Naval Academy Accused of Illegally Retaliating Against Affirmative Action Critic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Study Appears Likely to Complicate the Debate Over Legacy Admissions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In summarizing its key findings, the newspaper said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Peter Schmidt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give George W. Bush credit for this much: He admits to having gotten into Yale through his family connections, and he is quite capable of self-effacing humor. In delivering Yale's 2001 commencement address, he declared: "And to the C students I say, You, too, can be president of the United States."

Although he meant the remark as a joke, he stood as living proof that he was absolutely right, that students who have gotten through the doors of a top college need not perform well there to have other doors opened to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: allegations of faulty logic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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


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


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



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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

Study Finds the Brightest and Wealthiest Increasing Concentrated at Top Colleges

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

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

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

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

How Researchers Classify Biracial Subjects Skews Study Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asian Americans Rebel Against New U. of California Admissions Policy

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

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

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

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

Yale Plans to Halt "Ethnic Counselor" Program

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

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

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

Economics Coverage Dropped from a Silver Spoon

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

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

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

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

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

"Suppose your cousin and a total stranger get into a no-fault traffic accident. Both need one pint of blood, which you, a strapping young thing of over 110 lb and high iron levels, can supply to only one person. You would not hesitate to give the blood to your cousin — even if she needs it no more and no less than the otherwise indistinguishable stranger — because she is family.

"Princeton faces a parallel moral choice in its admissions. Princeton is more than a temporary aging vat; it is also a family, and its alumni are its kin. By definition, the quality of the student body does not suffer in taking a legacy over an equally qualified non-legacy, but there is a moral opportunity cost, a disloyalty, in not doing so. Loyalty to family, especially when there is no greater principle at risk, is important.

"Even if the school felt it bore no loyalty to its alumni, it still has the duty to minimize harm; the school knows that a rejection letter will likely cause greater trauma to a family that has been emotionally investing in the next generation's admission to Princeton for decades than to a family of an equally qualified but less invested candidate."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nebraska Ban on Affirmative-Action Preferences Upheld in State Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colleges Accused of Shirking Obligation to Seek Alternatives to Affirmative Action

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

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

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

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

Color and Money Gets Positive Review in International Education Journal

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

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

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

New Study Suggests Poverty Takes Toll on Children's Brains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Study: Blacks Reap Smaller Gains from Majors in Lucrative Fields

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

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

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

Conservative Advocacy Group Demands Admissions Data from UCLA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hear Peter Schmidt Interviewed by the San Diego Union Tribune

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

New Efforts to Help Black Males Focus on the Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did Elite College Lacrosse Contribute to Our Economic Crisis?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Congressional Caucus To Advocate for Colleges Serving Black Students

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

Researchers Sue California Bar for Data on Law School Graduates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barack Obama Praised for Nuance in His Views on Affirmative Action

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

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

Watch Peter Schmidt on C-Span's Book TV

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

"Learning Communities" Found to Help Disadvantaged Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campaigns for Preference Bans in Arizona and Nebraska Submit Petitions

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

Looking Back on Bakke

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

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

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

University of Michigan Avoids Any Big Diversity Drop from Preference Ban

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Dissident Voice Roils a Disney World Diversity Conference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Federal Report Sheds Light on Hispanic Immigrants' Education Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journal of American Professoriate Gives Color and Money a Favorable Review

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

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

The full review is available here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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


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

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

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

Oklahoma Anti-Preference Measure is Scuttled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Universities Criticized for TV Spots Depicting Whiteness of Campuses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Report Warns Growing Education Gaps May Hurt Social Mobility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two New Studies Sharply Criticize Many Workplace Diversity Programs

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."

An interview with two college leaders who are getting minority students to achieve at high levels (reprinted with permission from The Chronicle)

Peter Schmidt (Moderator):
Welcome to the Chronicle's live colloquy. I am Peter Schmidt, a Chronicle deputy editor who covers affirmative action and other issues related to diversity, and my guests today are Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and Susan B. Layden, associate dean of student affairs at Skidmore College. Both operate programs shown