April 2012
A
growing body of empirical evidence is undermining the claim that racial
preferences in college benefit their recipients. Students who are admitted to
schools for which they are inadequately prepared in fact learn less than they
would in a student body that matches their own academic level. As an ongoing
controversy at Duke University demonstrates, however, such pesky details may
have no effect on the longevity of the preference regime.
Duke admits black students with SAT scores on average over one standard
deviation below those of whites and Asians (blacks’ combined math and verbal
SATs are 1275; whites’ are 1416, and Asians’, 1457). Not surprisingly, blacks’
grades in their first semester are significantly lower than those of other
ethnic groups, but by senior year, the difference between black and white
students’ grades has shrunk almost 50 percent. This convergence in GPA might
seem to validate preferential admissions by suggesting that Duke identifies
minority students with untapped academic potential who will narrow the gap with
their white and Asian peers over their college careers.
Now
three Duke researchers have demonstrated that such catching-up is illusory.
Blacks improve their GPAs because they switch disproportionately out of more
demanding science and economics majors into the humanities and soft social
sciences, which grade much more liberally and require less work. If black
students stayed in the sciences at the same rate as whites, there would be no
convergence in GPAs. And even after their exodus from the sciences, blacks don’t
improve their class standing in their four years of college.
This
study, by economics professor Peter Arcidiacono, sociology professor Ken Spenner,
and economics graduate student Esteban Aucejo, has major implications for the
nationwide effort to increase the number of minority scientists. The federal
government alone has spent billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money trying to
boost minority participation in science; racial preferences play a key role in
almost all college science initiatives. The Arcidiacono paper suggests that
admitting aspiring minority scientists to schools where they are less prepared
than their peers is counterproductive.
The
most surprising finding of the study is that, of incoming students who reported
a major, more than 76percent of black male freshmen at Duke intended to major
in the hard sciences or economics, higher even than the percentage of white male
freshmen who anticipated such majors. But more than half of those would-be black
science majors switched track in the course of their studies, while less than 8
percent of white males did, so that by senior year, only 35 percent of black
males graduated with a science or economics degree, while more than 63 percent
of white males did. Had those minority students who gave up their science
aspirations taken Introductory Chemistry among students with similar levels of
academic preparation, they would more likely have continued with their original
course of study, as the unmatched record of historically black colleges in
graduating science majors suggests. Instead, finding themselves in classrooms
pitched at a more advanced level of math or science than they have yet mastered,
preference recipients may conclude that they are not cut out for quantitative
fields—or, equally likely, that the classroom “climate” is racist—whereas the
problem may just be that they have not yet laid the foundations for more
advanced work.
Attrition from a hard science major was wholly accounted for in the paper’s
statistical models by a freshman’s level of academic qualifications; race was
irrelevant. While science majors had SATs that were 50 points higher than
students in the humanities in general, students who had started out in science
and then switched had SATs that were 70 points lower than those of science
majors. Any student in a class that assumes knowledge of advanced calculus is
likely to drop out if he has not yet mastered basic calculus.
The
Duke paper, whose methodology is watertight, deserves widespread attention among
educators and policymakers. An amicus brief seeking Supreme Court review of
racial preferences at the University of Texas (in a case called Fisher v.
Texas) has brought the paper to the Court’s attention. Predictably,
however, a number of black students, alumni, and professors have portrayed the
research as a personal assault.
Members of Duke’s Black Student Alliance held a silent vigil outside the
school’s Martin Luther King Day celebration in protest of the paper and handed
out fliers titled “Duke: A Hostile Environment for Its Black Students?” In an
email to the state NAACP, the BSA called the paper “hurtful and alienating” and
accused its authors of lacking “a genuine concern for proactively furthering the
well-being of the black community.”
Naturally, the BSA has leveraged its protest into demands on the Duke
administration for more black faculty and administrators and for more funding of
black-themed programs. A Duke professor of English, women’s studies, and law,
Karla Holloway, tweeted that the study “lacks academic rigor”—this women’s
studies professor neglected to specify which of its algorithms she found
flawed—and that it “re-opens old racial wounds.” A senior research scholar, Tim
Tyson, wrote in an op-ed that the paper was a “political tract disguised as
scholarly inquiry,” representing a “crusade to reduce the numbers of black
students at elite institutions.” (Both Tyson and Holloway were active in the
witch hunt against the three Duke lacrosse players who were falsely accused in
2006 of raping a black stripper.) A group of recent black Duke graduates called
on the study’s authors to “stop their attack on students of color.”
