Two New Studies Sharply Criticize Many Workplace Diversity Programs

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One of the studies--yet unpublished, but described in detail in a Washington Post article--analyzed 31 years' worth of data from 830 mid-sized to large workplaces and found that "the kind of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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

Minority Groups Continue to Make Progress in Earning Doctorates

A new federal report says that minority-group members earned 20 percent of all doctorates awarded to U.S. citizens in 2006--an all-time high. Although the growth in the number of doctorates going to black and Asian Americans has slowed in the last decade, all minority groups are earning substantially more doctoral degrees--and account for a larger share of doctorates awarded--compared to a decade or two ago. How well various minority groups were doing depended on the field, with blacks accounting for most of the education doctorates earned by minorities, Asian Americans accounting for about half of all doctorates earning by minorities in engineering and the physical sciences, and Hispanics being the minority group with the greatest representation among doctorate earners in the humanities and social sciences. A Chronicle of Higher Education article summarizing the study's findings is available to that newspaper's subscribers here.

A separate report issued by the Council of Graduate Schools and and summarized here says that racial and ethnic minority members accounted for 28 percent of all graduate students in 2006, a 2-percent increase from the year before. A decade ago minorities accounted for 19 percent of all graduate students.

Listen to an Extensive NPR Interview with Peter Schmidt

National Public Radio's Margot Adler has interviewed Peter Schmidt at length as part of a wide-ranging discussion of higher-education access for the show Justice Talking. You can listen in here.

The Washington City Paper Profiles Peter Schmidt

Washington's City Paper has a profile of Peter Schmidt in its November 15 issue, available here.

New York Affirmative Action Smackdown

An Oxford-style debate over affirmative action took place in New York on Nov. 13, and supporters of affirmative action were declared the winners based on before-and-after audience polling. To be fair, however, the proposition that the two sides were debating--"It's time to end affirmative action"--seemed awfully broad, given that the term "affirmative action" covers a lot of practices that are not controversial. Plenty of past polling research suggests that, had the proposition been "It is time to end preferential treatment based on ethnicity or race," the outcome almost certainly would have been different. Chronicle of Higher Education blog coverage of the event, with a link to the transcript, is available here.

The UCLA Student Newspaper Drills Without Novocain

The Daily Bruin student newspaper at the University of California at Los Angeles alleges that the university's elite orthodontics residency program has been violating university policy by granting special consideration in admissions to major donors and their relatives. The newspaper says "applicants related to donors giving six-figure gifts were automatically advanced over other students despite their lower test scores and grades." The report cites the case of a student who says program officials offered him admission, only to then say some members of the admissions board were on the fence and a donation of $60,000 might help his cause. Officials of the dental school are denying any wrongdoing, but the newspaper claims to have hundreds of pages of e-mails and internal documents, as well as dozens of interviews, to back its assertions. The student newspaper's report is here, while Chronicle of Higher Education blog coverage of the controversy can be found here. If you're inclined to believe the young journalists' story, make sure you have a sink to spit in. The good news is that Californians might be inspired to brush and floss more. UPDATE: In a subsequent report, the Los Angeles Times says the American Dental Association is investigating cheating by UCLA dental students on a licensing examination.

Two New Studies Shed Light on How Minority Students are Affected by Peer Groups and Parental Job Loss

Two new studies recently presented at a Washington DC conference provide new insights on some of the factors that help determine whether minority students go on to college and academically succeed there.

In one of the studies, summarized at some length in an article on The Chronicle of Higher Education blog, two researchers from the University of Chicago--Ariel Kalil, an associate professor of public policy, and Patrick Wightman, a doctoral student in public policy--found that middle-class black children are much more likely than middle-class white children to see their chances of going to college diminished by a parent losing a job. The study suggests that the economic vulnerability of single-parent families is a major contributing factor.

In the other study, Marta Tienda, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, and Jason M. Fletcher, an assistant professor of public health at Yale University, examined how the academic achievement of black and Hispanic college freshmen is affected by the presence on campus of other freshmen from their high school. As discussed in a Chronicle of Higher Education blog article, the two researchers found that minority students at the University of Texas at Austin earned substantially better grades if other students from their high school and their racial or ethnic minority group entered college alongside them.

New Survey Explores Minority Students' Views Toward Diversity

A survey of black, Hispanic, and Native American students conducted by Widmeyer Communications, a research and polling firm, finds that many such students choose a college based at least partly on whether they think it is racially and ethnically diverse. (A full report is available here on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, available to nonsubscribers.) Nearly two-thirds said that it was at least somewhat important to them that students at the college they were considering studied and socialized with members of other races and ethnicities, nearly three-fourths said they want their college to promote such interaction. The survey's findings are somewhat at odds with other research showing a fair amount of self-segregation on campuses. It's worth noting that the Widmeyer survey lumped together its results from the three minority groups examined, possibly concealing variations between the three populations. (Hispanic students, who may belong to any race, have been shown in other studies to be comparatively adept at befriending other racial and ethnic groups.) An in-depth discussion of campus race relations--and how they are affected by affirmative action--can be found in Chapter 5 of Color and Money.

In Science and Engineering, Many More Minority Doctorates than Minority Professors

A new report financed by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation finds that blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans account for a much larger share of doctoral degree recipients in the sciences and engineering than one might surmise from the number of minority professors teaching classes in those fields at leading universities. In the field of chemistry, for example, the members of these three minority groups accounted for 7.5 percent of the doctorates awarded from 1996 to 2005, but just 3.9 of faculty members teaching chemistry at the 100 universities with the largest research budgets. As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the report says the paucity of minority college professors in such fields is a serious problem because such professors end up feeling isolated and minority students have little exposure to role models from their own racial and ethnic group. The report fails, however, to provide explanations for the numbers it offers. Is discrimination at work? Are differences in the prestige of the institutions awarding doctorates a factor? Might the private-sector businesses that compete with colleges to hire black, Hispanic, and Native American scientists and engineers be wooing them much more aggressively, and offering them larger salaries, than whites and Asian Americans in those fields? The report leaves the answers to such questions largely a mystery. A full text of the report is available here. Chronicle subscribers can find a story summarizing its findings here.

Some College Leaders Are Questioning the Value of Merit-Based Aid

The Chronicle of Higher Education blog reports that at least some colleges' leaders are beginning to ask whether their institutions should be spending less on merit-based scholarships and more on aid for needy students. At a recent panel discussion held at the College Board's annual conference, admissions deans expressed skepticism about whether merit-based awards really entice that many students to enroll at their institutions, and said identifying "merit" among the members of a highly qualified applicant pool can seem like an arbitrary exercise. Perhaps every bit as interesting as the Chronicle blog's coverage of the panel discussion, available here, are the ensuing comments from readers. Upper-middle-class parents piped up that they, too, find their kids' college tuition damned hard to afford.

