|
Gary
Orfield
 After
a generation of serious efforts by U.S. colleges and universities
to reverse their historic exclusion of African Americans, Latinos,
and American Indians, these institutions are suddenly facing a frontal
attack on the programs, policies, and commitments born of those
efforts. Threatened by court decisions, referenda, political attacks,
and lawsuits, colleges are struggling to foresee the consequences
of abandoning affirmative action and to devise viable alternatives
for promoting and preserving campus diversity. This volume documents
and examines that struggle.
As the communities around them become more and more
diverse, many campuses that have been forced to end affirmative
admissions are now rapidly turning whiter. There are fewer minority
applicants, and those who are admitted often choose to go elsewhere
rather than face severe isolation. These changes can create a vicious
circle of resegregation. Denying the benefits of a college education
to groups that are destined to become the majority in many cities
and states raises explosive issues. The first troubling examples
are already evident. At the leading public law schools in Texas
and California, states where the majority of students are now Latino
or black, the enrollment of blacks and Latinos has dropped dramatically:
the University of Texas (UT) Law School’s entering class in
fall 1997 was less than 1 percent black; in California black enrollment
dropped by 63 percent while Latino enrollment was down by 34 percent.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Regents
of the University of California v. Bakke permitted colleges
to consider race as one of a variety of factors in admissions, but
forbade the use of racial quotas. The key opinion, by Justice Lewis
Powell, cited Harvard University’s multidimensional admissions
process, which seeks to promote diversity of many kinds.
The rate of access to college for black high school
graduates relative to whites had reached its peak just before Bakke,
because of a variety of trends in the 1960s and early 1970s. These
included a vast expansion of federal aid for low-income college
students; the rapid growth of low-cost four-year state colleges;
and programs from the War on Poverty, such as Upward Bound, designed
to identify promising low-income students and give them both training
in key pre-collegiate skills and support in preparing for and applying
to college. Bakke enabled colleges wanting to maintain a
significant minority presence to do so even as these anti-poverty
programs were dismantled in the 1980s, and in spite of continuing
large gaps in the preparation of minority students.
Under Bakke, colleges were allowed to work
out something short of a quota that would boost minority access.
There were few legal or political challenges to these affirmative
admissions programs for a generation, while public debate focused
on more visible issues such as school busing, racially defined voting
districts, and affirmative action in employment. The conflicts over
race on campus were about curriculum, harassment, racially defined
housing and educational programs, and faculty recruitment. The few
researchers who concentrated on these issues gave most attention
to the problems of minority students on predominantly white campuses.
Everything changed suddenly in 1996, when federal
courts of appeals in Texas and California, the two largest states,
outlawed race-conscious college admissions policies. Several other
states were affected by a third appeals court decision in Maryland
that prohibited racially targeted financial aid. The U.S. Supreme
Court, which had already limited race-conscious remedies in minority
contracting, voting rights, and school desegregation, refused to
hear any of these three key cases, thus effectively limiting the
Bakke principle in large parts of the country.
As this book is published, legislative and legal challenges
to affirmative admissions have been launched in several other states.
Lawyers are advising some institutions to cut back on their existing
admissions policies, and minority scholarships are being terminated
in a number of states. In response, civil rights groups are attacking
the use of standardized tests and seeking other basic changes in
college admissions policies.
Higher education is fundamentally different from other
civil rights arenas. Civil rights policies are usually challenged
by institutions that are being forced to pursue racial goals they
oppose. Most affirmative admissions and aid policies, on the other
hand, are purely voluntary efforts to achieve goals the colleges
themselves support. Outside the South, colleges have not faced court
orders or federal sanctions to force them to admit minority students;
even in the South, there has been little such enforcement. The great
majority of colleges want to maintain their civil rights policies.
But white students and right-wing legal action groups trying to
impose a change on these institutions are asking federal courts
to prohibit these voluntary efforts and prescribe different admissions
policies.
In the states most affected thus far, minority communities
are reacting with shock and anger. Some campuses have erupted in
protests of the sort not seen since the Vietnam War. A college education
has become a central part of the American dream; slamming shut the
gates of college and professional school clearly threatens the future
of the communities affected. But high-pitched demands for action
can lead legislatures and academic administrators to consider any
alternative that sounds plausible.
