down on in-school sexual harassment (even when the alleged perpetrators are children in first or second grade). The previous Congress also joined the crusade, voting to amend its chief school- funding bill with language enlisting various federal programs in the battle for gender equity.

It seems an unquestionably noble cause, the rescue of schoolgirls. But the truth is that girls do not need to be rescued. The much-bemoaned schoolgirls crisis is largely a hoax. By most academic and social measures, the nation's girls are doing fine, and it's the boys we should be worried about.

So where did this widespread misperception come from? It came not from a consensus of education researchers, but a slick public-relations campaign mounted by the leadership of a single advocacy group, the American Association of University Women. The AAUW commissioned, published, and hyped the three reports on schoolgirls that sounded the alarm in the popular media; these reports compose the bible of the ongoing crusade. The AAUW has also taken the lead in lobbying for a policy agenda meant to remedy the problems alleged in its reports.

While the group's leadership insists it mounted its campaign out of a sincere concern for girls, its own literature betrays ulterior motives: ideology and self-interest. AAUW officials had resolved to instill the belief that schools discriminate systematically against girls long before much of anything besides feminist theory told them this was so. Soon, they came to see a crusade as a way to raise their organization's profile, recruit new members, and solicit new donations.

The AAUW issued the first of its three reports, "Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America," in 1991. The report found that girls' self-esteem plunges during adolescence and that schools bear much of the blame. A 1992 report, "How Schools Shortchange Girls," concluded that girls are the victims of severe educational discrimination that affects their marks, course selections, and career possibilities. A 1993 report, "Hostile Hallways," exposed what the AAUW described as "a sexual harassment epidemic" in schools.

The organization touts these reports as authoritative and unbiased, pointing to a dearth of public criticism as evidence of their validity. Anne L. Bryant, the AAUW's executive director, said in 1994 that she could count the reports' critics' on two hands, and those tended to be "a few academics and news commentators--mostly men."

But critics there are. One of them is Diane S. Ravitch, head of the Education Department's research branch under George Bush, who accused the AAUW of selective interpretation of data. Another is Chester E. Finn Jr., who held the same post under Ronald Reagan and called the group's research "a deflection from what is really wrong in education and a focus on a bogus problem." Still another is Joseph Adelson, editor of the widely used Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, who described the AAUW effort as "a propaganda machine that does not seem to respond to any contrary evidence."

If other educators as social scientists have accepted the AAUW's reports at face value, it is perhaps because they have been lulled by the group's reputation as venerable, staid, and mainstream. Established in 1881, the AAUW was old-line and hardly at the vanguard of feminism at the time of its centennial. The average age of its members was 55, and many had rebelled against the group's decision to support abortion rights. The AAUW was founded specifically to advocate on behalf of women who were being denied access to higher education. Having all but won that war, it was suffering a rapid decline in membership and was under pressure to prove its relevance.

So the timing seemed right when, in the mid-1980s, the group discovered Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan and other feminist scholars who had tapped into a hot new field: bias against girls. By June of 1989, AAUW leaders had begun to view the lives of schoolgirls through a feminist lens. In a pamphlet issued that month, they lamented the fact that girls and boys tend to take different courses and get slightly different grades, pointing to gender bias as a prime culprit. Citing the work of Gilligan and others, the pamphlet posited that girls favor cooperation over competition and thus fail to thrive in the competitive, male-centered environments found in most schools. "The structure of lessons and the dynamics of classroom interaction all too often create an environment alien, if not hostile, to girls," it said. The pamphlet urged members to pressure teachers, local school officials, and university education departments to embrace instructional methods certified bias-free.

Fourteen months later, a second pamphlet proclaimed that the schools' white-European-male-dominated curricula must be replaced by books and lessons "that show women and minorities as doers, leaders, and decision-makers." The pamphlet assured AAUW members that their group "was exerting every effort to bring the needs of women and girls to a central position" in the national debate over school reform.

The first big report came in January 1991. Based on a survey of about 3,000 children conducted by the polling firm Greenberg-Lake, it said that girls undergo a dramatic and disproportionate loss of self-esteem during adolescence--due largely to the way they are treated in schools. "Girls aged eight and nine are confident, assertive, and feel authoritative about themselves," the report said. "Yet more emerge from adolescence with a poor self-image, constrained views of their future and their place in society, and must less confidence about themselves and their abilities."

The report linked much of this deterioration to girls' difficulties in math and science. "Of all the study's indicators, girls perceptions of their ability in math and science had the strongest relationship to their self-esteem; as girls 'learn' they are not good at these subjects, their sense of self-worth and aspirations for themselves deteriorate."

Ordinarily, the results of such studies first appear in social-science journals, where others in the field can examine methodologies and conclusions. The AAUW eschewed this approach and chose instead to distribute a spiffy summary directly to the popular media. From a public-relations standpoint, the strategy paid off. The nation's journalists eagerly repeated the report's most alarming conclusions without bothering to check them out. The AAUW's subsequent literature boasted that the survey "shook America's consciousness and had a far-reaching impact."

One journal that showed some skepticism was Science News. In its March 23, 1991, issue, it noted that the AAUW's researchers had depended on students to assess their own thoughts and feelings and thus had based their conclusions on a form of data notoriously unreliable and difficult to interpret. It also faulted the researchers for not bothering to locate and survey high-school dropouts, who are disproportionately male and whose answers would likely have painted a less rosy picture for boys.

In Science News and elsewhere, social scientists also questioned the the way in which the AAUW solicited and interpreted children's answers. The survey presented children with such statements as "I am happy the way I am" and asked them to choose the best response in a continuum generally ranging from "always false" to "always true." The researchers then threw out those responses in the middle--which they held merely to signal the respondent's uncertainty--and drew conclusions based on the number of children who expressed strong feelings. Such methodology may work well in anticipating election returns, but it can lead to tenuous and subjective findings when used in studies of human behavior.

Moreover, readers of the AAUW report might have gotten the impression that self-esteem has been clearly defined and shown to have an impact on student achievement. In fact, it has not. Experts on the behavioral sciences say self-esteem has not established definition, is almost impossible to measure, and has not been shown to lead to or stem from academic success. If high self-esteem leads to high academic achievement, why is it that black males in the AAUW survey were the most self-assured while, at the same time, the most at-risk academically? If lower self-esteem breeds academic failure, why do Asia's relatively humble children routinely clobber our own on international comparisons of academic achievement? And if girls are giving up on themselves academically, why are more women than men enrolling in colleges and graduate schools?

But the AAUW publicized its report as if its starkest conclusions were beyond doubt. That June, it launched its "Initiative for Educational Equity," and elaborate effort to prod federal, state, and local authorities to purge schools of gender bias. The heads of the AAUW's approximately 1,700 local branches received packets from the national office telling them how to mobilize members to demand such change. The packet included a guide for hosting round-table discussions to ensure the AAUW's "visibility as the leader on educational equity issues."