NCAA Reaches Agreement with University of North Dakota over "Fighting Sioux" Mascot

The National Collegiate Athletic Association and the University of North Dakota have settled a lawsuit over the university's "Fighting Sioux" mascot, The Chronicle of Higher Education blog reports. The agreement offers the university a waiver from an NCAA policy barring American Indian imagery deemed hostile and abusive if, within the next three years, it gains approval of the mascot from at least two Sioux tribes with a significant presence in the state. (To read the Chronicle blog's coverage, with links to the NCAA's announcement, past coverage of the lawsuit, and a lively discussion by Chronicle readers, click here.) The Washington Redskins could not be heard making any comment on the NCAA agreement Sunday as they lay buried under the New England Patriots, 52-7.

Scheduling change for Nov. 19 event at Borders Books in Washington DC

Due to circumstances beyond his control, the time of Peter Schmidt's November 19 appearance at Borders Books at 18 and L NW, Washington DC, has been changed.

He is now scheduled to appear at Borders at 12:30 pm that day, for the lunch hour crowd.

Please disregard the 6:30 pm time mentioned in the previous blog post.

Sorry if this has caused any inconvenience.

Author of Color and Money makes two Washington DC appearances in November

Granted, being a resident of our nation's capital, Peter Schmidt makes "a Washington DC appearance" every time he steps out of his apartment to grab the morning paper. But metropolitan Washington residents interested in the book Color and Money may be glad to learn he has something a little more substantial to offer. On Thursday, November 1, beginning at 5:30 pm for the press and 6pm for the public, he will be chatting about his book and signing copies at the annual National Press Club holiday book fair. Then on Monday, November 19th, at 12:30 pm, he will be reading, discussing, and signing Color and Money at Borders Books at 18th and L Streets NW.

Book-related news: An extensive blog interview and more positive reviews

The blog "Nat Turner's Revenge" has just posted an extensive interview with Peter Schmidt in which he shoots left, shoots right, discusses media elitism, offers to buy bourbon, and recalls being told to eat doggy-doo. You can read it here. Meanwhile, Color and Money is the subject of recent reviews by the CampusProgress blog and by the Charleston Post and Courier. And The Chronicle of Higher Education, where Peter Schmidt oversees the Government and Politics section, has been nominated for an Utne Independent Press Award for political coverage. Details are available here.
UPDATE: The blog Mirror on America has posted a review of Color and Money, available here.
For those of you interested in what folks on the right think of Color and Money, see this review by George Leef of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. A review for the Washington Times by Martin Morse Wooster was far more positive, calling the book "fair, balanced, and judicious." To read it, however, you will need to have access to the Lexis-Nexis search engine or pay a few dollars to the Washington Times Web site's archive service. (If you plan to quote from the Washington Times review in any way, you should also see the letter that Peter Schmidt wrote to the Times to point out a serious factual error the review contained.)

Sizing Up Ward Connerly's Next Five Targets: Difficulty Level--Easy

Peter Schmidt reports in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the next five targets selected by Ward Connerly, the prominent affirmative-action critic, for ballot measures banning public colleges and other state agencies from granting preference based on race, ethnicity, or gender. Schmidt's conclusion? Connerly should have little trouble picking off four: Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. If he gets past some legal wrangling with state officials and affirmative-action supporters in Missouri over how his ballot petition there is worded, he is likely to prevail in that state as well. A link to Schmidt's story, accessible to both subscribers and nonsubscribers, is available here.

New Survey of College Professors Reveals Mixed Feelings on Affirmative Action in Admissions

A major study of faculty attitudes released last month has been billed in an article by David Glenn of The Chronicle of Higher Education as "arguably the best-designed survey of American faculty beliefs since the early 1970s." It's doubtful that the study's findings will offer much comfort to advocates of affirmative action in academe.

Of those college instructors who expressed an opinion of affirmative action in college admissions, only a very slim majority--50.7 percent--support it. Moreover, that 50.7 percent figure was arrived at by adding to the 11 percent who strongly favor it another 39.7 percent who only favor it somewhat.

On the other side, 17.4 percent of the college instructors expressing a view on the matter said they strongly oppose affirmative action in admissions, while 31.9 percent said they oppose it somewhat.

Considering that only 9.2 percent of college instructors in the survey were classified by the researchers as conservative, and just 20.4 percent voted for George W. Bush in 2004, it appears that opposition to affirmative action in the professoriate transcends political party and stretches well into the ideological middle ground.

On other questions related to race, most faculty members leaned further left. Among some key findings of the study conducted by the sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard University and Solon Simmons of George Mason University :

• 84.6 percent agreed with the assertion that a lack of educational opportunities is a cause of racial inequality between blacks and whites.
• 53.6 percent cited ongoing racial discrimination as a cause of racial inequality
• 18 percent agreed with the assertion that "most African Americans just don't have the motivation or will power to pull themselves out of poverty."
• Excluding respondents who expressed no opinion on the matter, 28.2 percent strongly agreed that the racial and ethnic diversity of the nation should be more strongly represented in the undergraduate curriculum, while 43.5 percent agreed somewhat, 21.3 percent disagreed somewhat, and 7.1 percent strong disagreed.

One of the study's other findings is of interest in light of the furor that former Harvard president Lawrence Summers aroused by speculating that differences in ability might explain the paucity of female math, science, and engineering professors. When asked their own take on why there are so few women teaching college students in those fields, 24.5 percent who answered the question blamed discrimination, 1 percent blamed differences in ability, and 74.5 percent expressed the belief that it is because men and women have different interests.

Can You Get Sued for Fighting Those Who Fight for "the Fighting Sioux"?

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the University of North Dakota has found a new category of people deemed in need of protection from discrimination: students who want to keep the university's Fighting Sioux nickname.

In a September 24 memorandum to five top administrators of the university, Sally J. Page, UND's affirmative action officer, warned that academic departments and programs that publicly oppose the nickname may be creating an unwelcome environment for those students who like it, and may be setting the university up for federal civil-rights lawsuits from fans of the nickname who feel discriminated against for their support of it.

What prompted the memo was a Sept. 22 ad in the Grand Forks Herald, signed by four university departments and about 20 university programs, urging that the controversial nickname be dropped. The Chronicle story on the controversy (available to regular subscribers and temporary pass buyers here) quotes several faculty members who oppose the nickname as offensive to American Indians as shocked they would be the ones being accused of possible discrimination.