Education leaders and policymakers face a difficult
challenge. The courts are increasingly responsive to white claims
of racial discrimination while dismissing minority concerns over
the continuing effects of historic discrimination. Many campuses
are therefore trying to figure out how to maintain diversity without
any explicit consideration of race in admissions. It would be simple
if race were simply a proxy for other conditions, but, as the research
in this volume shows, it is not. Race overlaps with class, educational,
and job inequality, and with geographic isolation, giving rise to
the hope that one or more of those factors might be an easy substitute.
But race in truth is unique in its significance and impact, both
historic and contemporary.
It is also true that any overt effort to specify a
set of multiple factors that are obviously intended to duplicate
the effect of racial selection would be seen as defiance of the
court orders, because institutions may not do by subterfuge what
they are prohibited from doing directly. In this complex situation,
policymakers are likely to adopt new strategies that sound as if
they might work with little or no serious analysis of their viability
or educational consequences. Such decisions often have unanticipated
consequences. If a policy turns out to be based on unworkable premises,
it could discredit the goal.
For example, if a new admissions policy succeeds in
admitting many minority students with far weaker preparation than
those admitted under the old policy, universities would temporarily
maintain minority enrollment levels but would find themselves flunking
out a growing percentage of minority students unless they mounted
a massive remediation effort. Because highly selective schools have
few instructors skilled in remedial work and give no rewards for
such work, major problems would be likely.
Moreover, Stanford Professor Elizabeth Cohen and others
have shown that race relations are improved when there is equal
status interaction—that is, when racial differences are not
reinforced by class differences and very large achievement differences.
Admitting only very poor black or Latino students from very weak
schools would tend to reinforce racial stereotypes and diminish
the probability of positive interracial contacts. It would be better
for developing positive race relations and reducing stereotypes
to find a way to admit those minority students most ready for college
work.
When race-conscious admissions policies are outlawed,
the easiest alternative for colleges seeking to admit significant
numbers of minorities is to target high-poverty, low-achieving schools,
because very few whites attend such schools. But the students from
these schools will also be the least likely to succeed in college.
It is extremely difficult to identify, using only nonracial criteria,
those African-American and Latino applicants most likely to succeed
in a selective college, because they are often middle-class students
attending more competitive, less impoverished schools. (These students,
of course, still face a variety of obstacles related to historic
and current forms of discrimination—obstacles that opponents
of affirmative action simply deny.)
The problem is complex: any purely voluntary affirmative
admissions program must produce good enough results to maintain
the support, or at least the acceptance, of the faculty and administration.
If the policy does not work it may be terminated at any point, leaving
no policy at all and fostering a belief that there is no feasible
solution. It is very important, in other words, that new policies
be likely to work.
Many university leaders have strongly reaffirmed their
belief that maintaining campus diversity is crucial. But belief
is not enough. These leaders must be prepared both for the coming
legal challenges and for the possibility that they will find their
accustomed authority in these matters suddenly limited. What they
will need, first of all, is much better information on the likely
consequences of policy alternatives. One goal of this book is to
provide that information.
U.S. college campuses historically reflected the dominant
groups in American society, choosing students with no interference
from federal courts or agencies. There were, of course, pressures
from trustees, alumni, sports teams, fund-raisers, and contributors
to admit certain students. Most students were white Protestant males
from more affluent and educated families. Nineteen states maintained
racially separate public campuses for black and white students,
and seventeen (where the large majority of blacks lived) had mandatory
segregation laws until 1954. Even after the Supreme Court outlawed
public school segregation, very little changed until the late 1960s.
Selective colleges historically tended to reflect
the biases of the larger society, including anti-Semitism and racism.
Even at the few northern colleges that admitted significant numbers
of black graduate students before the civil rights era, discrimination
was often overt. The University of Chicago, for example, segregated
its student housing and participated in a campaign to keep its neighborhood
all-white through restrictive real-estate covenants.
Things began to change after World War II, when the
G.I. Bill brought hundreds of thousands of less affluent students
to campus. Soon the United States began a huge expansion of higher
education. During the l960s and 1970s, state and federal governments
tried to make some kind of college education possible for anyone
who could benefit from it. Financial aid programs were created;
the War on Poverty encouraged the poor to attend college; and civil
rights laws directly challenged the tradition of racial exclusion.
This revolution began to open the door to white colleges for blacks.