The national leadership's vision of a "gender-fair" education system left little to chance. Under the proposed new order, states would not certify prospective teachers and school administrators unless they had taken courses on gender-related subjects such as new research on women. Teacher-training programs would tell prospective pedagogues that they "must not perpetuate assumptions about the superiority of traits and activities traditionally ascribed to males in our society." School systems would evaluate administrators, teachers, and counselors based on their efforts to promote and encourage gender equity.

And schools would have to submit to annual evaluations conducted with the assistance of the AAUW's new "Gender Equity Assessment Guide," which asks: Are girls equally represented in all classes, sports, and activities? Are " multicultural and gender sensitivities . . . raised in every aspect of the curriculum?" Are procedures in place "to review textbooks, teaching methods, and curricula for gender-role stereotyping?" Do the school's health-care providers offer a "full range of reproductive health services?" Etc. The answer, of course, must be yes, and woe to the school official who might defend the standard curriculum or express fear that offering a "full range of reproductive health services" would spark a parent rebellion.

The AAUW's second report, "How Schools Shortchange Girls," attempted to explain exactly what makes the status quo so destructive to the women of tomorrow. Conducted under contract by the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, it concluded, based on a review of 1,331 previous studies, that schoolgirls are the victims of profound gender bias at all grade levels. Teachers lavish substantially more attention on boys, it said. Textbooks erode girls' enthusiasm for learning by downplaying the achievements and experiences of women. Schools avoid discussing health-related topics, such as birth control, that are especially crucial to girls' development. Although girls enter school on the same footing as boys, they fall behind in key subjects because of their second-class treatment, and then on top of it all, they are asked to take standardized college-admissions tests that are biased against them.

Unfortunately, the report shortchanged its readers by presenting only half the picture. It failed to note that much of the extra attention that boys get from teachers comes in the form of scoldings and reprimands. It disregarded Education Department statistics showing that girls have almost caught up to boys in science and mathematics and are doing much better than boys in reading. It glossed over the fact that girls have substantially narrowed the gender gap in college-entrance test scores and are actually more likely than boys to complete high school and obtain college or graduate degrees.

The report gave no clue that boys generally receive lower grades on their report cards, or that boys are far likelier to be suspended or held back a year, or that boys account for two-thirds of children in special-education programs. Attempting to portray boys as youth's favored gender, brimming with confidence and self-esteem, the AAUW also failed to account for the particular self-destructiveness of adolescent males: Not only are boys two to four times likelier to commit suicide, depending on their age, they also stand much greater risks of being murdered, killed in car accidents, or incarcerated later in life, according to data compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics and other federal agencies.

The AAUW and its researchers denied any sort of bias. "Advocating for girls and women's rights is important, but our business is not advocacy, our business is research," asserted Susan McGee Bailey, executive director of the Wellesley center. Journalists once again took the AAUW at its word and gave currency to its claims. Educators scrambled to show worried parents that they were attentive to the problems described in the report, which was accompanied by an "action guide" telling AAUW members how to whip up public support for certain school reforms.

"The early reports are in and it's clear that the 'Initiative for Educational Equity' is the right issue at the right time for the AAUW," boasted a new letter to AAUW branches. Instead of suggesting how to help girls, the accompanying instructional packet described how to capitalize on the popular appeal of the crusade to help the AAUW. Branch leaders were urged to ask themselves: "How will Initiative efforts help our branch achieve membership growth, visibility, and fundraising goals?"

Much of the packet read like a training manual for door-to-door salesmen. It advised branch leaders: View everyone you meet in the course of the gender- equity campaign as a target for membership recruitment. Invite them to branch meetings where you can get their addresses and phone numbers and fellow members can chat them up. Push them to join and, "if possible, take their checks on the spot." When networking with other educational organizations or women's groups, ask for their membership or donor lists. "The overarching strategy is to turn every activity into a membership recruitment opportunity," it coached.

In June of 1993, the AAUW issued its explosive third report, "Hostile Hallways." Its shocking conclusion: 85 percent of girls have experienced sexual harassment in school. In a survey conducted by Louis Harris & Associates of 1,630 8th-through 11th-graders, 65 percent of girls complained of having been touched, pinched, or grabbed in a sexual way, and a fourth of the girls who reported being sexually harassed identified teachers or other school employees as the perpetrators.

But, perhaps due to the seriousness of its allegations, educators and social scientists seemed less inclined to accept this third report on its face. They argued that the AAUW had defined "sexual harassment" too broadly and thus risked trivializing the problem. In many cases, the alleged transgressions were unwelcome comments, jokes, gestures, or looks.

Skeptics asked, Were girls being subjected to a teenagers' Tailhook or just horseplay, adolescent taunts, and the awkward romantic overtures of unpopular boys? Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, complained that the report blurred the lines "between acts that are criminal and acts that are merely rude" and paved the way for schools to adopt new codes of conduct conveying the message that students "have an absolute right never to be offended." The report appeared to assume that the unsavory behavior it described was the product of a sexist society. Conservative scholars and pundits have posed an alternative explanation: that such behavior is actually the bitter fruit of the sexual revolution that feminists helped bring about.

But the AAUW stuck by its guns and called on schools to crack down on sexism. The crusade rolled onward, drawing new support and gaining ground on several fronts. In some school districts, the AAUW forced more changes in education policy in the space of a few short years than had advocates for black children in forty. Philanthropies and government agencies poured money into new programs for girls. All-girls private schools enjoyed a dramatic upsurge in popularity -- as did women's colleges such as Wellesley. A few public schools set up separate classes for girls, even as women's-rights groups elsewhere were trying to block districts from forming experimental academies for black males.

By now, other groups with more overtly feminist agendas were getting into the act. Inspired by the AAUW's research, the Ms. Foundation for Women launched "Take Our Daughters to Work Day." Its curriculum included handouts that lionized Anita Hill and Gloria Steinem and sought to teach children a litany of widely disputed statistics, telling them, for example, that a woman earns 71 cents to a man's dollar and that "10 percent of American women are lesbians." One handout listed a court's ruling that a lesbian couple comprised a "family of affinity" as a key historical event of 1992.

The effort was soon joined by the National Education Association. Working with the Wellesley College center, it produced Flirting or Hurting, a 106- page guide instructing teachers of 6th-through 12th-graders how to fight student-to-student sexual harassment. The authors, both from Wellesley, were Nan Stein, who had recently contributed to the book Transforming a Rape Culture, and Lisa Sjostrom, who had written both the Ms. Foundation's curriculum and a primer called The Mother Daughter Revolution Reader's Companion Guide. Among Flirting or Hurting's admonishments: "When a target complains about being sexually harassed, it should not be within the purview of school staff members to decide whether or not the situation being described constitutes sexual harassment."

In April of 1993, the AAUW proudly announced that Congress had been moved to respond to its "irrefutable" evidence of extensive gender bias in schools. Flanked by officials of the AAUW and other women's groups, the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues announced an ambitious package of House bills dubbed the "Gender Equity in Education Act." Education Week placed the annual cost of the measures at $ 360 million -- three times what the Education Department was spending on school desegregation and nearly half again its budget for bilingual education and immigrant programs. The proposed legislation created an Office of Gender Equity and funded the recruitment of female math and science teachers. Later that summer, members of the Senate offered a similar group of bills.