Taking the Temperature of the College Admissions Field

The National Association for College Admissions Counseling held its annual conference in Austin, Tex., last week, and Chronicle of Higher Education reporters were on hand to cover the latest developments and trends in the field. Many in attendance expressed frustration with the SAT and ACT--partly because relying on them causes colleges to favor applicants from privileged backgrounds--and are seeking alternatives. The organization has created a Commission on the Use of Standardized Tests in Undergraduate Admission to examine, among other things, the effects of the test preparation industry. (Chronicle subscribers can read more here.) A report issued during the conference noted that despite the recent decisions by some high-profile colleges (including Harvard and Princeton Universities and the University of Virginia) to abolish their early-decision admissions programs, more students are applying early-action and early-decision over all. The report also noted that the share of colleges saying class rank is important has declined from about a third to less than a quarter over the past 10 years, while the share saying application essays are important rose from 18 percent to 28 percent. (Chronicle subscribers can read more coverage here. The full report is available here. ) The Chronicle blog, available to non-subscribers, has this story on how many upper-middle-class families are hiring independent college admissions counselors to give their kids an edge.

Something for You on Your Front Porch, Harvard

Today's Boston Globe has an essay by Peter Schmidt discussing how elite colleges may be thwarting social mobility, and contributing to the complacency and academic mediocrity of children raised in privilege, by favoring applicants with cash and connections. It cites research concluding that 15 percent of the students at colleges in Barron's top two tiers are white kids who failed to meet their institution's academic standards. UPDATE: A letter written to the Boston Globe in response to the essay asserts that there simply are not many qualified low-income applicants out there, and elite colleges generally try hard to take in those who qualify. As discussed in Color and Money, there is indeed a phenomenon on college admissions called "the knighting effect," in which selective colleges show a high degree of interest in academically excellent students from seriously poor backgrounds. It does not appear to apply, however, to students whose family incomes are working class or above, or whose standardized admissions test scores are less than top-notch. For a careful empirical analysis of how many talented low-income students are not making into into selective colleges, see this study by Williams College researchers. While the letter writer is correct in noting that many of the selective-college applicants being elbowed aside by those who donate or have connections are themselves from privileged backgrounds, he fails to see the impact of such admissions preferences on applicants who are working-class or middle-class. It will be tough to have intergenerational social mobility if the children of those on the middle rungs of the economic ladder find their upward progress blocked.

Report Says Student Debt Rising Faster than Starting Salaries

A new report from the Project on Student Debt, a public-policy group, says the student-loan debts being shouldered by America's college graduates are rising faster than the starting salaries they stand to earn. Based on comparisons between the class of 2005 and the class of 2006, it found that average loan debt of graduates rose by 8 percent from one year to the next, while the average starting salary they were offered rose by just 4 percent. As noted on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, the average student-loan debt faced by a member of the Class of 2006 was $21,100. The picture varied greatly from institution to institution and from one part of the country to the next, however. Graduates from institutions in Washington, D.C. and New Hampshire faced the highest debt levels, at $27,757 and $24,800, respectively, the report says. Hawaii graduates had the lowest debt, at $11,758. For the most part, high-debt states are concentrated in New England and the Midwest. Finding a college with low tuition does not necessarily mean graduating with equally low debt; a lot depends on whether the college is generous in offering financial aid to the needy. The Project on Student Debt's Web site includes an interactive map that lets college-bound students and their families click on a state and learn the bad news.

Closing the Campus-Visit Gap

From The Chronicle of Higher Education blog: A new report from Eduventures, a prominent higher-education consulting group, says colleges can greatly increase their enrollments of students from low-income families, or families without a parent who attended college, by encouraging such students to visit campus. The report points out that high-school students who visit a campus are especially likely to apply and to enroll after being admitted. As Color and Money notes, colleges see campus visits as a sign of applicant interest, and therefore tend to favor applicants who have taken campus tours. Unfortunately, such an admissions preference generally skews the game in favor of families that can easily afford hotels and air fare. The Eduventures report suggests that colleges offer travel grants to recruits from low-income backgrounds to make campus visits possible.

The Professoriate Gets More Diverse

An article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education notes that there has been a substantial increase over the last decade in minority representation on college faculties. As of 2005, the last year for which comprehensive data was available, 16.5 percent of the nation's professoriate was black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American, up from 12.7 percent in 1995. In raw numbers, the gains were even larger, but there also was significant growth in the number of white professors, as well as professors who are not U.S. citizens. Hispanic and Asian American professors made the greatest inroads, with the number of full-time faculty members from each group rising by more than 75 percent. The number of black scholars with full-time faculty positions rose by about a third, the number of Native Americans, by about half. Many of the experts quoted in the story call the figures disappointing, saying they had hoped minority groups would have made greater strides.

New federal report shows continued gaps between racial and ethnic groups in college performance

A new report by the U.S. Department of Education shows that larger shares of all minority groups are going on to earn college degrees, but black, Hispanic, and Native American students continue to lag behind white and Asian American students in terms of their achievement. A Chronicle of Higher Education story on the report, available to regular and temporary online subscribers here, notes that, while Hispanics outnumbered blacks at colleges, larger numbers of black students went on to earn their degrees. One explanation for this finding may be a lack of financial assistance for Hispanic students, who received the smallest average grant of any group. (Asian Americans were the least likely to receive aid, while black students were the most likely to receive aid and got the largest average award.) The Education Department's summary of its report's key findings is available here. For a disturbing glimpse at what might be holding back some Hispanic students, see this Arizona Republic story on teachers who mangle the English language while providing instruction.

Higher education's umbrella organization issues new guidance on affirmative action

The American Council on Education, an umbrella organization for the nation's higher-education associations, has issued new legal guidance on affirmative action at colleges in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in June in two cases involving race-based assignments to public schools. Like a similar report issued by the College Board in July, the new ACE paper tells colleges that they must be able to show that the pursuit of diversity is important to their missions, that their race-conscious admissions policies have educational benefits, and that they have considered ways to diversify their campus without considering applicants' race or ethnicity. For links to previous coverage of the Supreme Court's June decision, in cases involving public schools in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, click here.

Listen to a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast interview with Peter Schmidt

You can call up the interview by clicking here.

Humble kids from the mountains find opportunity at the University of Michigan. Appalachian State beats the Wolverines 34-32

Sorry. Couldn't resist. :) Chronicle coverage of the upset in the Big House is here.

New SAT results show growing racial gap, continued class disparities

The College Board has released data on the SAT scores of high schools' class of 2007. Its figures show that the gaps between the scores of black and white students widened and that there remains a strong correlation between SAT scores and family wealth. Moreover, students from wealthy backgrounds accounted for a larger share of test takers, while the share of test takers who came from middle-income groups declined. A Chronicle of Higher Education story on the College Board's numbers is available to its subscribers here. The College Board's press release and full report, complete with tables showing results by race, ethnicity, and family income, is available here at its Web site.