Affirmative policies for student recruitment, admissions,
and aid were important elements of this effort. Given the unequal
educational backgrounds of minority students, the history of unconstitutional
segregation, the continued existence of segregated and unequal public
schools, the huge gaps in test scores, and the failure of limited
efforts in the preceding decade to significantly integrate elite
colleges and universities, many institutions devised much more focused
race-conscious policies in the late l960s and early 1970s. The basic
lesson of the first decade of civil rights policymaking was that
the problems were systemic: they would tend to be self-perpetuating
even when overt racial barriers fell. Real change, therefore, would
mean prying open the doors through a conscious plan to overturn
long-standing traditions.
Those policies were often attacked as government-imposed
quotas, but they were actually voluntary goals. The government could
have used its authority under the l964 Civil Rights Act to force
change, but it did not. That law forbade discrimination in institutions
receiving federal aid and gave the Department of Education authority
to regulate institutions on issues of nondiscrimination. Even after
the Office for Civil Rights was ordered by federal courts to require
equity and desegregation plans in the states that had intentionally
segregated students, it never used its power to cut off funds against
those falling far short of their goals for minority access. In the
rest of the nation, there were no regulations and no required plans
for racial equity. The one major enforcement case developed in the
1970s, against the University of North Carolina, was quickly dropped
when President Reagan took office.
Ironically, probably the most aggressive investigation
of admissions issues was by the Reagan administration on behalf
of Asian-American students who complained that an increased emphasis
on verbal skills at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley
would result in the admission of fewer Asians. Under threat, the
university backed down. No similar threat regarding admissions or
tests that have the effect of reducing enrollment has ever been
made on behalf of black, Latino, or American Indian students. Many
states, in fact, have recently adopted higher admissions requirements
with disproportionate negative impact on these minorities.
Most colleges and universities devised their own policies
for their own reasons. The urban upheavals of the 1960s and the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., lent urgency to these
efforts, and fostered the belief that colleges should try to develop
interracial leadership for the future good of society. Colleges
exercised their traditional discretion in admissions, and their
authority under Bakke, to devise policies and practices that
would identify, admit, and assist larger numbers of minority students.
Even at its peak, this effort at equity fell far short
of reflecting the nation’s overall population or its population
of high school graduates. It came closest to equalizing rates of
college entrance among white and black high school graduates in
the late 1970s, just before Bakke and the rapid tuition increases
and aid cuts of the l980s. But there was always a large gap in graduation
rates. By the early l980s, there was a serious drop in the percentage
of minority students entering college compared to whites, a racial
gap that grew during the decade.
Access to college for minority families was threatened
on a number of fronts. Cutbacks in state and federal funding and
huge rises in tuition compounded the impact of sharp cuts in the
buying power of the largest aid program, the Pell grants. The Reagan
administration loosened civil rights requirements and called for
the raising of entrance requirements. It also mounted an all-out
attack on race-conscious civil rights remedies, announcing that
states need not achieve the racial goals set for their higher education
systems—even those states that had never desegregated their
institutions. The administration asked the courts to permit race-based
remedies only where clear discrimination was proved and, even then,
only for a few years. Where there was no overt historic discrimination,
it argued, no affirmative policies should be allowed because they
would amount to discrimination against whites. Presidents Reagan
and Bush went on to appoint the majority of all sitting federal
judges; the courts increasingly leaned toward their limited vision.
By the late l990s, this view had reshaped the law of affirmative
action in employment, voting rights, minority contracting, and school
desegregation. In each case the Supreme Court restrained the lower
federal courts, turning authority over to state and local officials.
As court-imposed remedies were terminated, the courts became more
responsive to claims that even voluntary race-conscious efforts
discriminated against whites. The recent appeals courts’ decisions
in Texas, California, and Maryland clearly reflect this transformation.
Once affirmative action was stripped away in the two
largest states, the consequences of ranking applicants by standardized
tests became much more obvious. The studies included in this volume
confirm reports from several highly selective campuses and professional
schools: under the new rules there have been devastating declines
in the admission of underrepresented minority students. And a recent
California study suggests that, even without the use of standardized
tests, differences in grades alone would produce major drops in
the enrollment of black and Latino students.
Dropping racial targeting will have similar effects
nationwide—particularly at the 20 percent of U.S. colleges
with genuinely selective admissions—given the existing gaps
in test scores and grades between whites and underrepresented minorities.
Thomas Kane of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government analyzes
the probable impact of such a change on the fortunes of white applicants,
compared with general public perceptions of affirmative action.