Congressional support was overwhelming. Elsewhere, however, the fanfare, rhetoric, and additional federal spending associated with these measures caused the gender-equity crusade to pop up on conservative radar screens. Barbara J. Ledeen, executive director of the Independent Women's Forum, denounced the legislation as "feminist pork" and asserted that its underlying philosophy demeaned women by viewing them as victims.

But the most visible critic was Christina Hoff Sommers, a Clark University philosophy professor whose new book, Who Stole Feminism?, debunked the AAUW reports and an assortment of other statistics popularized by feminists. She blasted the AAUW studies as biased "advocacy research" and alleged that the federal legislation they inspired "will enrich the gender-bias industry and further weaken our schools."

Sommers's book attracted wide-spread attention and secured her a place on the talk-show circuit. Outraged, the AAUW became part of a coordinated effort to attack her credibility. "We need to respond and respond loudly," the liberal media-watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting said in a letter mailed to AAUW officials and other feminist activists. Both FAIR and the AAUW sent formal complaints demanding retractions from Simon & Schuster, Sommers's publisher. When Ann Bryant took to the radio to defend the AAUW studies against Sommers's criticisms, an interoffice memorandum urged her staffers to flood the talk show's switchboard with sympathetic questions and comments. "Men usually dominate as call-ins, so we need all the friendly calls we can get," implored Gabrielle Lange, an AAUW public-relations official.

Eventually, gender-equity legislation was passed into law. Since then, however, the new Republican-led Congress has come under pressure from conservatives to repeal some of its measures. Rather than simply defend the AAUW's reports, gender-equity crusaders have been questioning the motives of the critics by asking, What difference does it make if the AAUW's research was flawed? What is important, they argue, is that the reports succeeded in making the nation aware of the educational needs of girls. Only a sexist reactionary would fret over the veracity of reports that so clearly serve the best interests of girls.

Logic of this kind is seductive to those prone to confusion about ends and means. This is because it ignores the harsh truth that our public schools have finite resources with which to address overwhelming demands. Far from fully meeting the needs of all students, most school administrators wrestle with the dilemma of how to apportion neglect. And hard decisions should be based on accurate information, not propaganda.

The AAUW has a point when it says that girls lag behind in science and math and that schools should be doing more about it. But instead of directing its energies toward changing the way these subjects are taught, the AAUW decided that a complete transformation of the school culture was required. The sweeping and diffuse education-policy agenda that it subsequently adopted seems more concerned with having schools produce feminists than with having them produce new generations of female doctors and engineers.

And given that our education system seems to be having enough trouble teaching the basics, parents might question whether schools should be in the business of quizzing students on the glories of Anita Hill or disciplining them for sending a valentine to the wrong classmate. The AAUW, aware that many children learn traditional notions of gender from their parents, has been promoting the slogan "Raise boys and girls the same way." The slogan tips the organization's hand and reveals its true agenda: not a laudable quest for basic fairness, but a radical desire to create a society in which the concept of gender no longer applies. Such thinking ignores both the biological basis of gender and the wishes of many parents, who would rather raise boys as boys and girls as girls and feel it is their prerogative to do so. Even those parents who accept the AAUW's philosophy and want to raise boys and girls the same way often find that doing so is impossible, if not downright cruel to the children.

If the gender-equity crusade were truly motivated by an earnest concern for all children, rather than feminist ideology, one might expect its leaders to be concerned with the serious problems that plague boys. For the most part, they aren't. The AAUW has not just diverted attention from the problems of boys, it appears to have opened the door to outright discrimination against them. One AAUW pamphlet asserts that even when all children are treated exactly the same, "there may be a negative impact on girls because they may experience it differently than boys."

The sorriest truth is that the reforms inspired by the crusade may actually harm the education of both boys and girls. "There is reason to fear [that] such programs and policies will deepen gender stereotypes, 'water' down the curriculum, label girls as having 'special needs,' and ultimately cheat all students," warned Roberta Tovey, a writer and teacher from Boston, in The Harvard Education Letter last year. In pushing for the equal representation of girls in all classrooms, the AAUW may, perversely, be putting schools under pressure to assign more girls to low-level compensatory and special-education classes, where they are now out-numbered.

If the AAUW genuinely wants to rescue girls, it can start with this: by sparing those, girl and boy, who risk being trampled by its crusade.

High-School Exit Tests Don't Boost Academic Performance, Study Says

2008-05-19T19:13:00.002-04:00

Nearly half of the states require students to pass a test to graduate from high-school, based on the assumption that students should demonstrate some basic level of academic ability if their diplomas are to mean anything.

But, as reported here in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a new study of the impact of exit tests on student achievement suggests that being able to pass them does not really say much. The reason? Those states that adopted fairly tough tests soon found themselves besieged by the angry parents of children who did not pass, and responded by making the tests a lot easier. Other states felt no need to lower the bar because they had not set it very high in the first place.

One consequence of such actions is that the exit tests do little to drive schools to improve student achievement. When it comes to their scores on federal reading and math tests, students in states with high-school exit exams have not performed any better over time than those students who live in states without them.

Given that many of the students who fail the exit tests drop out of high school without ever getting their diplomas, the authors question whether the social benefits offered by the tests outweigh the costs.

The authors of the study, the results of which have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Educational Policy, are Eric Grodsky, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis, Demetra Kalogrides, a graduate student in sociology at that campus, and John Robert Warren, an associate professor of sociology and a director of undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

In a separate study published in January in the journal Sociology of Education, Grodsky, Warren, and Jennifer C. Lee, an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University at Bloomington, found that people who earned their diplomas in states with high-school exit tests did not earn higher incomes than people who earned their diplomas elsewhere, and were no more likely to complete college or be employed.

Report Says Improving Black College Graduation Rates is Mainly a Matter of Commitment

2008-05-14T20:33:00.002-04:00

Colleges already know the way to close gaps in black and white graduation rates, but most continue to lack the will to bring the necessary educational improvements about, according to a report recently released by Education Sector, a Washington-based research group.

"While more research in this area is certainly needed, the biggest challenge in better serving minority college students is not creating new knowledge about how to help them; it is creating new incentives for institutional leaders to act on the knowledge that already exists," says the report, written by Kevin Carey, Education Sector's research and policy manager.

"If there is a single factor that seems to distinguish colleges and universities that have truly made a difference on behalf of minority students, it is attention," the report says. "Successful colleges pay attention to graduation rates. They monitor year-to-year change, study the impact of different interventions on student outcomes, break down the numbers among different student populations, and continuously ask themselves how they could improve."

The report identifies several institutions--including Florida State University and the University of Alabama--where black students are at least as likely as their white peers to earn degrees in a timely manner. It says nothing is preventing other colleges from adopting the strategies such institutions have used to great effect, such as aggressively intervening to help students who run into trouble in the beginning of their freshman year and placing students in "learning communities" where they offer each other support while taking courses together.