Federal civil-rights panel wades into law-school controversies

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is issuing a report today that wades into not just one, but two, heated controversies over affirmative action at law schools: the debate over the American Bar Association's requirement that such schools demonstrate a commitment to diversity, and UCLA law professor Richard Sander's fight to gain access to California state bar data to find out just how well affirmative-action admits fare in law school and life thereafter. The only place you will get the full story is here in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The commission's full report, "Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," is available here. A 2005 California bar association report showing that black graduates of law schools are about half as likely as whites to pass the bar on their first try is available here.

Peter Schmidt in USA Today: "When Loving Parents Choose Segregation"

Peter Schmidt has an essay in USA Today suggesting that today's biggest obstacle to school integration is not overt racism, but parental love. You can read it here.

Report says many top Hispanic students choose a college based on proximity, not prestige

A new report by the nonprofit group Excelencia in Education says high-achieving Hispanic students often pay little attention to prestige in selecting a college, focusing instead on location, cost, and the atmosphere on campus. One result is that the 6 percent of American colleges classified by the federal government as "Hispanic-serving" educate almost half of all Hispanic undergraduates, with many of their students not consciously choosing a Hispanic-serving institution so much as simply seeking an affordable education at a college near their home. The report's authors say the good news is that Hispanic students are behaving pragmatically in choosing a college. The bad news is that they are missing out on opportunities to enroll in institutions that may help them get farther in life. A Chronicle of Higher Education story on the report is available here for regular subscribers and subscribers with temporary online passes. Additional resources on Hispanic education are listed on this Web site under supplemental readings for Chapter 3 of Color and Money.

When Black and Brown Don't Mix Well

The Aug. 2 issue of The Economist has an illuminating article on relations between blacks and Latinos in the U.S. Its bottom-line conclusion: The two populations are much less united than depicted by some civil-rights activists. The article notes that a survey of residents of Durham, N.C., "found that 59% of Latinos believed few or almost no blacks were hard-working, and a similar proportion reckoned few or almost none could be trusted." Fewer than 1 in 10 whites surveyed held such negative views. Another telling set of statistics: Blacks, who account for 9 percent of the population of Los Angeles County, account for 59 percent of hate crime victims there, and seven out of ten times the perpetrators are Latino. The full article is available here.

Is the Democratic Presidential Nomination Strictly an Ivy League Club?

The Phoenix of Boston has an article in yesterday's issue suggesting that John Edwards' lack of a Harvard or Yale degree is greatly hurting his chances of getting the Democratic presidential nomination. The article, by Steven Stark, notes that the last Democratic nominee who did not attend one of those institutions for either undergraduate or graduate school was Walter Mondale, back in 1984. The article asserts that "fundraising (particularly now that all serious candidates spurn public funding) and primary politics have been taken over by the well-educated elites for whom Harvard and Yale are the Holy Grails," and that "the elite press is now dominated by former classmates of the candidates" with prestigious Ivy League pedigrees. It says:

To these people, Edwards doesn’t pass muster. It’s not that he’s not smart — he clearly has an impressive intellect. It’s much more subtle and insidious: if there’s one unstated lesson these select schools teach you, regardless of how much money your family actually has, it’s how to act like a member of the upper class.

The full text of the article is available here.

One wrinkle that Stark missed is that, as discussed in Color and Money, Edwards harshly criticized legacy admissions preferences when he campaigned in 2004. Such a stand probably seemed downright threatening to some of those who earned degrees from elite institutions and hope to see their children follow their footsteps into their alma mater.

More than Meets the Eye in "The Show Me State"

The Missouri Civil Rights Initiative, the group leading a campaign to ban the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies there, has gone to court to challenge how Missouri's secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, wants the measure summarized on the ballot.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article giving the full back and forth between both sides. In a nutshell, the summary language for the ballot measure proposed by MoCRI says:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to prohibit any form of discrimination as an act of the state by declaring:

The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting?

As certified by Ms. Carnahan, a Democrat, this month, the summary language in the ballot petition's title says:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to:

1. Ban affirmative-action programs designed to eliminate discrimination against, and improve opportunities for, women and minorities in public contracting, employment, and education; and

2. Allow preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin to meet federal-program-funds eligibility standards as well as preferential treatment for bona fide qualifications based on sex?

One prominent higher-education lawyer privately notes that any college affirmative-action program "designed to eliminate discrimination against, and improve opportunities for, women and minorities" in higher education would run afoul of the limits the Supreme Court placed on such policies as far back as its landmark Bakke decision of 1978. The court specifically held in that ruling that colleges cannot use race-conscious admissions policies to remedy societal discrimination. For discrimination to be the justification, it must be discrimination that the college in question perpetrated. In both the Bakke decision and its Grutter v. Bollinger decision of 2003, the only justification for race-conscious admissions explicitly allowed by the Supreme Court was the desire to foster levels of racial and ethnic diversity that will provide educational benefits to all students. So, in essence, if the proposed amendment to the Missouri Constitution bans what Ms. Carnahan says it bans, it bans what the Supreme Court says the U.S. Constitution already bans. Any Missouri college that has is operating a program like the ones she describes is vulnerable to lawsuit unless it has admitted to, or has been found guilty of, discrimination against minorities and women.

Postscript: If Carnahan's name sounds familiar, there is good reason for that. Her father, the late Mel Carnahan, was Missouri's governor from 1993 to 2000, and her mother served in the U.S. Senate. Her grandfather was a Congressman and U.S. ambassador appointed by JFK, and her brother, Russ, now holds a Congresssional seat.

The requirement that applicants be Packer fans still applies

Wisconsin's state attorney general has issued an informal opinion upholding the legality of a new University of Wisconsin system policy directing campuses to take race and ethnicity into account in freshman admissions. Details are available on The Chronicle of Higher Education's blog.

New study suggests historically black colleges have financial payoffs

A new study slated for publication in the Southern Economic Review found that black men who attended historically black colleges and universities in the late 1970s and early 1980s earned more over their lifetime than black men who attended other four-year colleges. The researchers--Bradford F. Mills Jr., a professor of agriculture and applied economics at Virginia Tech, and Elton Mykerezi, a recent graduate of that department--did not find similar payoffs for HBCU attendance for black women, however. Noting that black men face greater wage disparities compared to white people than black women, the researchers suggest that HBCUs may be particularly effective at taking black men from disadvantaged backgrounds and offering them the education and job networks they will need to transcend poverty. Subscribers to The Chronicle can read more here.

Amherst reaches out to the middle class

Amherst College, which has stood out from other selective higher education institutions for its efforts to provide greater access to low-income students, announced recently that it also would be doing more to help the middle class. Under a new policy announced July 19 and reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Amherst will replace all of its loans to students with outright financial-aid grants. Amherst's president, Anthony M. Marx, said he made the change because he was worried that middle-class families were being scared off by Amherst's sticker price of $45,000 annually. Subscribers to The Chronicle can read the full story by clicking here.