Because there are far more whites in the pool of eligible applicants
at selective schools, Kane reasons, a drastic reduction in the number
of minorities admitted would produce only a small increase in the
acceptance rates of whites and Asians. At Harvard College, for instance,
even if no blacks or Latinos were admitted at all, a white or Asian
applicant’s chances of acceptance would rise by only one or
two percent. “If more than one or two percent of those who
were originally denied admission believe that they would have been
admitted but for affirmative action,” Kane writes, “then
the perceived costs of the policy overstate the true cost.”
Kane’s analysis illuminates a fallacy in the
thinking of many critics of affirmative action, who exaggerate its
actual impact and thus play on the resentment of whites who are
inclined to blame it for their own disappointments. Reversing affirmative
action will cause substantial harm to minority group representation
on selective campuses and deepen minority skepticism about the possibility
of racial progress, and yet help few whites or Asians.
The end of affirmative action on key selective campuses
will reverberate throughout the educational system. Jerome Karabel
of Berkeley reports that restricting enrollment of Mexican Americans
in the UC and UT systems would gravely affect Latino medical school
applications nationwide. Thus the entire country’s supply of
Latino doctors could be harmed by policy changes at just two large
state university systems. From these and other data, Karabel concludes
that the demise of affirmative action will mean “a return to
a level of racial and ethnic segregation in American higher education
not seen in more than a quarter of a century.” The American
Medical Association reports that minority applications to medical
school fell by 11 percent in 1997.
Ending affirmative action not only limits admission
to higher education but also sends a much broader signal to minority
groups, who are especially sensitive to symbols. In a racially polarized
society, minorities watch closely for signs of hope or of reversal.
When they see what seem to be unmistakable signs that doors are
being closed, many decide that they will not be allowed in. So even
before the new admissions policies took effect in Texas and California,
there were sharp drops in the numbers of inquiries and applications
from minorities. Susanna Finnell’s study of Texas A&M University
documents a dramatic decline in applications from Latinos and blacks
for its academic scholarships following the news that the court
had outlawed affirmative action. At the same time, there was a surge
of applications from whites and Asians—perhaps reflecting their
overestimate of the impact of affirmative action on their groups.
Texas A&M’s academic scholarships are reserved
for students with high SAT or ACT scores who are also in the top
segment of the graduating class. These scholarships were originally
designed in part to recruit talented minority students, who are
underrepresented on campus. In the year after the Texas court of
appeals decision, applications for the scholarships from Latinos
dropped by 36 percent; applications from blacks dropped 71 percent.
The number of white applicants went up 103 percent.
Elementary and secondary public school enrollment
in Texas is now 53 percent nonwhite. If current trends continue,
Latinos will be the majority group in the state’s public schools
within a few years, but they will be largely excluded from its selective
colleges.
Finnell describes Texas A&M’s efforts to
attract minority students to its historically white campus in recent
years, including a highly effective invitational summer program
targeted at talented minority youth. With such racially targeted
recruitment efforts now illegal in Texas, if the university wants
to continue the program it must open it to whites, quintupling its
size and defeating its purpose. The result is that no one is invited.
An effort to overcome a campus’s historic image of racial bias
through personal visits is simply abandoned. This outcome only reinforces
problems rooted in a history of discrimination.
Faced with catastrophic declines in black and Latino
enrollment, policymakers and advocates in Texas and California have
begun a hurried search for race-blind alternatives that seem likely
to preserve some degree of diversity on campus.
Because the courts have forbidden only the consideration
of race, and because affirmative action arises from notions of redressing
disadvantage, people naturally think of different definitions of
disadvantage that might work. The one most often discussed in affirmative
action debates is poverty, because blacks, Latinos, and American
Indians are much more likely than whites to be poor. They are also
likely to attend segregated, high-poverty schools.
But using poverty as a proxy for race will not preserve
diversity, as analyses by Kane and Karabel show. Most poor people
in the United States are neither black nor Latino, and many of the
minority students admitted to college through race-conscious affirmative
action are not poor. A ranking of students below the poverty line
by their test scores would result in a pool of favored applicants
that was mostly Asian and white—many of them from temporarily
poor families who managed to send their children to competitive
schools that prepared them for college entrance exams.
