We recently celebrated the birthday of one of the greatest Americans, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Nearly forty years after he was martyred, Dr. King will, at last, be honored with a fitting monument on the Mall in our nation’s capital.) And February is, of course, Black History Month. Coincidentally, the University of Michigan recently lost its appeal before the Supreme Court to be allowed to continue its current admissions policy until the next admission cycle, arguing that changing policy midstream is unfair to applicants. Michigan had, of course, already lost its defense of its policy of awarding ‘points’ to some applicants based merely on their minority status. The policy was seen as being unfair.
    Well, let us begin by agreeing that college admissions has never been ‘fair’ and is not likely ever to be so.

    A few generations ago, the headmasters of the nation’s most prestigious prep and boarding schools simply phoned the deans of the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities and informed them which of their graduates they would be sending along the next fall. Today, after the GI Bill and the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, the college admissions process is more meritocratic than it has ever been, but it is not strictly so. But, I will argue, neither should it be.
    First, it is useful to understand that underrepresented minority students are just one of four groups that are given preference in college admissions. The others are recruited athletes, the children of potential major donors, and “legacies” (the children of alumni). Interestingly, we do not see colleges and universities being sued because of the advantages the latter three groups gain in admissions. I would venture to guess that is because not only are white students not likely to be ‘discriminated against’ in such instances, they probably benefit. In the case of recruited athletes and potential major donors, who wouldn’t want to have a nationally-ranked football team or a new library at his or her alma mater? And in the case of legacies, given what legal scholars term ‘de facto discrimination’ in America in the past, legacies are quite likely to be white. (Similarly, schools work hard to maintain a 50-50 gender balance; not surprisingly, we don’t see college boys suing because there are too many eligible co-eds at their schools. On a related note, it is also currently easier to be admitted as a male applicant, as applications from women outnumber those from men, 57 percent to 43 percent.)
    Imagine, though, a strictly meritocratic admissions office, one which admits the students with the highest SAT scores and the highest GPAs, no questions asked. The college or university served by that office might be a place of truly awesome brain power, but it might not be a particularly interesting place to go to school. And colleges and universities understand this. Year in and year out, dozens and dozens of students with a perfect 1600 on the SAT (or 2400 on the new scale) apply to Harvard, and Harvard routinely denies the large majority of such applicants. Why? Because the ability to generate impressive numbers does not necessarily mean that such a student will be able to contribute in some meaningful way to the school community.
    Or, put yourself in the place of a college admissions officer. In front of you there are the files of two candidates. One student scored 1150 (on the 1600 scale) on the SAT and has earned a 3.1 GPA, while the other student’s numbers are 1100 and 3.0 respectively. You admit the first kid, right? But what if the first student is the child of two college graduates and attends a prep school where the average SAT is 1300, the average GPA is 3.6, and one hundred percent of the class is college-bound, while the second student lives in a single-parent household, is the child of two high school dropouts, and attends a rural or inner-city public school where the SAT average is below 1000 and where the dropout rate is nearly fifty percent. The first student is a gross underachiever, while the second student is beating the odds. Who merits admission?
    Here’s another experiment. Let’s presume that in a given year no African-American, Latin American, Native American, or multiracial students applied to Stanford and that the additional spots in the freshman class were therefore given to white and Asian-American applicants. In such a scenario, Stanford’s 12 percent admit rate becomes 17 percent. The 8-to-1 odds of being admitted become a still-rather-stiff 6-to-1. So under the current admissions process (in which we must presume that at least some of the underrepresented minority candidates are ‘better qualified’ than their white or Asian-American counterparts), the likelihood that a particular white student was not admitted because Stanford – or just about any other highly selective college or university – aims at diversity as one of its admission goals is, in fact, statistically insignificant. Simply put, odds are that the kid is not getting in anyway.
    The goal of diversity at the University of Michigan was not a wrong one; it was the rather arbitrary ‘points system’ which the university’s admissions office used that was misguided. Like the SAT-GPA argument proffered above, it attempted to reduce human beings to something quantifiable. Plenty of colleges and universities, including the Ivy League and most of the rest of the nation’s most prestigious schools, understand this and so make their admissions decisions in a more holistic and, yes, subjective manner.
    It has been pointed out that in states such as California and Texas, minority numbers at state colleges and universities have actually risen after the citizens voted or schools were ordered by the courts not to consider race in admissions. This is only because the colleges and universities consequently adopted policies guaranteeing admission to all students who rank in the top ten percent of their public school graduating classes, policies which, rather ironically, rely upon continually segregated public high schools – nearly a half century after Brown v. Board of Education! These policies also seem – probably mistakenly – to assume that a student who graduated in the ninth percentile at an under-funded rural or inner-city school is somehow better prepared for higher education than a student who graduated in the eleventh percentile at a well-funded suburban school.
    As a brief aside, many groups filed amicus briefs in support of the University of Michigan. Interestingly, one such group comprised many, many retired military officers, including a number of former Joint Chiefs of Staff – not a particularly liberal lot. Briefly, they argued that diversity (minorities constitute a greater percentage of the military than they do the general civilian population) is a beneficial and worthwhile notion.
    A while back, I heard something encouraging on the radio. According to the Committee of 200, a group of women business leaders, the earnings gap between men and women will have closed by the year 2020. I say that this is encouraging since next fall my four-year-old daughter will enter pre-K. So when my daughter goes looking for her first job, she can expect that she will receive equal pay for equal work. Unfortunately, the young women among this spring’s Mercersburg Academy graduates, who will likely enter the workforce in 2011, can have no such expectation. (Incidentally, 2020 will be more than a century after women in the US won the right to vote.)
    As recently as a few generations ago in America, it was expected that a white man of means would go on for a college education and enter a profession. At the same time, what few women attended college were allowed mainly to attend only women’s colleges; and while many of these schools were quality institutions, an equal number were little more than finishing schools. (Incidentally, the Ivy League wasn’t fully co-ed until just a quarter of a century ago, when in 1982 Columbia admitted its first female students). Meanwhile, “colored” children attended primary and secondary schools which, in the South, were by law open only six months of the year; also at the time, the handful of black colleges were still mainly trade schools.
    And this, I suppose, is my point. When a ‘level playing field’ truly exists in the US, there will no longer be a need for remedies (which is what affirmative action is).
    Dr. King often employed the metaphor of a foot race. If a group of runners begins a race, and then other competitors join the race, already a lap or two behind, there are only two ways that the latecomers have a chance of being competitive in the race: they can either run so much faster than the runners who got a head start that they catch them – a virtual impossibility; or the latecomers can be allowed to join the race where the frontrunners are at the moment.
    Finally, perhaps you have heard of Kiri Davis. She is a young (high school-aged) documentary filmmaker. In her award-winning short film A Girl Like Me she replicates the famous “doll test” of Dr. Kenneth Clark. Using the results of Dr. Clark’s research, Thurgood Marshall, in Brown v. Board of Ed, effectively argued against the fallacy of the “separate but equal” doctrine. More than fifty years after Brown, Ms. Davis’s results are shockingly and disturbingly similar.
    The simple fact is, a nation with such a legacy has some catching up to do.

Posted by Frank Betkowski at February 7, 2007 11:50 AM

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