College Board lawyers to colleges: The Supreme Court means business

Lawyers for the College Board have issued guidance to colleges in response to the Supreme Court's decision dealing with the Seattle and Jefferson County school integration plans. The lawyers' bottom line: The latest decisions affirm that the Supreme Court was serious when it said in its 2003 affirmative action rulings that colleges seriously need to consider race-neutral alternatives to race-conscious admissions policies and to make sure their race-conscious policies serve some legally justifiable educational purpose. Read more here. (UPDATE: The College Board and National School Boards Association teamed up to issue guidance to school districts in late September. It is available here.) A few days after the College Board report for colleges came out, the Civil Rights Project issued a report arguing that colleges are unnecessarily scaling back their affirmative-action efforts in response to threats of litigation and pressure from Bush administration officials. Chronicle blog coverage is here.

Meet the New Boss

The Washington City Paper has an article this week on the sorts of young people one routinely finds emerging from the America's selective colleges and waltzing into jobs in Congressional offices, K Street lobbying firms, and other hubs of power in the nation's capital. The picture painted by "Members Only," a story on the social networking group Late Night Shots, is not the least bit pretty. If you would rather not be exposed to offensive language, don't click this link to the story. Click here for a summary of a study showing the connection between wealth and power in Washington, and here for a look at the special place Washington holds in that Who's Who of America's super-wealthy, the Social Register.

Education Department and Law School Accreditor Square Off over Diversity

The Education Department has asked the American Bar Association to provide detailed reports on its efforts to require law schools to promote diversity as a condition for certification. Many critics of the certification requirement suspect that it encourages law schools to discriminate against white and Asian students in ways that violate some states' bans on affirmative action and, potentially, the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The Chronicle of Higher Education has the full story.

Not Giving Something for Nothing

A new study by Jonathan Meer, a doctoral candidate in economics at Stanford University, and Harvey S. Rosen, a professor of economics at Princeton University, empirically affirms what many college officials have long suspected: People donate money to colleges because they think it increases their children's chances of being admitted. They're more likely to donate to their college of choice as their children approach college age, and their generosity to that institution plummets once it gives their kid a rejection letter. A Chronicle of Higher Education summary of the study is posted on the Chronicle's news blog.

Supreme Court ruling limits school integration plans but has little immediate impact on colleges

The U.S. Supreme Court issued its long-awaited ruling today in two cases involving race-conscious school assignments. The Chronicle of Higher Education's story on what the ruling means for colleges is here. The Century Foundation has responded by issuing a study examining socioeconomic integration plans as an alternative to integration plans that assign students to schools based on race. It did not take long for another school district's policies to be challenged based on the new Supreme Court precedent, as Scotusblog notes.

Critics of affirmative action seek to make it a key issue in the immigration debate

Reprinted with permission from The Chronicle of Higher Education's news blog, which is available to nonsubscribers. A statement from a group that opposes the campaign discussed below is available here.

June 7, 2007

Affirmative Action's Foes Call for Ban on Preferences in Immigration Bill

Critics of affirmative action plan to publish an open letter tomorrow calling for any immigration bill passed by Congress to contain language barring newly naturalized citizens from receiving preferences based on race, ethnicity, national origin, or color.

The open letter, scheduled for publication in The Washington Times, argues that “immigration and race preferences cannot be considered in isolation,” and that it is unfair that “the majority of immigrants coming to America will automatically be eligible for race preferences and privileges not provided to the great majority of Americans.”

The letter bears the signatures of 26 local and national leaders of the movement to bar the use of affirmative-action preferences in education, employment, and contracting. The effort to get it published was led by Ward Connerly, chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute and a leader of successful campaigns in California, Michigan, and Washington to ban affirmative-action preferences at public colleges and other state and local agencies.

The next affirmative action battlegrounds

Reprinted with permission from The Chronicle of Higher Education

From the issue dated May 4, 2007

4 States Named as New Targets in Affirmative-Action Fight

By PETER SCHMIDT

Critics of affirmative action announced last week efforts to get bans on racial and ethnic preferences on the ballots in four states — Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and Oklahoma — as part of a plan to thrust the issue into the national spotlight in the November 2008 elections.

Ward Connerly, the prominent anti-affirmative-action activist who played a key role in the successful campaigns for similar measures in California in 1996, Washington State in 1998, and Michigan last fall, is advising the newly formed state campaign organizations and was on hand for each of last week's announcements. He said an additional state, either Nebraska or South Dakota, would soon be added to the list.

"Getting our nation to the point of applying a single standard to all Americans is one of the most crucial issues of our time," Mr. Connerly, chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, said at the first of the press conferences held last week, in Denver. His group says it seeks to turn the November 4, 2008, election day into what it calls a "Super Tuesday for Equal Rights," with the goal of getting enough states to ban affirmative-action preferences in public-college admissions and other areas to send a clear message about their unpopularity to the nation's leaders.

Several civil-rights organizations are mobilizing efforts to battle the proposed ballot measures. For example, the Colorado Unity Coalition, consisting of about 40 business, civil-rights, religious, and labor organizations, held meetings to organize an opposition campaign there prior to last week's announcement. Bill Vandenberg, one of its leaders, said, "We believe we will be successful in educating Coloradans about the initiative and ensuring they know this initiative will do nothing to build Colorado's economy or our education system."

The Colorado Unity Coaliton formed 11 years ago to fight a similar measure that never gathered enough petition signatures to get on the ballot. Since then, the coalition has dissuaded the state legislature from adopting several bills to curtail affirmative action.

Mary A. Ratliff, president of the Missouri state conference of local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said she planned to look to her organization's national leadership, as well as to other local and national civil-rights groups, for assistance. "We are going to bring in whoever we need to bring in to help us fight this fight," she said.

Wade J. Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a national coalition of nearly 200 civil-rights organizations, said he expected many of his group's members to enter the fray, either directly or through their state affiliates. "I don't think that any of these states are particularly easy marks for Connerly," he said.

Petition Challenges Likely

In all four of the states where press conferences were held last week, the proposed ballot measures have essentially the same wording. Their key operative clause reads: "The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting." The state groups set up to campaign for the measures all have the words "Civil Rights Initiative" in their names.

At all four of last week's news conferences, Mr. Connerly cited the recent controvery over radio personality Don Imus's racist remarks and the wide acceptance of false accusations against Duke University lacrosse team players as examples of how "race will continue to divide our nation as long as we insist on treating people differently based on ethnicity or gender."

"We have to get past that kind of thinking," Mr. Connerly said, "and we must start by getting our government out of the business of privileging some citizens over others."