Recent immigrants from Asia, for example, often are
highly educated people who cannot practice their professions in
the United States, at least until they receive a new certification;
their children, however, have the immense advantage of the parents’
education and often are able to attend suburban schools because
they face less housing discrimination than blacks or Latinos. The
stereotype that Asian children encounter in these schools is generally
positive, not negative. A policy that gives preferential admissions
to such students, who enjoy family and school advantages and have
experienced little discrimination in the United States, while excluding
minorities who face serious discrimination, would have serious unanticipated
consequences. (Some Asian refugee groups do not, of course, enjoy
these advantages and in fact face problems much more like those
confronting Latinos.)
To maintain the current level of black and Latino representation
through preferences based on poverty instead of race, selective
colleges would have to reserve six times as many places for poor
students as they currently reserve for underrepresented minorities,
according to Kane’s analysis. Few, if any, colleges could afford
to pursue such a course.
One seemingly easy but race-blind way to insure some
minority representation would be to target high-poverty schools.
Very few white students attend such schools; schools in which more
than 90 percent of the students are black or Latino are 16 times
as likely as mostly white schools to have a majority of poor kids.
It is not surprising, then, that the Texas legislature, seeking
a way to preserve minority access to college, fixed on this solution.
It declared that the top 10 percent of students in every high school
are eligible for admission to the University of Texas. This approach
includes high-poverty schools in the admissions pool, using traditional
measures of achievement within the school, not race, to select individual
students.
Segregation is widespread but far from absolute in
Texas schools, and so there is no guarantee that the top-scoring
students even in heavily nonwhite schools will be African American
or Latino. But a serious problem arises from the strikingly unequal
preparation of this cohort of students.
College admissions officers have long known that class
rank is hardly comparable from one high school to the next. The
top students in many high-poverty schools are woefully unprepared
for college. Ignoring this fact and admitting these students presents
universities with a difficult choice. If nothing else changes, many
of the new students will simply flunk out and the policy will be
discredited. To avoid this outcome, colleges will have to invest
in effective remedial strategies, something selective campuses have
been notoriously reluctant to do. Many, in fact, have raised their
admissions requirements in recent years and cut back remedial programs.
Thus, a seemingly simple solution has the unintended effect of excluding
many of the best-prepared minority students and requiring other
complex changes in policy.
The assault on affirmative action has brought into
much sharper focus the social consequences of relying on standardized
tests in the college admissions process. Black, Latino, and American
Indian students have always fared poorly on such tests. The reasons
for their poor performance are complex and not entirely understood.
What is clear, however, is that if colleges are forced into a slavish
adherence to cutoff scores in admitting applicants, the numbers
of blacks, Latinos, and American Indians on campus will fall precipitously.
The enrollment figures in California and Texas law and business
schools have already sparked intense scrutiny of the validity and
predictive power of admissions tests, and testing policies have
become principal targets of civil rights advocates.
Tests are often assumed to be neutral and highly reliable
measures of merit, but experts have long known that they have large
margins of error in assessing any individual student, and that their
overall predictive power accounts for only a modest portion of the
variance in achievement among first-year college students. Given
the difficulties of choosing among thousands of similar applicants,
it is easy to understand why colleges rely on an indicator that
helps even a little, provides very simple, easily interpreted data,
and shifts the costs to the students. As the power of tests increases,
however, advocates are calling for changes in the nature and uses
of those tests. A university committee in California has recommended
dispensing with standardized testing entirely. Others call for the
construction of different kinds of assessment that are more related
to actual performance on the job, or that reflect more of the talents
and experiences of minority students. Some California campuses tried
to do this.
Following the court decisions ending affirmative action
in Texas and California, the Texas state legislature responded to
large initial losses by trying to preserve minority access by providing
automatic access to the university for any student finishing in
the top 10 percent of his or her high school class. University of
California campuses had to admit at least half of their students
purely on the basis of test scores and grades; since many applicants
had perfect or near-perfect grades, the test scores alone would
be decisive for them. The California campuses tried to come up with
a number of other measures and procedures to address other forms
of disadvantage. The most selective California campuses, however,
experienced drastic declines in African American, Latino, and American
Indian students.
The total of African Americans, Latinos, and American
Indian undergraduates admitted at Berkeley fell from 23 percent
to 10 percent, and from 20 percent to 13 percent at UCLA—this
at a time when the state’s minority population was rapidly
rising. In Texas, in spite of the 10 percent plan, fewer blacks
were admitted at Austin, and there was no increase in the number
of Latinos. The group that benefited most from the 10 percent plan
was Asians, who had not suffered from the end of affirmative action.