To
the extent that these critics tried to address the paper’s arguments, they
missed its gist entirely. The Duke alumni alleged that black students “shy away”
from “so-called ‘difficult’ majors” because they’ve been told all their lives
that they are “inferior”—overlooking the fact that Duke’s black students “shied
away” from the sciences only after starting out in those fields. Tyson
claimed that black students choose the humanities over the sciences because they
“come from cultural and intellectual traditions different than—not less
than—most white students at Duke”—again, ignoring the fact that black students
overwhelmingly intend to major in the sciences when they arrive at Duke. An
essay by a professor of critical culture, gender, and race studies at Washington
State University faulted the researchers for not exploring the “countless” ways
in which “racism” denies black high school students equal access to SAT prep and
Advanced Placement courses. But the focus of the major-switching paper was on
what happened to minority students after they arrived at Duke, not
before.
Moreover, the paper did note that the racial difference in academic preparation
is “not surprising, given disparities in resources between black and white
families.”
The
study’s critics also asserted that the intellectual demands of humanities and
science majors are indistinguishable. Applying Ferdinand de Saussure (a
19th-century Swiss linguist invoked today only in literature classes) to The
Matrix, it was claimed, is as challenging as mastering the Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle. Here, too, the protesters ignored the paper’s empirical
evidence: Seniors in the hard sciences have lower grades than freshmen in
humanities and social sciences, even though the SATs of science majors are on
average higher than those of humanities majors. For blacks, the disparity in
grading is even greater. Black freshmen get higher grades in the humanities and
social sciences than freshmen of all races get in the hard sciences, though
black students’ test scores and overall grades are significantly lower than
other students’. As for the coursework demands in the various fields, it is
students themselves who report spending 50percent more time studying for the
hard sciences, and who rate those courses as more difficult than the humanities
and the social sciences.
In
a different world, the Duke administration might have tried to dispel some of
the distortions of the Arci-diacono paper, given the authors’ patent lack of
invidious intent and the rigor of their work. Instead, Duke’s top bureaucrats
left the authors twisting in the wind. In an open letter to the campus, provost
Peter Lange and a passel of deanlings declared: “We understand how the
conclusions of the research paper can be interpreted in ways that reinforce
negative stereotypes.” It is hard to imagine a more hypocritical utterance. To
the extent that the paper reinforces “negative stereotypes,” it does so by
describing the effects of Duke’s policy of admitting black students with lower
academic qualifications than whites and Asians. It is Duke’s predilection for
treating black students as a group whose race trumps their individual academic
records that constitutes “stereotyping,” not the authors’ analysis of the
consequences of that group thinking. (Campus spokesman Michael Schoenfeld
ignored a request to specify the “negative stereotypes” that the paper might
reinforce.)
But
perhaps a concession to black anger had to be made to clear some space for a
defense of the Arcidiacono paper? Not a chance. The deanlets and provosts
followed their invocation of “negative stereotypes” with an anodyne
generalization about academic freedom: “At the same time, our goal of academic
success for all should not inhibit research and discussion to clarify important
issues of academic choice and achievement.” In other words, don’t blame us for
what these wacky professors might say.
The
bureaucrats went on to explain the origins of the student database which the
professors had used for their study, as if the very gathering of information had
been called into question by the paper. (The Duke data repository was a response
to William Bowen and Derek Bok’s 1999 study of college affirmative action,
The Shape of the River, which had exposed the low grades of preference
beneficiaries nationwide; the Duke data project was intended to identify and
help resolve similar problems of underachievement locally. In other words, the
Arcidiacano paper was squarely within the mandate of the Duke student database.)
Duke has worked to create an “empowering, safe, and stigma-free environment” for
students to get help in science, the administrators added, implicitly
acknowledging that the administration has known for years about minority
students’ struggles with science. (As for the nauseating women’s studies’
rhetoric about the need for “safe spaces” on campus, the idea that Duke is
anything other than the cushiest, most supportive, most compassionate
environment ever experienced by late adolescents is preposterous. The
often-observed self-segregation of minority students at elite campuses into
“safe,” race-themed “spaces” results, in large part, from preferential
admissions and the resulting disparities in academic skills.)