Nationally, black students at four-year colleges have a six-year graduation rate that is about 20 percentage points lower than the six-year graduation rate for white students.

A Chronicle of Higher Education article summarizing the report's key findings is available to subscribers here.

Color and Money Author Wins National Award for Coverage of Minority Issues

2008-05-14T19:23:00.003-04:00

Peter Schmidt, the author of Color and Money, has won a prestigious national award for his coverage of minority issues as a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Lincoln University, a historically black institution located in Missouri, bestowed a Unity Award for education reporting on Schmidt for a series of stories on affirmative action at colleges. Lincoln University annually confers its Unity Awards in Media on journalists to honor them for outstanding coverage of issues affecting minority groups and people with disabilities.

Ward Connerly's "Super Tuesday" Campaign Suffers Another Setback

2008-05-08T19:11:00.002-04:00

Just a few months ago, the prominent affirmative-action critic Ward Connerly seemed confident that he could get five states to vote this November on ballot measures barring public colleges and other state and local agencies from granting preferences based on race, ethnicity, or gender.

As of this week, however, the best result he can hope for is to score wins in three.

On Sunday, his campaign organization in Missouri conceded that it would not be able to meet a deadline for submitting enough petition signatures to get proposed ban on the November ballot in that state. With his Oklahoma organization having similarly abandoned its efforts in that state last month, Mr. Connerly is now left with three remaining targets: Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska.

The campaign organization in Colorado has already submitted its petition signatures for counting. Mr. Connerly says he remains confident he will get measures on the ballot in Arizona and Nebraska, and he has vowed to continue his fight in Missouri and Oklahoma in the coming years.

Political analysts had predicted the measures would pass easily in all five of the states--provided, that is, they got on the ballot. As discussed in early blog postings here, however, Mr. Connerly ran into a tight deadline for gathering signatures in Oklahoma, and his Missouri campaign ran into massive resistance from state officials who sought to alter the measure's wording and local pro-affirmative-action activists who hit the streets to insert themselves between those circulating the petitions and potential signers.

A full Chronicle of Higher Education story on the latest Missouri development is available to its subscribers here.

Twenty-fifth Anniversary of "A Nation at Risk" Brings Reports Bemoaning Lack of Progress

2008-04-30T13:28:00.002-04:00

Education historians say the event most responsible for the birth of the nation's current reform movement was the 1983 publication of the report "A Nation at Risk." Issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education--a panel appointed by the education secretary at the time, Terrel H. Bell--the report attracted widespread media attention and inspired countless school-improvement efforts with its warning that the United States is headed for deep trouble as a result of the mediocre performance of its public schools and their students.

Anyone born when "A Nation at Risk" was issued is now about old enough to have earned an advanced degree. But two new reports released this month, on the 25th anniversary of the issuance of that landmark study, suggest that it is far more likely that anyone born then dropped out of college or never even made it through high school.

The first of the two reports, titled "A Stagnant Nation" and published by the advocacy group Strong American Schools, concludes that efforts to carry out the recommendation of "A Nation at Risk" have been "stymied by organized special interests and political inertia." (The Chronicle of Higher Education blog has a summary followed by lively comments from readers available here.)

The second of the two reports, written by a long list of prominent education experts and titled "Democracy at Risk," calls on the federal government to greatly increase its spending on teacher training, education research, and other efforts to improve schools. As noted in a Chronicle summary of its key findings, it says: “For an annual investment of $4-billion, or less than what we are currently spending per week in Iraq, the nation could underwrite the high-quality preparation of 40,000 teachers annually (enough to fill all the vacancies that are filled by unprepared teachers each year), seed 100 top-quality urban teacher-education programs, ensure mentors for every new teacher hired each year, provide incentives to bring expert teachers into high-need schools, and dramatically improve professional-learning opportunities for teachers and principals."

Both new reports offer food for thought to interested in improving college access.

Journal of American Professoriate Gives Color and Money a Favorable Review

2008-04-28T22:28:00.003-04:00

Color and Money has just been given a positive review in the latest issue of Academe, the magazine published by the American Association of University Professors.

The reviewer--Paula M. Krebs, the magazine's editor--finds some flaws in the book but reaches this bottom-line conclusion: "Peter Schmidt’s nuanced account of the class and race politics behind how affirmative action became a way to provide 'diversity' experiences for privileged white students is sobering for anyone who cares about educational access in the United States for students who are not both white and rich."

The full review is available here.

Hillary Clinton Ducks Discussion of Affirmative-Action Preferences in Philly Debate

2008-04-22T10:05:00.004-04:00

Hillary Clinton has spoken out strongly in favor of race-conscious college admissions policies in the past. When the University of Michigan affirmative action cases came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003, she went so far as to sign on to a friend-of-the-court brief that--even in the eyes of education researchers who support race-conscious admissions--greatly overstated what research says about the educational benefits of such policies.

When the topic of race-conscious admissions policies came up in the April 16 Democratic debate in Philadelphia, however, she let Barack Obama take a few steps out on that limb and then refused to follow. He stated a position that is actually more centrist than the ones she has expressed in the past--saying that some affluent young black people, such as his own children, perhaps should not be given extra consideration. Ms. Clinton then positioned herself to the right of him by giving an answer Ward Connerly could endorse, refusing to talk about affirmative-action preferences at all and instead focusing on the need to make college accessible for all Americans.

As Color and Money discusses at length, the Clintons have long had an ambivalent relationship with affirmative action and the broader cause of racial integration. When they first moved to Washington DC, they refused to enroll their daughter Chelsea in the heavily black and Hispanic DC public schools, choosing instead to enroll her in a highly exclusive private school, Sidwell Friends. In winning election in 1992, Bill Clinton did not reiterate the Democratic Party's support for affirmative action. When up for reelection in 1996, he avoided expressing opposition to the Proposition 209 ban on affirmative-action preferences before voters in California, for fear of losing that state. At the same time, however, Bill Clinton appointed a staunch advocate of affirmative action and integration, Norma Cantu, to head the Education Department's civil-rights office. And, based on a sweeping review of federal affirmative action policies, he famously declared that the federal government's approach to affirmative action should be "mend it, don't end it."

As described in this Chronicle of Higher Education blog post on the Philadelphia debate, Hillary Clinton had been a fairly strong supporter of the use of racial preferences by colleges prior to the Pennsylvania contest, which is expected to hinge on the votes of blue-collar whites. It will be interesting to see how she answers questions on the subject if she stays in the race through the upcoming primaries in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico.

University of Texas at Austin Sued for Reviving Race-Conscious Admissions

2008-04-09T13:33:00.006-04:00

A federal lawsuit filed April 7 alleges that the University of Texas at Austin cannot legally return to using race-conscious admissions because it had found alternatives that producted satisfactory levels of diversity on campus.

The plaintiff in the lawsuit is a white woman who applied in January for undergraduate admission at UT-Austin and was rejected despite having a 3.59 GPA, solid SAT scores, and a record of participation in extracurricular activities in high school. She is being represented by the Project on Fair Representation, a Washington-based organization that has been pushing the Bush administration to weigh in against UT-Austin's policy.