At the University of Texas at Tyler, less than 15 percent of the
students admitted under the 10 percent plan were minorities. The
net effect was that there was no recovery from the dramatic declines
that occurred following the circuit court ruling in Hopwood v.
Texas. Schools in both states often mentioned the severe problems
they had faced in recruiting those students who were admitted, caused
by ending minority scholarships. Eligible black and Latino students
had to consider whether or not to accept less financial aid, and
whether to attend schools where they would be more isolated due
to greatly reduced enrollment of minority students.
These issues will be addressed in detail in a future
volume from the Harvard Civil Rights Project. They already figure
prominently, however, in the early reaction to post-affirmative
action problems in some states. One of the many ironies of the current
situation is that those most convinced that tests truly measure
“merit” are creating a political climate in which tests
may ultimately be downgraded in importance.
Some universities have reacted to the crisis by belatedly
deciding to develop admissions policies that comply with the spirit
of Bakke. As Jorge Chapa and Vincent Lazaro make clear in
their essay in this volume, the UT Law School provided a tempting
target for white litigants because its admissions procedure clearly
violated the Supreme Court’s Bakke principle—that race
could be considered only as one of many variables in a complex admissions
process. Too many selective public universities did not create such
a process; they simply used the standard test scores and grades
and added in race. The UT Law School created a “Texas Index”
by combining test scores and grades, and then treated minority and
white applicants differently. It was a two-factor analysis—nothing
like the Bakke model. This meant that applicants were arrayed
on a relatively simple continuum and admissions decisions were then
adjusted by taking race into account as the decisive factor.
At very selective colleges where many applicants have
high grades and the choice hangs on just two variables—tests
scores and race—the admissions process is particularly vulnerable
to challenge. Because such systems use no other cross-cutting factors,
the loss of minority students can be precipitous once race is eliminated
as a criterion. Certainly any campus that retains such a flawed
process after the appeals court ruling in Hopwood is exposing
itself to the maximum risk of judicial takeover of its admissions
process.
Complying with the Bakke model is a logical but costly
alternative. A study of changes in the admissions process at UC
Irvine by Susan Wilbur and Marguerite Bonous-Hammarth suggests that
a multidimensional system of assessing student potential can help
produce a more diverse campus. They report that the new system,
implemented in the wake of a UC regents’ vote ending affirmative
action, resulted in significant increases in the admission of black
and Latino applicants above the numbers admitted through a simple
formula based on tests and grades. Their study suggests that if
public universities invest in admissions processes designed to assess
a broader array of talents, they may be able to remain diverse.
The Irvine system did this, but the campus still had substantial
drops in black and Latino admissions in 1998.
Still another important way of thinking about the problem is to
reconceptualize the goals of the selection process. Admissions criteria
should be seen as a way to fulfill the values of the institution
and to create the most effective learning community that embodies
those values. Advocates of a one-dimensional “merit”-based
system seem to suggest that admission to college is simply a reward
for the students who are most “deserving,” as measured
on the scale of test scores and grades. But universities are not
passive receptacles; they are dynamic communities that profoundly
affect the development of students on many dimensions that are not
readily quantified. The most important intellectual interactions
many students ever experience take place in college—often with
other students. Universities must foster the creation of knowledge
and the training of leadership for the community and its professions.
Because of these critical functions of universities, admissions
processes reflect considerations important to the fulfillment of
community as well as individual goals. This is precisely what the
Supreme Court recognized in the Bakke case.
Gregory Tanaka, Marguerite Bonous-Hammarth, and Alexander
Astin suggest in this volume that it would be appropriate for universities
to make interracial experience a “plus factor” for admissions.
They cite evidence that multiracial campuses offer important advantages
and that creating such communities should be a fundamental goal
of a university in diverse society. Their research suggests that
students who bring interracial experience with them to college may
be valuable assets for these institutions. Diversity by itself,
without people who understand how to make it work, may confer fewer
benefits and create more problems than on campuses with many such
people. If it is reasonable, Tanaka and colleagues argue, to give
admissions preference to student athletes on the grounds that they
enhance student life and increase external support for the school,
is it not also reasonable to consider experience and skills in multiracial
settings an asset? Positive race relations contribute to both the
productive sharing of ideas on campus and to good institutional
relationships with the outside community.
There may be other legitimate considerations in admissions.
