| By Kay Steiger - Oct 1st, 2007 at 9:39 am EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
The New York Times Magazine has a special "college issue" this week. I haven't managed to get through all of it, but I did read the piece on affirmative action in college admissions. It seems that ever since the push to eliminate considering race in college admissions, the number of black kids on campuses around the country has plummeted. And it seems that it's more than rooted in race; it's rooted in class as well, since "colleges apparently put even more stock in the polish that comes with affluence — the well-edited essay, the summer trip to Guatemala, the Arabic language lessons. In any case, the poor lose." The piece goes on to point out that Pell Grants recipients, typically those in income brackets in the bottom 40 percent, are hovering somewhere around 10 percent at prestigious universities.
Indeed, since we still view college as the best conduit to achieving the American Dream, it seems odd that admission standards hinge so heavily on things that are best achieved through wealth. The prep courses for taking the SATs tend to be extremely expensive. It's not just race, though, it's the poor. Of course, the poor tend to be overwhelmingly black and Latino.
Two schools have had real success in maintaining diversity: UCLA and UC-Berkeley. This is interesting, especially in the wake of the anti-affirmative action ballot initiative, Proposition 209. What the piece wonders is if there was some "under-the-table" affirmative action taking place. But is this a bad thing? The campuses are more diverse and successful than ever.
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That said, these measures exist for a reason.
The opportunities that wealth gives you, from a young age, actively help build you into a person who will be successful in life. It's not just, or even primarily, a matter of privilege. A kid who's gone to good schools, taken those AP classes, learned those foreign languages will have a better foundation for success later in life than one who didn't, and oftentimes a better foundation for success in college as well.
I'd say it's lazy liberalism to pretend that the vastly divergent experiences of two people from different socio-economic classes can magically (or even largely) be rectified during the college admissions process.
A real liberalism, a liberalism that demands results, needs to look earlier than that - back to opportunities available from birth onward. It starts well before the federal education system touches you; it starts with the cycle of fatherlessness and single parenthood that plagues many poor communities.
To fix issues of inequity, you have to start at their source. Anything else is an inelegant band-aid.
It looks like the article confirms what I've been saying for a while here - Prop 209 in California has produced a far more vibrant educational environment than more doctrinaire affirmative action programs could hope to.
I think it's somewhat elitist to think that the differences between socioeconomic classes are so vast as to preclude members of one from achieving or contributing as much as members from the other. And I think it's illogical to assume that, if this were the case, it would be better to support policies that would widen that gulf, rather than narrow it. If wealth inherently makes you better suited for success (and, having tutored some wealthy kids in the past for the ASVAB of all things, I don't necessarily agree that it's necessarily the case), then wouldn't promoting non-wealthy achievers over wealthy ones make sense if the goal is to, pardon my preambling, form a more perfect union?
And, of course, let's not pretend that affirmative action is going to get a kid with a 1070 SAT into Yale. We're talking about kids who, considering their backgrounds, are already achieving pretty damn well. Taking that factor into consideration neither undermines higher education nor damages future prospects for societal improvement.
(Incidentally, the strategy you suggest for how liberalism should address societal inequality seems like it would be greatly helped with a larger pool of educated, minority professionals. As you note, it's things that occur years before college admissions time that most impact a person's life and development. You yourself have argued time and again that parental resources are among the most important determinants of success. So why not support programs that will, for want of a better term, create more beneficial parents for the next generation?)
Do you really think the ultimate benefit to society of letting a white rich kid who speaks French into an elite school is greater than letting a poor black kid who managed to get the requisite GPA and SAT/ACT scores take the slot?""
Subtracting the race part out of it, since socio-economic class is the issue here:
First off, I wouldn't give credit for knowing French or Spanish, period. They're incredibly common and they aren't that valuable for becoming the sort of global elite I'd want those receiving government financial aid to be aspiring to.
So you're basically narrowing it down to a poor kid and a rich kid with equal qualifications, which entirely misses the point.