The executive director of the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative is Valery Pech Orr, who was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1995 Adarand Constructors v. Peña decision, which dealt with the use of affirmative action in awarding government contracts. Linda Chavez, the syndicated columnist and founder of the Center for Equal Opportunity, will serve as an honorary co-chairman of the campaign in Colorado, where she was raised.

In a written statement issued last week, Ms. Orr expressed confidence the measure will prevail, saying, "We in this state are individualists; racial and gender preferences run counter to our most basic values, and we expect that that will be made abundantly clear on November 4, 2008."

The Missouri Civil Rights Initiative is led by a former director of admissions at North Central Missouri College, Timothy P. Asher, who says the college refused to renew his contract in June 2004 because he had alleged that one of the institution's scholarship programs was discriminating against white students. In an interview last week, Neil G. Nuttall, president of North Central Missouri, said his institution's decision not to renew Mr. Asher's contract had nothing to do with the scholarship program. "The cause of his nonrenewal was insubordination," Mr. Nuttall said.

The organizations formed to direct the preference-ban campaigns must still gather enough petition signatures to get the measures on the ballots. A spokeswoman for the Detroit-based Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary, which filed several lawsuits challenging Michigan's preference ban, said her group plans to fight the measures in other states using one of the chief tactics it employed in Michigan: accusing those gathering petition signatures of voter fraud.

"We have had a fair amount of discussion with both civil-rights and lesbian and gay groups, and it is our view that what we have to do is stop these ballot initiatives before they get on the ballot," the spokeswoman, Shanta Driver, said last week.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Government & Politics
Volume 53, Issue 35, Page A34

One rock Color and Money left unturned: The student loan scandal

At the time Color and Money went to press, people were just starting to learn how about the cozy relationships betweens many college administrators and student loan providers. The upshot was that many students were being steered toward lenders who charged them higher interest rates than they might get elsewhere, making college even less affordable.

The Chronicle of Higher Education's federal reporters have been on the scandal like a pack of pit bulls. You can find out the latest at chronicle.com. This story offers an excellent overview. A Congressional report on the problem was issued in June.

The Texas 10 Percent Plan survives yet another legislative challenge

Experts on Texas state politics say it was the intervention of lawmakers from rural parts of the state that kept the state legislature from passing a measure that would have curtailed the plan's reach. To learn more, read coverage in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Will colleges' diversity budgets soon come under attack?

Reprinted with permission from The Chronicle of Higher Education

From the issue dated February 2, 2007

Diversity-Program Administrators Fear Challenges to Their Spending

By PETER SCHMIDT

Clemson, S.C.

Many college administrators who gathered here last week for a national conference on educating black students said they saw a new threat to their programs emerging from a libertarian group's recent efforts to demand a strict accounting of expenditures on diversity by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In a report released the week before, the Independence Institute, a research organization based in Golden, Colo., alleged that the state's flagship university had little idea how much money it spends promoting diversity and poorly manages such expenditures. University officials denied that they were spending any such money wastefully, but two Republican state representatives in Colorado have cited the report in calling for the state auditor to thoroughly examine the university's diversity expenditures.

News of the Colorado development distressed, but hardly surprised, many of the nearly 170 college administrators, faculty members, and admissions counselors who subsequently gathered here for Clemson University's Fifth National Conference on Best Practices in Black Student Achievement.

Although several participants said they had grown accustomed to justifying their affirmative-action efforts and felt confident they would be able to account for every dollar spent on diversity programs, others said they worried that colleges were ill prepared to defend such efforts against those demanding that they be subjected to a strict cost-benefit analysis.

The prospect of colleges' being asked to account for every dollar spent on diversity is "something to think about, maybe even sweat about," said an administrator from a public university in Indiana.

One of the conference's featured speakers, Damon A. Williams, the University of Connecticut's assistant vice provost for multicultural and international affairs, said he saw the Independence Institute's efforts to scrutinize university spending on diversity as representing "the next wave" of attacks on affirmative action. He said he had responded to news of the institute's report by sending letters to three major national higher-education organizations, which he declined to name, urging them to mobilize colleges elsewhere to defend themselves against similar scrutiny.

"I think many institutions are greatly at risk," Mr. Williams said. Colleges have only in the past few years begun documenting the benefits of diversity, he said, and while they generally can make good arguments that the diversity programs serve a valuable purpose, they have not done enough to track the money spent on such efforts and their results.

Fear of Paralysis

Jessica Peck Corry, director of the Independence Institute's Campus Accountability Project, said last week that she found it "disheartening" that college administrators would see her organization's demand for financial accountability in diversity programs as an attack on the programs themselves.

"This has nothing to do with affirmative action," she said. "This has to do with fiscal policy." She said she had hoped colleges and her organization could find common ground in their desire to make sure diversity programs "are getting the best bang for their buck."

It is also the case, however, that the Independence Institute has challenged the legality of some of the University of Colorado's affirmative-action efforts, criticizing its past practice of reserving some workshops and classes solely for members of minority groups. Its most recent report similarly criticized minority-oriented programs that the institute perceived as promoting racial and ethnic separatism.

Richard Bayer, dean of enrollment services at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, said he saw the inquiry about diversity spending at Colorado as part of a broader movement to demand accountability of higher-education institutions. "To some degree I think it is going to have an impact on diversity on campus," he said. "It makes you stop and think very carefully about how you are spending your dollars, and are you making a difference."

"Every time we try to do something, there is a group that is challenging what we are doing," Mr. Bayer said. "We are going from analysis to, almost, paralysis."

Some administrators who expressed the most confidence in their ability to defend their diversity expenditures were those from states in which affirmative action has come under the most intense scrutiny. Karen Eley Sanders, assistant provost and director of academic support at Virginia Tech, said being the subject of past investigations by the Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity had left her institution at a point where "I think we can account for what we are doing with our dollars."

Rahim Reed, associate executive vice chancellor for campus-community relations at the University of California at Davis, said a ban on affirmative-action preferences, approved by voters in that state in 1996, had forced his institution to restructure its diversity programs in ways that may have made them less vulnerable to attacks on their spending.

Rather than operating stand-alone programs focused on specific racial or ethnic groups — an approach that he sees as most exposed to auditors' scrutiny — his campus has incorporated diversity into its basic mission and broadened its diversity programs to include a wide range of populations, he said.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Government & Politics
Volume 53, Issue 22, Page A20

The last big barrier to minority access to college: the achievement gap. (Reprinted with permission from The Chronicle of Higher Education)

What Color Is an A?

Colleges take on a persistent but rarely discussed issue: the poor grades earned by many minority students

By PETER SCHMIDT

Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Chantrice Ollie is an all-too-rare find at most predominantly white, selective colleges: a black student with a high grade-point average.