As discussed at length in Color and Money, Texas public universities were barred from considering race and ethnicity under a 1996 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the case Hopwood v. Texas. Black and Hispanic enrollments plunged, but then seemed--at least for the most part--to rebound after lawmakers passed a measure guaranteeing students in the top 10 percent of their high school class admission to the Texas public university of their choice.

In 2003, the Supreme Court essentially invalidated the Hopwood decision by upholding the use of race-conscious admissions in its ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan law school. But in that ruling, the Supreme Court also held that colleges must consider alternative ways of achieving diversity on campus before they resort to using affirmative-action preferences.

UT-Austin returned to using race-conscious admissions in 2005. The new lawsuit against it probably will hinge largely on the question of whether the alternatives to preferences used by the university in the wake of Hopwood produced sufficient levels of diversity.

"The top-10-percent plan has proven more successful in achieving diversity than did race-based affirmative action," Edward J. Blum, the director of the Project on Fair Representation, argued in a Chronicle of Higher Education interview. "Because of that, we believe the University of Texas is foreclosed from even considering a student's race."

Oklahoma Anti-Preference Measure is Scuttled

2008-04-09T13:01:00.002-04:00

Foes of affirmative-action preferences have quietly abandoned their effort to get Oklahomans to vote to bar public colleges and other state and local agencies from considering race and ethnicity in admissions, employment, and contracting decisions.

As summarized here on The Chronicle of Higher Education blog and reportered here at greater length in Tulsa World, the campaign on behalf of the measure, the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative, filed a motion in the state Supreme Court on April 4 asking that it be withdrawn from consideration.

The campaign needed 138,970 valid signatures to get the measure on the ballot. Largely because Oklahoma law gives referendum advocates just a 90-day window for circulating such petitions, the advocates of the Oklahoma measure gathered just 141,184 signatures, leaving them little buffer room if significant numbers are challenged. Oklahoma's Secretary of State subsequently spotted large numbers of duplicate or otherwise suspicious signatures on the ballot measure, suggesting that it might be in trouble if someone combed through it carefully.

The motion filed by the campaign says: "Based of the number of signatures delivered to the Secretary of State, the validity rate for the signatures would need to be in excess of 90 percent, which is a statistical impossibility given historical validity rates and the limited time to verify the signatures."

The abandonment of the Oklahoma campaign is not expected to have a significant impact on efforts to put similar measures before voters in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and Nebraska.

Parental Income Plays Big Role in Determining Payoff from a Bachelor's Degree, Study Finds

2008-04-05T18:07:00.002-04:00

Many studies have documented the long-term economic payoff from a bachelor's degree. But they have tended to lump such degree recipients together, comparing the average incomes of all people with bachelor's degrees to the average annual incomes of all people without them.

Reality is a lot more complicated than that. The truth is that the economic payoffs from a bachelor's degree vary greatly depending on parental wealth, according to study findings recently presented by Marvin A. Titus, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Maryland, at the American Educational Research Association conference in New York.

The study is discussed in greater depth here on The Chronicle of Higher Education news blog. It's bottom line is that, while people from poor backgrounds greatly increase their earning potential by getting a bachelor's, they're unlikely to earn more than people from wealthy backgrounds, including those who never went to college.

Titus calls for more research on how people acquire the "social capital" that keeps the rich ahead of the poor and influences long-term earnings.

Education Researchers Say Trends Such as Increased Reliance on the SAT Work Against Minorities

2008-04-02T19:19:00.002-04:00

The United States appears to be gaining little ground when it comes to closing the education gaps that leave selective colleges relying on race-conscious admissions policies to prop up minority enrollments, according to a panel of scholars who presented research findings in New York last month at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference.

Among the studies discussed at the symposium was an analysis of College Board data which concluded that elite colleges have undermined their own efforts to promote diversity in recent decades by giving much more weight to applicants' SAT scores. The authors of the study--Catherine L. Horn, an assistant professor of educational leadership and cultural studies at the University of Houston, and John T. Yun, an assistant professor of education at the University of California at Santa Barbara--found that the share of seats at top colleges going to students with exceptionally high SAT scores has increased dramatically in the past 20 years. Although the number of students taking the test and posting high scores has grown, the researchers say the bigger driving force behind the trend they document is a desire by colleges to improve their rankings in college guides--by U.S. News and others--that consider the average SAT scores of colleges' students in judging selectivity.

Among other researchers who spoke at the symposium, Michal Kurlaender, an assistant professor of education at the University of California at Davis, presented an analysis of federal data showing that the share of black and Hispanic college students who end up earning bachelor's degrees by age 30 actually declined over the past three decades. Donald E. Heller, a professor of education at Pennsylvania State University and director of its Center for the Study of Higher Education, presented an analysis showing that only a few states notable for their small minority populations have managed to close the gaps between the races in terms of high-school and college completion.

The bottom-line question that the symposium tackled was whether Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was correct in predicting, in the court's 2003 Grutter decision dealing with college affirmative action, that the educational gaps between the races will be eliminated in 25 years (or by 2028). The consensus among the researchers here: No chance.

A Chronicle of Higher Education article discussing the symposium in more detail is available to subscribers of the newspaper here. All of the research presented at the symposium is included in a forthcoming book, Realizing Bakke's Legacy, being published by Stylus Publishing in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1978 decision Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

Universities Criticized for TV Spots Depicting Whiteness of Campuses

2008-03-30T13:30:00.003-04:00

A paper presented last week at an annual national conference of education researchers alleges that the promotional TV spots produced by universities depict their campuses as unwelcoming to minorities.

Brian Bourke and Michael S. Harris, both assistant professors of higher education at the University of Alabama, analyzed the 30-second television spots that 43 colleges aired during the 2006-7 Bowl Championship Series. Their paper, presented in New York last week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, concluded that the overwhelming majority of the students an alumni depicted in the ads were white, and that the ads therefore send potential minority applicants the message that they will be tokens on campus.

A more in-depth discussion of the researchers' findings is available here on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog. Noted by the blog item--and several of the readers who posted comments in response to it--is the tricky position that overwhelmingly white colleges find themselves in in producting such spots. Showing how few minority students are on their campus may indeed discourage minority students from applying, but if their ads exaggerate how much diversity is found on their campus they can be accused of dishonesty. Many minority students don't appreciate finding out after they enroll at a college that the place is not nearly as diverse as its recruitment materials led them to believe it would be.

Michigan's Ban on Affirmative-Action Preferences Survives a Court Challenge

2008-03-19T20:12:00.002-04:00

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging Michigan's Proposal 2 ban on the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies.

Despite being perceived as liberal and being tough on proponents of the ban in his court proceedings, U.S. District Court Judge David Lawson rejected each of the arguments made against Proposal 2, including the assertion that it targeted minorities.

One of the key organizations being the legal challenge, By Any Means Necessary, has vowed to appeal the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Michiganders passed Proposal 2 overwhelmingly in November 2006, with 58 percent of voters coming out in favor of it.