Finally, as is de rigueur in all such flaps over “diversity,” the administration
pledged to try even harder to be sensitive to Duke’s black students. “We welcome
the call to action. Many people have been working for a long time to create a
positive climate for African-American students. We look forward to ongoing
conversations with BSA and others about ways that we can improve,” Schoenfeld
penitently announced. Of course, as Schoenfeld meekly hints, Duke has been
engaged in color-coded programming and funding for decades, pouring money into,
to name just a few endeavors, a black student center, a black student recruiting
weekend, and such bureaucratic sinecures as a vice provost for faculty diversity
and faculty development and an associate vice provost for academic diversity,
who, along with the faculty diversity task force and faculty diversity standing
committee, ride herd over departmental hiring and monitor the progress of the
2003 10-point Faculty Diversity Initiative, which followed upon the previous
10-year Black Faculty Strategic Initiative. But no college administration in
recent history has ever said to whining students of any race or gender:
“Are you joking? We’ve kowtowed to your demands long enough, now go study!” And
why should the burgeoning student services bureaucracy indulge in such honesty,
for it depends on just such melodramatic displays of grievance for its very
existence.
The
BSA may have misunderstood the paper’s argument, but it was right about one
thing: The Duke administration had completely ducked the substance of the study.
Referring to the bureaucrats’ open letter, the BSA’s executive vice president
told the campus newspaper: “They didn’t mention the words ‘race,’ ‘black’ or the
phrase ‘affirmative action’ in their response, and we feel that this was a
deliberate attempt to avoid directly addressing the issues at hand.” No kidding.
The Duke hierarchy uttered not a word on the question whether the school’s black
students were dropping out of the sciences because of their relative lack of
preparation. It was as if Arcidiacono, Spenner, and Aucejo had committed a
social transgression so embarrassing that the only polite thing to do was to
ignore it.
The
uproar over the major-switching paper has had its intended effect: Lead author
Arcidiacono may be browbeaten out of affirmative action research. “Honestly, I’m
not sure how much further I want to go with this line of inquiry,” he says. “I
may have been naïve to think I could do this work.” Arcidiacono’s other
scholarly focus, applied econometrics, has the distinct advantage that “no one
gets upset” with you, he says. Moreover, economists understand the concept of
distribution—to talk about average black academic preparation, for example, does
not mean that there are no black students superbly qualified to study
engineering and chemistry.
A
handful of scholars have been documenting the negative consequences of so-called
“academic mismatch,” but the scourging of Arcidiacono and his fellow authors
cannot encourage many others to enter the fray. Nevertheless, the evidence is
already strong that preferences are contributing to the undereducation of
minorities. In 2005, UCLA law professor Richard Sander demonstrated that blacks
admitted to law schools because of their race end up overwhelmingly in the
lowest quarter of their class and have much greater difficulties passing the bar
than students admitted on their merits. A working paper by Sander and UCLA
statistician Roger Bolus extends the Arcidiacono analysis of students at Duke to
a comparative setting: Science students with credentials more than one standard
deviation below their peers’ are half as likely to graduate with science degrees
as students with similar qualifications attending schools where their academic
preparation matches their peers’.
As
such findings mount, the conclusion will become inescapable: College leaders who
continue to embrace affirmative action do so simply to flatter their own egos,
so that they can gaze upon their “diverse” realm and bask in their noblesse
oblige. Faced with the Arcidiacono analysis and other research like it, the
responsible thing for Duke administrators to do would be to admit all students
on the same basis, so that all would stand an equal chance of success in the
most challenging majors. Getting rid of racial preferences would reduce Duke’s
black population, now 10 percent of the student body, by half, but the half that
remained would be fully competitive with their peers. Admittedly, such a drop in
the black student census would trigger charges that Duke was hostile to
minorities. And unless other schools reformed their own admissions policies, the
students whom Duke would have admitted through racial preference would simply go
to other elite institutions, where they would be just as handicapped by
deficiencies in their academic preparation. All the more imperative, then, to
air the mismatch research as widely as possible. But until it becomes possible
to discuss the effects of preferences without being accused of racial animus, it
may be impossible to dislodge academic affirmative action, no matter how
discredited its purported justifications.
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