Because most colleges look only at English verbal test scores, they
often underestimate students who have another first language. Outside
the United States, fluency in two or more languages is considered
a hallmark of an educated person. In the United States, by contrast,
it is rare for students to graduate from college with a working
knowledge of a second language, in spite of the importance of such
knowledge in a global economy. Demonstrated fluency in a second
world language could well be a plus factor in admissions decisions.
Other attributes and skills directly relate to success
in careers and professions and could be incorporated into the admissions
process. Leadership talent, the ability to work with others, verbal
confidence, resilience, perseverance in the face of setbacks, and
many other qualities are valued by employers and could be considered
by admissions committees. Colleges have every right to take such
qualities into account.
Every crisis presents opportunities for progress.
In the long run, colleges and universities must take advantage of
the affirmative action crisis to sharpen and reaffirm their goals,
to develop recruitment and admissions policies that look at the
whole person and recognize more of the accomplishments of minority
students, and to reflect critically on how better to achieve their
goals after the students arrive on campus. In the short run, however,
a great deal remains at risk.
The reversal of affirmative admissions in higher education
can drastically reduce black, Latino, and American Indian enrollment
on highly selective campuses. The increased use of tests and grades
as entrance standards will tend to exacerbate the existing inequities
in U.S. society. If affirmative action is outlawed nationally, as
it has been in Texas, the impact on access to leading public and
private universities would be enormous. Many of our most able students
would find themselves on campuses overwhelmingly dominated by white
and Asian students. The severe isolation characteristic of our more
affluent suburbs would become the rule in the institutions that
train the leaders of our society and our professions. This threatens
critical educational functions of universities and their ability
to fully serve their communities.
The research reported in this volume shows that there
is no good substitute for affirmative admissions efforts targeted
at historically excluded groups. Any substitute criteria will be
likely to bypass many of the best-prepared black and Latino students,
who may face many forms of racial discrimination but are neither
poor nor isolated in the weakest schools.
The likely outcome of substituting poverty for race
will be the admission of fewer and less-prepared black and Latino
students. Therefore, the highest priorities for supporters of minority
access to college should be:
- a vigorous defense of race-conscious affirmative action admissions
policies that comply with Bakke, which rightly called for
the creation of a multidimensional admissions process that takes
account of a wide variety of applicants’ talents;
- documentation of the academic benefits of diversity (the subject
of the second volume in this series); and
- strong efforts to counter inaccurate and polarizing claims about
minority admissions.
If affirmative action is struck down, universities
should undertake a long-overdue examination of the entire admissions
process. The same kind of narrow formulaic approach that is most
likely to exclude minorities is also likely to exclude other students
with talents that are not easily measured by tests and grades and,
conversely, to reward students from the most affluent and educated
families and communities. If colleges define “merit” as,
in effect, being born into a highly educated, suburban white or
Asian family and attending a highly competitive white high school,
they are serving to maintain a stratified society rather than to
truly reward merit and ability. As access to college becomes more
and more decisive in shaping life chances, leaders of higher education
have a growing responsibility to reach out for talent and make mobility
possible. Universities that grafted affirmative action onto a flawed
admissions process a quarter century ago now risk losing diversity
unless they build a better process. Even if they eventually are
successful in defending affirmative action in the Supreme Court,
the radical reversals in some regions, the experiments they produce,
and the legitimate criticisms of some of the existing systems all
argue for change.
The essays in this book show that research can play
an important role in the affirmative action debate. But far too
few rigorous studies have addressed the important issues raised
in the courts and in political debates. Very little previous work
addressed the basic issues before the courts today; researchers
could, for example, contribute important knowledge on the history
of discrimination and its continuing effects, which is the strongest
legal basis for race-conscious policies. Documenting the nature
of the disadvantages that middle-class blacks and Latinos still
face is crucial for their continued access to higher education.
The rollback of affirmative action in higher education
requires all members of the university community to consider soberly
a profound social change that they have hitherto taken for granted.
A generation of multiracial campuses—the only such generation
in U.S. history—was the product of both a great social movement
and the commitment of university leaders three decades ago. Too
little has been done to renew that commitment or to make the resulting
levels of diversity work even better.
Now that our campuses are threatened with a return
to almost total domination by the most privileged racial and ethnic
communities, educational and political leaders must ask how much
they value that hard-won diversity and what they are willing to
do to keep it. From that debate could emerge a new understanding
of common goals—and the energy to build a more democratic system
for educating the future leaders of our rapidly changing society.
|