Another Honor from National Education Writers Association for Color and Money Author

2008-02-25T21:47:00.003-05:00

Color and Money author Peter Schmidt has just received a national award from the Education Writers Association for an essay based on his book and published in The Boston Globe.

Schmidt received second prize in the category "Opinion-Circulation over 100,000" (for major daily newspapers) for his essay "At the elite colleges--dim white kids." The honor comes in the EWA's 2007 National Awards for Education Reporting.

Schmidt's analytical piece was e-mailed far and wide and had an enormous impact. It was highlighted in the popular news digest The Week and cited by The American Prospect blog TAPPED, a host of black-oriented blogs (including Jack and Jill Politics), the progressive blog CommonDreams.org, and a long list of Web sites and chat boards dealing with college admissions. It continues to influence the affirmative action debate with its conclusion that, on selective college campuses, whites students who gained admission solely through nonacademic preferences outnumber the black and Hispanic beneficiaries of affirmative-action preferences by a margin of about 2 to 1.

New Report Warns Growing Education Gaps May Hurt Social Mobility

2008-02-24T16:04:00.003-05:00

A new report commissioned by the Pew Charitable Trusts and written by Brookings Institution scholars warns that growing gaps in college access threaten social mobility in the United States. It says parental income and race and ethnicity appear to be playing an ever greater role in determining one's access to college and long-term financial prospects, with the education gap widening between whites and Asians on one hand and blacks and Hispanics on the other. In recent years, just 11 percent of the children of America's poorest fifth have gone on to earn college degrees, compared to 53 percent of children from the top fifth. The report, "Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America," can be downloaded here.

Peter Schmidt in USA Today: "Asians, not whites, hurt most by race-conscious admissions"

2008-02-24T15:10:00.003-05:00

Peter Schmidt has an article in the February 20 issue of USA Today discussing a recent study finding that it was Asian American, and not white, enrollments that rose substantially at five prestigious public universities after they were precluded from considering applicants' race or ethnicity. A more detailed discussion of the report, published in the journal InterActions, is available to Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers here. The report itself--by prominent education researchers David R. Colburn, Victor M. Yellen, and Charles E. Young--is available here.

Campaigns Against Affirmative-Action Preferences Face Possible Setbacks in Michigan and Oklahoma

2008-02-15T14:01:00.001-05:00

The crusade against affirmative-action preferences being led by Ward Connerly appears at risk of possible setbacks in Michigan and Oklahoma, although there is a good chance that any Michigan setback will only be temporary.

Michigan's Proposal 2 ban on affirmative-action preferences, passed by 58 percent of that state's voters in November 2006, seems somewhat likely to be ruled unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court Judge David M. Lawson in the coming weeks or months. Not only did Judge Lawson previously issue a decision--later overturned--to temporarily block the enforcement of Proposal 2, he also has made several procedural calls against advocates of the measure in handling two lawsuits (later joined into one) seeking to have it overturned. Moreover, when Judge Lawson held a February 7 hearing on whether the cases should go to trial, both his line of questioning and the procedural calls he made suggested that advocates of Proposal 2 weren't exactly on his Valentine's Day shopping list. Throw all of these tea leaves together, and it's no big leap to read them as portending that Lawson will strike down Proposal 2 in a summary judgment (without holding a trial).

If Judge Lawson does issue a summary judgment ruling Proposal 2 unconstitutional, two developments are almost certain: An appeal of his ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the onset of headache-inducing confusion in Michigan as state agencies try to decide whether to comply with Proposal 2 while its legality remains up in the air.

One of the lawsuits challenging Proposal 2, filed by the NAACP and ACLU, argues that it violates the Equal Protection Clause by essentially walling off racial and ethnic minorities from receiving the same sorts of admissions preferences that public colleges give to other subsets of the population, such as military veterans or the children of alumni. The other lawsuit, filed by the group By Any Means Necessary, argues that, without affirmative action, college admissions criteria irremediably discriminate against black, Hispanic, and Native American applicants, so Proposal 2 has the effect of imposing a discriminatory system.

Judges on the Sixth Circuit have already expressed skepticism toward these arguments, concluding in a December 2006 ruling that they did not see any reason to forestall enforcement of Proposal 2 because they did not think the arguments made against it will prevail in the federal courts. And similar arguments were ultimately rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit--in a decision that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to reconsider--in cases challenging California's Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot measure with language very similar to Proposal 2. So if Judge Lawson strikes down Proposal 2, the setback may well only be a temporary one.

The situation in Oklahoma is much different. There, officials are taking up a fairly simple question: whether the campaign on behalf of a proposed ban on affirmative-action preferences has enough signatures to get the measure on the ballot in November.

The campaign organization needed 138,970 valid signatures. And, partly because Oklahoma law allows only 90 days for such petition-gathering, it turned in fewer than it hoped. The 141,184 signatures that it submitted to state officials may seem like enough on the surface, but that total does not offer much in the way of a buffer. The invalidation of just 1.6 percent of their signatures could sink their campaign. On February 8, the Associated Press reported that Oklahoma Secretary of State Susan Savage had told the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which is ultimately responsible for the signature count, that she had found many duplicate signatures and cases where dozens of signatures were listed as being at the same address.

Study Suggests "No Child Left Behind" May Push Minority Students to Leave High School

2008-02-14T18:32:00.006-05:00

A Texas school accountability law that served as a model for the No Child Left Behind Act has had the effect of causing more students--especially blacks and Hispanics--to drop out of high school, a new study concludes.

The study, summarized here on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, tracked students in a large urban Texas district over seven years and found that the state's school accountability law created incentives for high schools to let students drop out (or even take steps that might encourage them to do so). Because the law calls for schools to be rated based on their students' test scores, it enables schools to improve their ratings by letting many of their lowest-scoring students--who are disproportionately black, Hispanic, and low-income--walk out the door. It also creates incentives for school officials to hold students back a year, which generally results in improvements in their test scores but also strongly increases the likelihood they will drop out.

Federal Government Investigates 16 New York Campuses' Efforts to Help Black Men

2008-02-05T22:33:00.000-05:00

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has begun investigations of 16 campuses of the City University of New York system to determine whether they violating federal civil-rights laws in their efforts to help black men.

The investigations stem from a complaint filed in 2006 by a group called the New York Civil Rights Coalition, which alleged that the CUNY system was violating civil-rights laws by gearing offerings to members of a specific race.

According to the New Yori Civil Rights Coalition, the CUNY institutions under investigation are the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Kingsborough Community College, LaGuardia Community College, Baruch College, Brooklyn College, City College, Lehman College, the College of Staten Island, Medgar Evers College, Hostos Community College, Hunter College, Queens College, Queensborough Community College, York College, the CUNY Graduate School and University Center, and the New York City College of Technology.

Additional details of the investigation are available on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog. The back-and-forth in the commentary field makes for lively reading as well.

Two New Studies Sharply Criticize Many Workplace Diversity Programs

2008-02-02T18:06:00.000-05:00

Two new studies of workplace diversity programs say that many are ineffective or may actually hurt companies' efforts to hire and promote more minority members and women.