Let's look at what the rich have more of that actually *matter* - public speaking and leadership-related extracurriculars, for instance. You can't put too much of a premium on being verbally persuasive. Experience in strategically important foreign languages. Relevant travel experience (A vacation in Cancun shouldn't count for anything, but working for an NGO in Ecuador should, and rich kids have more access to that).
""I think it's somewhat elitist to think that the differences between socioeconomic classes are so vast as to preclude members of one from achieving or contributing as much as members from the other.""
Nobody claimed that - I'm simply saying that they'll have different statistical distributions.
""If wealth inherently makes you better suited for success (and, having tutored some wealthy kids in the past for the ASVAB of all things, I don't necessarily agree that it's necessarily the case), then wouldn't promoting non-wealthy achievers over wealthy ones make sense if the goal is to, pardon my preambling, form a more perfect union?""
This goes back to my earlier point, of the false notion that we can make college admissions some sort of tabula rasa where those admitted catch up and earlier inequities can be somewhat rectified. I don't think that's the case, and I think the college graduation statistics of those who *are* admitted bear that out.
If you want to fix inequality, you have to look much earlier. You have to start from issues of birth, and pregnancy, and family. The root causes of the cycle of poverty.
Trying to adjust for this in higher ed isn't even a distant second in terms of effectiveness.
""And, of course, let's not pretend that affirmative action is going to get a kid with a 1070 SAT into Yale. We're talking about kids who, considering their backgrounds, are already achieving pretty damn well. Taking that factor into consideration neither undermines higher education nor damages future prospects for societal improvement.""
The article doesn't bear that out -- in fact, according to the article the data shows that benefits from affirmative action accrue almost entirely on the basis of race rather than on the basis of socio-economic disadvantage.
And, let's not forget, the UCs have only gotten more vibrant and more impressive as campuses since Prop 209.
""So why not support programs that will, for want of a better term, create more beneficial parents for the next generation?""
Because it doesn't work as you say it does? There is a Black middle class in America, and their existence doesn't do much for America's Black poor. They largely have their own neighborhoods, their own issues, their own organizations. There is a far greater divide in America, I would argue, between the Black middle-(not to mention upper middle- and upper-) class and the Black poor than between the Black and White poor.
Continuing and expanding traditional forms of race-based affirmative action will not do, and has not (in the recent past, at least, I agree with the argument that affirmative action was at one time necessary) done, much to lift up poor Black communities or America's poor in general.
I think you have a quite unrealistic goal for government funding. I think this shows a value for ambition over competence and a return on an investment. If we create a phalanx of elementary school teachers instead of international law scholars, I think that's still a net gain. I'm not of a mind that one need seek to be a captain of industry in order to try and get federal education assistance.
""Let's look at what the rich have more of that actually *matter* - public speaking and leadership-related extracurriculars, for instance. You can't put too much of a premium on being verbally persuasive. Experience in strategically important foreign languages. Relevant travel experience (A vacation in Cancun shouldn't count for anything, but working for an NGO in Ecuador should, and rich kids have more access to that)""
I'm failing to see how affirmative action programs negate this information on applications. Extracurriculars are still considered in admissions, last I checked, even in schools with affirmative action programs in place. Working for an NGO in Ecuador is probably going to score some points, too. And, sorry, but do you think there's a plethora of Farsi-fluent would-be intelligence analysts with high test scores who just can't get past the gate at good schools?
""If you want to fix inequality, you have to look much earlier. You have to start from issues of birth, and pregnancy, and family. The root causes of the cycle of poverty.
Trying to adjust for this in higher ed isn't even a distant second in terms of effectiveness.""
Out of curiosity, can you cite a single study that indicates college graduates have worse indicators concerning birth, pregnancy, and family? If not, that might indicate that it, even if to just a limited extent, college education helps on those fronts. If it does help, and at a relatively low societal cost, then it's worth pursuing as a strategy, though an incomplete one.
""And, let's not forget, the UCs have only gotten more vibrant and more impressive as campuses since Prop 209.""