She applied to Skidmore College with weaker academic credentials than most of the students it admits. Her public high school, in Cleveland, offered few advanced courses. She had earned mostly A's, but her SAT scores were well below Skidmore's usual standards.

Had Ms. Ollie enrolled at a different elite college, there is a good chance her grade-point average would be well below the 3.6 she has earned at Skidmore in her freshman year. But Skidmore — a small, private, liberal-arts college in a town known for its horse tracks — has committed itself to taking in academic long shots and turning them into winners. On the whole, the black students admitted through Skidmore's special programs for subpar applicants from economically and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds earn higher grades than those who enroll through the regular admissions process. The same holds true for other racial and ethnic groups.

Ms. Ollie attributes much of her academic success so far to the emotional support she receives from the programs' staff and her fellow participants. "It's a family," she says.

In finding ways to increase the share of its minority students who perform at high levels, Skidmore is itself exceptional. After more than five decades of racial integration and four decades of affirmative action, most of the nation's colleges and universities have not come close to eliminating the performance gap that separates many black, Hispanic, and Native American students from their white and Asian-American counterparts.

Although some colleges say they are working on the problem, few have any proof that their strategies are effective. The paucity of minority undergraduates earning high grade-point averages remains one of the chief obstacles to diversifying the enrollments of advanced-degree programs.

The crisis could grow more dire. As legal and legislative assaults on affirmative action continue, more graduate and professional schools may have to stop considering applicants' race and ethnicity. Unless colleges can find ways to improve minority undergraduates' academic performance, there is likely to be a drop in the percentage of black, Hispanic, and Native American students becoming doctors, lawyers, professors, and engineers.

Susan B. Layden, who oversees Skidmore's efforts to promote minority achievement as associate dean of student affairs, is among a growing group of educators and researchers who believe that colleges must do far more to help minority students earn high grades.

"This is not rocket science," she says. "We can do this across higher education, especially at the elites."

Worse Than Expected

In seeking to increase their numbers of high-achieving black, Hispanic, and Native American students, colleges face two formidable problems: Such students are substantially underrepresented among applicants with high grades and SAT scores. And even those who perform well in high school tend to do worse in college than white and Asian-American students with comparable SAT scores and grades — a problem known as "the overprediction phenomenon."

The underrepresentation of black, Hispanic, and Native American students among highly qualified college applicants is often blamed on disparities in family education and income, as well as on inequities in elementary and secondary education. But the children of many affluent professionals in those same groups are struggling, too — tending, on average, to score lower on the SAT and academic-achievement tests than white and Asian-American students who attend inferior schools and have parents with less education and money.

Education researchers and other social scientists have offered a host of explanations for such performance gaps, including the residual effects of slavery and segregation, the stigmatization of high academic achievers by their minority peers, and the lack of minority role models among college administrators and professors. All those theories are the subject of vigorous debate. (See article on Page A26.)

Whatever the reasons, the fact is that white and Asian-American students continue to outperform black, Hispanic, and Native American students by a significant degree. According to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, the percentage of the nation's white undergraduates earning mostly A's is about twice the proportion of black undergraduates doing so.

Researchers with access to the transcripts of students at selective colleges say the performance gaps are even more pronounced there, especially at the highest achievement levels and among students majoring in mathematics, engineering, the sciences, and technology-related fields.

Such gaps exist in advanced-degree programs as well. Studies of law schools conducted since the early 1990s have found that about half of black students rank in the bottom fourth, or even the bottom tenth, of their classes (the variation mainly reflects differences in the law schools and student populations being studied). One of the chief goals of programs such as Skidmore's is to ensure that minority students are better represented among students ranked in the middle and near the top.

Academic Boot Camp

In an attempt to compensate for the short supply of black, Hispanic, and Native American students who meet its regular admissions standards, Skidmore, with a total enrollment of about 2,400, annually admits about 40 freshmen whose failure to make the cut seems related to their disadvantaged backgrounds. Once they matriculate, the college provides them with support services intended to help them succeed academically.

Skidmore has two intertwined efforts under way: the Higher Education Opportunity Program, which receives state support and serves only New Yorkers, and the Academic Opportunity Program, for students from other states.

The programs assist students who have high high-school grades and other traits signaling strong long-term academic potential, but who have low SAT scores or come from schools that offered few advanced courses.

One of those students is Uriel Salcedo, a sophomore whose parents are working-class Mexican immigrants. The teachers at his Denver public high school lavished high grades on him and praised his writing ability. But when he arrived at Skidmore, he says, he got C's and D's on his papers: "It was like I had been living a lie most of my life."

The Skidmore programs are designed to ease that transition, starting before the freshman year even begins. Each incoming student must attend a four-and-a-half-week academic boot camp. Students spend their days taking an intensive writing course, an intensive math course, and a course in which they must digest — and write analytically about — the ideas of figures like Plato and Darwin. They are required to study for three hours a night, with the help of professional tutors.

Bobby Langford, a a black freshman from Worcester, Mass., says the summer program pushed him "to the limit," but that his writing skills improved substantially. Moreover, the philosophers he studied are so firmly implanted in his head that often, he jokes, "I think I am thinking too much."

Vaughn Greene, a black junior who enrolled through the Higher Education Opportunity Program and has served as a head resident in the dormitories during the past two summer institutes, says many students at first fail to take the summer program seriously. After getting slammed with D's and F's on their first papers, however, "they realize it is time to switch gears and actually do something because these people aren't playing."

The lesson appears to sink in. As of last fall, 78, or nearly 60 percent, of the 133 students involved in the two Skidmore programs had grade-point averages of at least 3.0, and more than a fourth had at least 3.5.

In trying to close the academic performance gap between the races, Skidmore is taking on one of academe's touchiest subjects. Officials of colleges and universities generally refuse to disclose the median grade-point averages of their minority students. Many are hesitant to even discuss the performance gap, for fear that doing so would stigmatize minority students or provide ammunition to those seeking an end to race-conscious admissions.

Critics of affirmative action say the academic performance gap is simply a result of colleges' willingness to lower their standards for the sake of diversity. "If you systematically admit students with lower academic qualifications, then those students are going perform below the level" of regularly admitted students, says Roger B. Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, an advocacy group. The center has produced several reports citing the lower achievement of minority students as evidence that admissions offices give substantial preferences to certain minority candidates.

'An Ignored Issue'

Some college leaders argue that the performance gap merits discussion regardless of the political ramifications. "There are people who are just waiting to pounce" on any bad news about minority achievement to make a point, says Joseph A. Tolliver, St. Lawrence University's vice president for student life. But "if you don't talk about it, how are you going to solve it?"

Freeman A. Hrabowski III is president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which has attracted national attention by successfully fighting the overprediction phenomenon and getting black and Hispanic students with high SAT scores to perform at least as well as those scores would predict. He calls the performance gap "an ignored issue." College leaders, he says, "should be more concerned about seeking the truth and less concerned about what sounds popular or even politically correct."