One of the studies--yet unpublished, but described in detail in a Washington Post article--analyzed 31 years' worth of data from 830 mid-sized to large workplaces and found that "the kind of diversity training exercises offered at most firms" were followed by a 7.5 percent drop in the number of women in management, a 10 percent drop in the number of black women in management, and a 12 percent drop in the number of black men in top positions. "Similar effects were seen for Latinos and Asians," the newspaper reported.

The study said that voluntary diversity training programs, which do not require employee participation and tend to be designed to promote some business goal, actually seemed to result in increased diversity in managerial ranks. The programs that were ineffective were the mandatory diversity training programs that many companies adopt out of fear of discrimination lawsuits. Alexandra Kalev, a Univerity of Arizona sociologist who headed up the research, told the newspaper that "forcing people to go through training creates a backlash against diversity."

A second study, by the Rand Corporation, says that many companies seem to look at diversity superficially--focusing on the numbers of people from one group or another in various positions--and fail to rethink how they do business so that their increased diversity makes them more productive and profitable and their employees happier.

Plans for Sweeping Study of Colleges' Admissions Preferences Are Met with Skepticism

2008-01-14T21:37:00.001-05:00

About 30 professors and graduate students have formed a national consortium to study the short- and long-term effects of colleges' various admissions preferences on students who receive them.

The undertaking is called Project SEAPHE, with the acronym standing for Scale and Effect of Admissions Preferences in Higher Education. It will focus chiefly on affirmative-action preferences for minority students, but it also intends to examine the effects of the admissions preferences that colleges give other subsets of the applicant pool, such as athletes and the children of alumni.

The consortium's leaders say its researchers hold a wide variety of views toward affirmative action. Dozens of colleges and law schools have already provided the group with student data, generally in response to letters citing state freedom-of-information laws.

Some advocates of affirmative action have doubts about the consortium's neutrality and question whether its work will be objective. The consortium's leader, Richard H. Sander, a UCLA law professor whose work is described in Color and Money, has been widely attacked by affirmative-action proponents for his past research concluding that law schools' affirmative action policies may do minority students more harm than good by placing them in environments where they struggle academically. The consortium's efforts are being financed by the Searle Freedom Trust, a Washington-based foundation that has contributed generously to conservative groups such as the American Enterprise Institute.

An Chronicle of Higher Education article discussing Project SEAPHE in more depth is available here.

Prominent Foes of Affirmative Action Get Behind Rudy Giuliani

2008-01-09T18:41:00.000-05:00

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's campaign for the presidency has picked up the support of some of the nation's most prominent foes of affirmative-action preferences. They include Ward Connerly, who has been named as one of Mr. Giuliani's at-large delegate candidates in the California Republican primaries, and lawyers Gerald Reynolds, Brian Jones, and Clint Bolick, all of whom have played leading roles in organizations opposed to such policies and now are part of part of Mr. Giuliani's team of education advisers. For his part, Mr. Connerly says he sees himself and Mr. Giuliani as largely on the same page on the affirmative action issue. Additional details are available here on The Chronicle of Higher Education blog in an article available to non-subscribers.

Court Hands a Key Victory to Campaign to Limit Affirmative Action in Missouri

2008-01-09T17:04:00.000-05:00

A state court judge has given a major break to the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative, the campaign organization for a proposed November 2008 ballot measure to bar public colleges and other state and local agencies there from using affirmative-action preferences. In a stunning rebuke to Missouri's secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, the judge has thrown out the summary language that Ms. Carnahan sought to place on the proposed ballot measure over its backers' objections. The secretary of state had summarized the proposed amendment as banning "affirmative-action programs designed to eliminate discrimination against, and improve opportunities for, women and minorities in public contracting, employment, and education"--language that its backers saw as calculated to turn voters against it. In a January 7 ruling, the state judge rewrote the summary language to say the measure would "ban state and local government affirmative-action programs that give preferential treatment in public contracting, employment, or education based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin." Ms. Carnahan has pledged to appeal the ruling, but, for now at least, the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative is gathering signatures to put the measure on the ballot using the language the judge drafted. Details of the judge's ruling, and other legal questions that it addressed, are available here in The Chronicle of Higher Education. See also this past entry on the Color and Money blog.

Medical Schools Diagnosed with a Rising Blue Blood Count

2008-01-07T23:43:00.000-05:00

An analysis of medical-school enrollments published by the Association of American Medical Colleges says the share of their students from privileged backgrounds is growing. As reported on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog, the share of their students from the wealthiest fifth of society rose from 50.8 percent in 2000 to 55.2 percent in 2005, the most recent year examined. Meanwhile, despite the medical schools' professed interest in promoting economic diversity in their enrollments, their share of entering students from the poorest fifth of society has remained well below 6 percent for nearly 20 years. Among the factors that the analysis blames for the growing lack of economic diversity at medical schools: student debt levels that have been rising faster than physician pay, and a similar lack of economic diversity at the undergraduate institutions from which medical schools draw their students.

Low-Income Enrollments Declining at Many Top Colleges

2008-01-02T17:13:00.000-05:00

Enrollments of low-income students have undergone both short- and long-term declines at many prestigious universities and liberal arts colleges, according to an analysis of federal Pell Grant data published in the latest issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education and summarized here on The Chronicle of Higher Education news blog.

The analysis found that some institutions experienced declines in the share of their students receiving need-based Pell Grants even after launching widely publicized efforts to cover the full tuition costs of low-income students. “Contrary to what one might expect, it appears that there is no strong correlation between the generous new fiscal measures and success in bringing low-income students to the campus,” the Journal says. “The only sure conclusion is that money alone will not do the job.” It suggests that colleges take other steps, such as aggressive recruiting, to try to increase the share of their students who are low-income.

The Journal's analysis examined 30 top universities and 30 top liberal arts colleges. Confirming an observation made by Peter Schmidt in Color and Money, it shows that low-income students accounted for a rapidly rising share of the enrollments of the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles in the decade after those institutions were barred under state law from considering race in admissions. Meanwhile, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor experienced a sharp decline in the share of its students who were low-income during the years in which if fought to keep its race-conscious admissions policies in place.

Poll Finds Tensions Between Minority Groups

2007-12-31T15:26:00.000-05:00

A new poll of black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans concludes that there are "serious tensions among these ethnic groups, including mistrust and significant stereotyping," even as substantial majorities of each group perceive a need for minority members to set aside their differences and work together on issues affecting their communities.

According to a press release accompanying the poll's findings, 44% of Hispanics and 47% of Asians say they are “generally afraid of African Americans because they are responsible for most of the crime.” Meanwhile, 46% of Hispanics and 52% of African Americans believe “most Asian business owners do not treat them with respect.” And half of African Americans feel threatened by Latin American immigrants because “they are taking jobs, housing and political power away from the Black community.”

Moreover, the three groups seem more trusting of whites than of each other, the release says. The poll found that 61% of Hispanics, 54% of Asians and 47% of African Americans would rather do business with whites than members of the other two groups.