Having sadly never even stepped foot in the Golden State, I certainly can't speak to the vibrance and impressiveness of the UCs. I can only speak to the statitstics, which only really say that they're more white. Link
""There is a far greater divide in America, I would argue, between the Black middle-(not to mention upper middle- and upper-) class and the Black poor than between the Black and White poor.""
Having spent a hell of a lot of time working politics in Atlanta, I think I can say with some degree of certainty that, in my experience, this is an incorrect assumption on your part. Perhaps I'm tainted by life in the South (though my year in a rural Michigan city where the mills have all closed seemed to support that assumption), but I think you're undervaluing the premium placed on race in American life, even among the great unwashed masses. We've had this dispute countless times before, but I simply don't think race can in general be overlooked in favor of socioeconomic status in designing public policy, and I think discounting the importance of race as a factor in such analyses is an error.
""Continuing and expanding traditional forms of race-based affirmative action will not do, and has not (in the recent past, at least, I agree with the argument that affirmative action was at one time necessary) done, much to lift up poor Black communities or America's poor in general.""
I don't know if that's correct or not, but I suspect at the very least that they're insufficient to that end. Of course, the general idea is to address racial disparities, and the UC statistics since '96 seem to bear out the idea that they help promote parity. Partial progress at a relatively low cost is something I can usually get behind, and the more we do to eliminate (or at least alleviate the impact of) racial inequity, the better.
UC administrators had a problem with this, because (forgive me for being uncharitable to them) it messed up their neat narratives too much to have one minority group making gains at the so-called 'expense' of another. So they bent over backwards to try and push down Asian-American enrollment even after Prop 209, resorting to increasingly arbitrary standards of "judging the whole person" in ways that discriminated against Asian-American applicants (Ironically, the very concept of judging this nebulous concept of a person's 'whole character' in college admissions comes from the direct, explicit attempts of the Ivy League to keep the Jews from gaining disproportionate admission a few generations ago).
Asian-Americans finally overcame that, too - to the point where UC Berkeley hovers between 40-50% Asian, UCLA has similar numbers, and UCI is now majority-Asian.
There's actually been talk by some bloggers I've read that there may not just be competition at work here, but also self-selection -- a nascent phenomenon of 'white flight' to less-prestigious UC campuses like UC Santa Barbara, and the Cal State system, that are still majority-white. Which would be both strange and illuminating, if true, and completely unverifiable apart from random anecdotes picked up here and there. I wouldn't put much stock in it -- it sounds implausible -- but I have been gone a couple of years, and hey, who knows.
At any rate, the UCs have been getting 'Asian-er', not whiter.
Not to mention you have to break it down into East Asian-American v. Southeast Asian-American v. South/Central Asian-American v. Middle Eastern-American enrollment...
If you look at the demographics of California, these supposedly 'overrepresented' kids are disproportionately 2nd generation and 1.5-generation kids of immigrants.
As a matter of general statistics, first generation immigrant parents tend to place a huge emphasis on education - it's no surprise that their kids will be disproportionately successful for their given socio-economic class.
If you look at it in that light, they're not overrepresented at all. The idea that the primary mode for grouping people to decide who should be 'overrepresented' or 'underrepresented' should be skin color is too simplistic to be useful.
If the issue is diversity of the student body - The broad category of "Asian-Americans" is one of the most diverse out there, including people from vastly different backgrounds, communities, etc. in proportions that are more diverse than the sub-categories within Hispanic-origin or African-origin students. The UC campuses are plenty diverse.
If the issue is a matter of reversing discrimination and injustice, I think it's fair to say Asian-Americans as a group have historically faced more discrimination and injustice in America than, say, Mexican-Americans.
Considering, well, everything we've ever learned about our national history and the incredibly strong correlation between race and rates of college attendance, imprisonment, lifetime income, etc., I don't think this is anywhere close to reasonable. When skin color stops being one of the most accurate indicators of a person's likelihood of success, then skin color can be too simplistic a grouping tactic when working towards an equitable society.
And, apropos of nothing else in this discusion, this is certainly worth a read: Link