Discussions of the possible causes of the performance gap can easily veer toward subjects that are controversial, even taboo. Glenn C. Loury, a professor of social sciences and economics at Brown University who previously directed Boston University's Institute on Race and Social Division, observes that some academics fault the cultures associated with certain minority groups or even suggest that genetics may be at work. He can feel uncomfortable even entertaining the idea that cultural forces play a role because, in doing so, he says, "you are presuming there is something wrong with African-American kids, and now you are undertaking to fix them."

The discussion is further complicated by the effectiveness of many historically black and predominantly Hispanic colleges. Many of them produce large numbers of minority graduates with academic records strong enough to easily gain admission to most graduate programs and law and medical schools. Their relative success suggests that predominantly white colleges may place a distinct set of obstacles in the paths of minority students, an idea that can put campus administrators on the defensive.

Talks Under Way

Many college officials who are working to close the performance gap say the initial impetus for their efforts was the 1998 publication of William G. Bowen and Derek Bok's The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton University Press). Based on their analyses of data from 28 selective colleges, Mr. Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, and Mr. Bok, a former president of Harvard University, extensively documented race- and ethnicity-linked differences in achievement, including those attributable to the overprediction phenomenon. They also found a strong correlation between undergraduate grades and future earnings, with black students who earn low grades suffering more, in terms of their future earnings, than white students with comparable academic records.

Since then dozens of colleges have joined efforts to study and discuss the academic performance gap, although most have yet to bear fruit.

Among the efforts under way is the Consortium on High Achievement and Success, comprising more than 30 private liberal-arts colleges and small universities, including Amherst, Brandeis, Oberlin, Pomona, St. Lawrence, and Swarthmore. Established in 2001 and based at Trinity College, in Hartford, Conn., the group has adopted a statement of principles declaring that "all students who matriculate to our campuses are capable of succeeding," and that member institutions intend to focus on "promoting high educational achievement, not remediation."

So far the consortium has collected data from member colleges to determine what approaches are working, encouraged its members to replicate any programs shown to remedy the especially severe education problems of black and Hispanic men or to academically challenge highly talented minority students, and worked to design academic support programs aimed at helping students perform well in difficult entry-level courses. It plans to hold meetings in the coming months on effective approaches to educating freshmen, teaching writing, and advising students who wish to enter the health professions.

"We are trying all sorts of things. Some things are succeeding, some are not," says Mr. Tolliver, of St. Lawrence, who is a member of the consortium's Steering Board.

As part of a separate effort, scientists from 18 higher-education institutions, including Bowdoin College, Harvard University, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and the University of Washington, have been meeting since late 2005 in symposia on improving diversity in the sciences. Member institutions have agreed to submit data on grade-point averages, retention rates, and other measures of success, to establish a basis for long-term studies seeking to identify effective strategies for improving minority achievement.

Wendy E. Raymond, an associate professor of biology at Williams College who helps to lead the effort, says the federal government has spent millions of dollars on programs that "have had very little statistical success" in getting more minority students to become scientists. "Let's encourage funding for programs that actually work," she says.

Elsewhere on the research front, Mr. Bowen is gathering data on the performance gap as part of a study of 21 major public universities. The Council on Aid to Education's Collegiate Learning Assessment is seeking to measure how much undergraduates at various colleges are learning. And the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering is gauging member colleges' progress in getting minority students to earn high grades.

Few Proven Strategies

From 2002 to 2005, L. Scott Miller, then executive director of the Consortium for High Academic Performance, at the University of California at Berkeley, led a three-member team in evaluating more than 100 efforts to improve the educational achievement of minority or disadvantaged undergraduates. The researchers found many programs and strategies that focused on increasing graduation rates, but very few that explicitly sought to help more minority students earn high grades.

Moreover, the team found, few of the programs examined had undergone any sort of rigorous evaluation of their effectiveness. As a result, its report concluded, selective colleges "have few programs and strategies with strong empirical evidence showing that they help increase the number of high-achieving undergraduates from underrepresented groups."

Among the few exceptions cited were Skidmore's two programs and the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

Established by Mr. Hrabowski in 1988, the Meyerhoff program recruits high-achieving, well-prepared students interested in science, engineering, and mathematics and takes steps to ensure that they perform academically every bit as well as might be predicted based on their high-school grades and SAT scores. Among its key components, the program urges faculty members to act as mentors, monitors students' progress, and encourages students in the program to help each other in study groups.

The university has compiled data showing that participants have much higher grade-point averages, and are much more likely to get admitted to graduate programs in science, engineering, and math than are students of the same minority groups who emerged from high school with similar academic profiles.

Unfortunately for other colleges, the Meyerhoff program's success depends largely on its ability to bring high-achieving minority students together. Because the nation's high schools annually produce only a few thousand black and Hispanic graduates with Meyerhoff-caliber academic profiles, there is a limit on the number of colleges that can duplicate the approach.

Expensive Proposition

Mr. Miller and his fellow researchers concluded that the Skidmore programs would be easier for colleges to copy. Both the Skidmore and Meyerhoff programs are costly, however. The Skidmore programs had a total budget of $4-million in the 2006-7 academic year.

Much of the money that is not used for financial aid pays the salaries of the educators who advise and provide the intensive tutoring to the students involved.

The office that houses the Skidmore programs has a welcoming feel. Students are free to drop in to seek academic help or simply banter and chat with staff members. On a recent Friday morning, Monica D. Minor, director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program, helped Eilin Nunez, a sophomore from the Dominican Republic, plan a term paper about politics in the Middle East. In another room, Lewis Rosengarten, the associate director, worked with Linda Leandre, a black freshman, to revise a paper that she had written for an English-composition class.

It is not as if Skidmore's minority students are completely happy with the college. The freshman class is just 3 percent black and 3.7 percent Hispanic. In April students here staged a protest demanding that the college do more to promote diversity and fight racial bias.

"There are a lot of people here who have no idea where we come from, the struggles we have had to get to college," says Ms. Ollie, the freshman from Cleveland.

The program's advisers make a point of urging students not let their studies suffer by getting overinvolved in minority-student organizations or efforts to transform the college. Ms. Layden, the associate dean of student affairs, says she occasionally intervenes with administrators when she determines that they are distracting minority students from their studies by asking them to help with minority recruitment or public-liaison efforts.

The conventional wisdom in academe is that students will perform better academically if they feel good about themselves socially and personally. The Skidmore programs operate on the assumption that doing well academically helps students feel good about themselves, says Ms. Layden. To help minority students feel they can achieve at higher levels regardless of what is going on around them, she says, "we create a smaller environment within this place where students feel safe."