A solid majority of the Hispanic respondents strongly agreed with the propositions that all Americans have an equal opportunity to succeed and that people who work hard will get ahead. Black respondents had much less faith in equality of opportunity and the American dream, while Asian Americans were in the middle.

A Prestigious Award for Political Coverage

2007-12-31T15:00:00.000-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has won the Utne Independent Press Award for best political coverage for 2007, a year in which Peter Schmidt headed up its Government and Politics section as deputy editor. In winning the award, the Chronicle beat out The American Prospect, Governing, The Nation, and The New Republic. The judges at the Utne Reader said the Chronicle "combines grade-A reportage with sharp, smart (dare we say, non-academic?) prose, to make a seemingly specialized beat both accessible and relevant to the broadest of audiences." A desire to make complex material accessible to a broad audience also underlies Peter Schmidt's writing in Color and Money.

Harvard's New Aid Policy May Be Better News for the Wealthy than the Poor

2007-12-17T20:37:00.001-05:00

A new essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education asks some tough questions about the financial-aid policy that Harvard University recently announced with great fanfare. Harvard heralded the policy as "ensuring greater affordability for middle- and upper-middle-income families." But Donald E. Heller, the director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University, notes in his essay that many of the students who will benefit come from families making $120,000 to $180,000, placing them within the top 5 to 15 percent of all Americans in terms of their income. By any definition, such students are "upper-income," Heller says. And if being able to attend Harvard at lower cost drives many more of them to come knocking on its doors, the better ones will likely be elbowing out applicants from humbler backgrounds. Subscribers to the Chronicle can read the full essay here.

Two New Reports Show How Low-Income Families Have Trouble Planning for College

2007-12-12T15:53:00.000-05:00

Two reports released this week shed light on how the children of parents who are poor or never went to college suffer when it comes to planning for higher education. A National Center for Education Statistics report, summarized here on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog, describes how such students find it hard to obtain reliable information that can help them decide whether and where to attend college. A separate report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy, summarized for Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers here, says the families of such students often fail to plan for their children's college education until it it too late. Parents should give serious thought to how they will finance college education, and what high-school classes their children need to take to become college-ready, while the kids are still in middle school. Unfortunately, many fail to take such steps until their children are high-school juniors or seniors.

Peter Schmidt Analyzes Harvard's New Effort to Help Middle-Class Students for Boston Public Radio

2007-12-11T11:26:00.000-05:00

WBUR, National Public Radio's Boston affiliate, turned to Peter Schmidt to make sense of Harvard's new effort to make college more affordable for middle and upper-middle-class students. You can hear the interview here.

Oklahoma Measure Limiting Affirmative Action Appears to Have Cleared a Hurdle

2007-12-10T20:41:00.000-05:00

The backers of a proposal to amend Oklahoma's state constitution to limit affirmative action say they are confident they have gathered enough signatures to get their measure on the ballot. Their proposed ballot initiative--similar to referenda already passed by voters in California, Michigan, and Washington State--would bar public colleges and other state agencies from granting preferences based on race, ethnicity, or gender. For more details, see the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, where Color and Money author Peter Schmidt broke the story.

What High Schools Feed the Top Colleges? A Wall Street Journal Analysis Holds a Few Surprises

2007-12-04T22:31:00.000-05:00

A Wall Street Journal analysis of enrollment data from eight highly prestigious colleges shows that overseas schools and science- and math-focused public magnet schools now rank alongside New England prep schools and New York private schools as the institutions' leading feeders. A Chronicle of Higher Education synopsis of the Journal story is available here. The Journal's list of the top feeders of the eight colleges studied--Chicago, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Pomona, Princeton, Swarthmore, and Williams--is available here. Check out the school with the 13th best success rate in terms of the share of students it sends on to one of these colleges. Its location? South Korea. UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal subsequently published a correction admitting major flaws in its methodology and saying additional corrections may be possible. Although the story's bottom-line conclusions generally hold true, the accompanying rankings should be viewed as a work in progress.

Advocates of Diversity in the Legal Profession Face One Major Obstacle: Law Schools

2007-12-04T21:57:00.000-05:00

When leading advocates of diversity in the legal profession held a recent panel discussion in Washington, they seemed fairly confident they had found ways to prod law firms to hire and promote more blacks and Hispanics. They seemed much less certain of their ability to push law schools to diversify their enrollments, mainly because the schools face considerable pressure from the publishers of law-school rankings to take in only applicants with high LSAT scores. Click here to read full Chronicle of Higher Education coverage and a lively back-and-forth among the readers of its blog.

International Assessment of Scientific Literacy Shows How Racial Gaps Hurt U.S. Competitiveness

2007-12-04T15:27:00.001-05:00

The results of an international assessment of scientific literacy among 15-year-olds show that United States ranks below 16 of the 30 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation, and 8 of 27 other nations or "jurisdictions" (such as Hong Kong) that administered the test. When the test results for the United States are broken down by race and ethnicity, however, a much more complex picture emerges. White 15-year-olds in the U.S. did fairly well, with their average score being below just 30 OECD nations' (Finland, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and the Netherlands) and three non-OECD nations' or jurisdictions' (Hong Kong, Taipei, and Estonia.) Black U.S. 15-year-olds, by contrast, were outscored by every OECD nation, including Mexico, and 19 of the 27 other nations and jurisdictions that administered the tests. Hispanic students were outscored by all but two of the OECD nations. The average score for Asian Americans was just a hair below the OECD average. A Chronicle article on the international test is available to subscribers here.

Group Plans Web Site Offering Alternative to College Rankings

2007-12-04T15:03:00.000-05:00

The Education Conservancy, an organization opposed to commercial influences on higher education, appears to be well on its way to raising $400,000 to set up a free Web site to help students find the right college without relying on published rankings. Interestingly, much of the money has come from institutions that fare quite well in the U.S. News & World Report annual college rankings--the very contest that the Education Conservancy is most focused on rendering irrelevant. As described in a Chronicle of Higher Education article (available to subscribers here), preliminary plans call for the Web site to feature a questionnaire and diagnostic exercises to help students determine what colleges are the best fits for them.

Federal Report Says Minority Students Increasingly Clustered at Same Colleges

2007-11-29T18:06:00.000-05:00

A new report by the U.S. Education Department says that the nation's minority undergraduates are increasingly clustering at institutions classified by the federal government as "minority-serving." From 1984 to 2004, the share of minority students enrolled at "minority-serving" colleges rose from 38 percent to 58 percent. A Chronicle of Higher Education article on the report's findings says Hispanic-serving colleges enrolled the largest share of all minority undergraduates, with 26.8 percent. Such institutions not only enrolled half of all Hispanic undergraduates, but served 19 percent of all Asian undergraduates and a large share of other minority groups as well. In terms of the share of all minority students served, Hispanic-serving institutions were followed by black-serving colleges (15.6 percent); Asian-serving colleges (7.5 percent); historically black colleges (5.1 percent); other minority-serving colleges (2.6 percent); and tribal and American Indian-serving colleges (0.6 percent).