No politically incorrect blog that deals with higher education would be complete without a discussion of affirmative action.
IF RACIAL preferences in higher education were good for racial minorities in higher education, we surely would have seen definitive evidence of it by now. Instead, a widening shelf of empirical research suggests that the opposite is true – that affirmative action in academia is not advancing minority achievement but impeding it.
In the University of California v. Bakke case more than 30 years ago, the Supreme Court gave colleges and universities a green light to admit applicants on the basis of race if their aim was to secure the blessings of a “diverse’’ student body. Many educators and policymakers concluded that lowering academic standards for black and Hispanic candidates – though awkward and controversial – was a worthwhile tradeoff, since it would increase the number of minorities with advanced degrees and prestigious careers. Build racial diversity into each freshman class, it was widely believed, and more diversity among graduate students, academics, and professionals would ensue.
But it hasn’t worked that way.
In a report published last year , the US Commission on Civil Rights explored why black and Hispanic students who enroll in college intending to major in science, technology, engineering, or math – the so-called STEM fields – are far less likely than other students to follow through on those intentions.
The problem isn’t lack of interest; incoming minority freshmen start out more attracted than their white counterparts to a science or engineering degree. Nor is racism to blame; the commission found that discrimination “was not a substantial factor’’ in the rate at which black and Hispanic students give up on science and math majors. Yet the bottom line is disheartening: Even after decades of affirmative action, blacks (relative to their share of the overall population) are only 36 percent as likely as whites to earn a bachelor’s degree in a STEM discipline — and only 15 percent as likely to make it all the way to a science-related PhD.
There are a bunch of issues to discuss here. Affirmative action is the admission of students into a school who have lower academic qualifications than their colleagues who were admitted but did not qualify for affirmative action.
There can be two reasons for a student having lower grades and test scores: lower intelligence or lack of knowledge (or some combination of both).
We’re not going to deal with the issue of intelligence in this post. This is for several reasons. First, and most importantly, I have almost no knowledge of the subject of psychometrics. Second, average intelligence of any group of people (assuming that it can be measured with adequate precision) has little if any bearing on the intelligence of any single member of that group, so, that complicates the issue beyond my ability to discuss it. Third, I find the topic a bit depressing to discuss because the whole topic is lousy with “shut up.” You remember how James Watson lost his job and had to kiss the jackboots of the guardians of political correctness? I do not know if what Watson said is true or not. But, dude, that’s JAMES FREAKING WATSON! Discoverer of the double helix. If he falls to the forces of “shut up” then this is a bad situation. I don’t even want to think about it right now. This brings me around to my last point. Discussion of group intelligence is a controversial subject. I’m not touching intelligence because I believe I can make a compelling case against affirmative action by only discussing how a student will suffer from having a lack of knowledge. The implications of a lack of knowledge should be completely obvious for all to see. I figure I have a better chance of persuading if I stick to facts that everybody knows or ought to know.
So, on with the motley.
Math is a cumulative subject. If you have holes in your knowledge you will experience pain as your mathematics studies advance. For fear of embarrassment at asking such a basic question, a student who doesn’t know how to take a negative exponent is not likely to raise his hand in the middle of a Calculus II class to ask the professor what a negative exponent does. This is bad. This produces unnecessary pain, failing grades, and switches to a major ending in the word “studies.”
In the below video, world champion educator Sal Khan discusses how holes in knowledge can wreak havoc on an educational career.
I have some hope that Sal Khan’s wonderful website Khan Academy can go some distance to closing the knowledge gap for many students. I have no idea how much help it would be as a general solution. The below video shows a marvelous success story. How much that success story can be repeated is beyond me. That said, I doubt that a wide-eyed optimist would be correct in saying that we now have a magic bullet. The wide-eyed optimists are always wrong and there are no magic bullets. I will also note that the faster the pace of a college course, the harder it is to use tools like Khan Academy to patch up weak areas of knowledge during the semester.
Jacoby continues:
And it’s not only in science and math that the supposed beneficiaries of racial preferences fall behind. According to UCLA economist and law professor Richard Sander, more than 51 percent of black students at elite law schools finish their first year in the bottom 10 percent of their class. Black students fail or drop out of law school at more than twice the rate of white students (19.3 percent vs. 8.2 percent). And while 78 percent of white law school graduates pass the bar exam on their first attempt, only 45 percent of black graduates do.
Once again we can, in part, trace the origin of this problem back to deficiencies in knowledge. If you’re assigned some reading that mentions in passing the Congress of Vienna, the First Intermediate Period of Ancient Egypt or the Treaty of Tordesillas, you better know what they are or you’re not going to understand what you read quite as well as you otherwise would. Enough of these references to stuff you don’t know, and the entire reading is going to go over your head. This is bad. This produces unnecessary pain, failing grades, and switches to a major ending in the word “studies.” Wikipedia might help a bit, but it’s, once again, not likely to be a general solution.
Though UVA’s admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.”
This finding, first published in a psychology journal, was consistent with Hirsch’s past scholarship, in which he had argued that the author takes for granted that his readers have crucial background knowledge. Hirsch was also convinced that the problem of inadequate background knowledge began in the early grades. Elementary school teachers thus had to be more explicit about imparting such knowledge to students—indeed, this was even more important than teaching the “skills” of reading and writing, Hirsch believed. Hirsch’s insight contravened the conventional wisdom in the nation’s education schools: that teaching facts was unimportant, and that students instead should learn “how to” skills.
Cultural knowledge, the kind that is necessary to understand real college-level reading material is supposed to be conveyed slowly over the twelve years of primary and secondary education. Part of the problem, no doubt, is that Hirsch’s name (and the very concept of “core knowledge”) is a dirty word among those who teach our teachers how to “educate” their students. But whatever the ultimate source of a lack of knowledge, this lack will manifest itself in an inability to handle college-level work, especially work that is assigned at a pace to be expected in an elite institution.
For more details, you can find a wonderful interview with E.D. Hirsch on this very topic here.
That said, there will be students who would thrive at an elite school who don’t have the grades and test scores at present to get in. Some of them would have been admitted to those elite schools if there were affirmative action. For those students I would say this: go to a state school or even a community college. Ace the tests. Turn in fantastic papers. Then transfer to your Ivy League school. Ultimately, your degree will be from an elite institution. And you will, upon entering that institution as a junior, know that you pack the gear to excel.
