Those familiar with the Supreme Court are saying that it’s looking increasingly likely that affirmative action in college admissions is on its way out. The New York Times explores the ways in which states that are now looking for a different way to maintain diversity on their college campuses can emulate one of the first states not to use affirmative action at all – California.

In 1996, after the passage of Proposition 209, California became one the first states to do away with affirmative action in college admissions entirely. In the first few years after Prop 209 was adopted, the impact on minority enrollment in the University of California system was undeniable. The number of Latino students fell by 3% from 15% to 12%. The percentage of the student body that was African-American also declined by a single percentage point from 4% to 3%. At some of the most prestigious campuses in the system like Berkeley and UCLA, the declines were even steeper.

But after a few years the numbers rebounded — and then some.

Until last fall, 25 percent of new students were Latino, reflecting the booming Hispanic population, and 4 percent were black. A similar pattern of decline and recovery followed at other state universities that eliminated race as a factor in admissions.

Since considering race in admissions was no longer an option,the public university system in California – and other states where affirmative action is no longer on the books like Florida, Michigan and Washington – instead look for traits that are frequently its proxy. For example, admissions procedures on UC campuses give students points for “overcoming disadvantages” such as being from low-income families or from families where English isn’t the first language. Applicants from underperforming schools also get a leg up, as well as those from crime-ridden neighborhoods.

The approach has helped maintain the level of diversity on UC campuses, but is that necessarily a good thing?

Not according to Heather Mac Donald, writing for the City Journal. Mac Donald asks if at a time when the public university system in California is claiming poverty, can it justify spending millions of its budgets to fix a problem that doesn’t really exist?

UC Two captured the admissions process long ago. Ever since the passage of Proposition 209 banned racial discrimination at public institutions, UC’s faculty and administrators have worked overtime to find supposedly race-neutral alternatives to outright quotas. Admissions officials now use “holistic” review to pick students, an opaque procedure designed to import proxies for race into the selection process, among other stratagems.

Nor, according to Mac Donald, is this diversity push really serving those it was designed to help the most – the students. Mac Donald cites Richard Sander’s “mismatch theory,” which demonstrates how admitting students who are academically unprepared to tackle the work to a school where an average student has the skills to meet the challenge merely sets them on a road to failure.

The post Diversity Without Affirmative Action: Still a Worthy Goal? appeared first on Education News.

By Kevin Wolfman

Affirmative action, White America’s eternal nemesis, is about to get another close-up.

Kevin Wolfman

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Grutter v. Bollinger that race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Michigan’s law school, as well as universities nationwide, were acceptable. While the Court rejected the constitutionality of strict “quota” admissions, it reaffirmed that institutions were free to consider race as one factor, among many others, in admissions decisions. Writing for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor held that affirmative action “further[ed] a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”

But this is 2012. O’Connor, the conservative swing vote in the Bollinger case, is long gone from the bench. In her place sits Samuel Alito, a Justice who would be conservative enough to win the upcoming Republican primary in Arizona, were he so inclined. (O’Connor, herself an Arizona native, wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in the desert.) With the replacement of the conservative O’Connor with the arch-conservative Alito, it was only a matter of time before a miffed white applicant denied entrance to her school of choice decided to raise a stink about affirmative action in federal court. So here we are, with the Supreme Court once again poised to possibly throw affirmative action in the trashcan, just nine years after polishing and displaying it proudly on the mantel.

The case against affirmative action has always been, and will always be, the same: Considering race in university admissions is “reverse discrimination”—explicitly racist, and therefore against the law. It’s a fair point. Given that each university has a limited number of slots for new students, the application process is a zero-sum game by definition. Giving a race-centric boost to certain minorities (Asians excluded, of course) automatically decreases the odds of acceptance for white applicants.

On the surface, therefore, this is a pretty cut-and-dried case. Affirmative action decreases whites’ chances for admission due solely due to the color of their skin, so that makes it illegal.

This argument is shallow and incomplete, however. The fact remains that affirmative action, while possibly harmful to white college applicants, presents significant benefits to white college students. O’Connor stated in her Bollinger opinion that a “diverse student body” provides “educational benefits,” presumably to white students as well as those of color. What are these benefits, exactly?

For one, diverse student bodies actually promote higher-level thinking skills. As demonstrated by Stanford education researcher Anthony Lising Antonio, white students who socialize regularly in multiracial peer groups tend to reason more critically about political and social issues than those who hang out in homogenous crowds. Rather than resorting to shallow, emotional appeals, they demonstrate increased “integrative complexity,” weaving multiple perspectives and shades of nuance into their arguments. (Read this article for a more complete discussion of the Antonio study.)

At the same time, college, as a whole, makes students of all colors more tolerant, compassionate, and inclusive. These are universal values that any well-adjusted human being can get behind, and increasing diversity on campus can only accelerate students’ embrace of them. The value of the college experience is not limited to the acquisition of professional skills and a rise in lifetime earning potential. College honestly promotes understanding, acceptance, and unity across racial and ethnic lines. That is not a warm and fuzzy liberal talking point, but an established scientific fact. White students benefit significantly from the experience of living and learning alongside students of color—and vice versa.

These are just a couple of the “educational benefits” cited by Justice O’Connor in 2003, and they still exist in 2012.

Of course, even if opponents of race-conscious admissions accept the fact that diversity does help make white students become better critical thinkers, more tolerant citizens, and more compassionate human beings, they are likely to fall back on this position: In the end, the minority applicants who get accepted to college through affirmative action programs just don’t “deserve” their spots. Because affirmative action admits often have relatively lower grade point averages and/or standardized test scores than their peers, critics claim that they do not rightfully “earn” their positions on campus.

This would be a valid argument if grade point averages and test scores were universally reliable measures of past performance, current aptitude, and future potential. They are most assuredly not—for many reasons, which will be discussed in a future article. For now, it will suffice to state that academic “merit” cannot be reliably measured solely with GPAs and SATs.

Do a few white applicants lose out a spot in their college of choice due to affirmative action policies? Yes. But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of colleges and universities in this country that provide both a quality education and an attractive lifestyle. As journalist and Yale grad Alexandra Robbins persuasively illustrates in her book The Overachievers, when it comes to future earnings and career advancement, where one attends college matters much less than how well one performs in college academically.

Among other things, Robbins cites a study that followed the careers of two groups of Harvard applicants. The first group’s students were admitted to Harvard and enrolled in the school. The second group’s students were admitted to Harvard but chose to enroll elsewhere, usually at a less prestigious place (it’s hard to find anywhere as prestigious as Harvard). Years later, the students in the second group were just as professionally successful as the students in the first group. The lesson? If you are “qualified” for a particular school, you are probably going to end up just as well off as the students at that school, whether or not you actually attend that school yourself.

White America’s never-ending hissy fit over affirmative action may be just one more symptom of our society’s unhealthy obsession with so-called “top” colleges. Students (and parents, of course) have been brainwashed by self-interested, for-profit entities like The Princeton Review, Kaplan, and U.S. News and World Report into believing that a rejection from a college perceived as “elite” will seriously damage an applicant’s odds of future success. As Robbins demonstrated, however, this is simply untrue.

The intellectual and social benefits of campus diversity, for students both white and non-white, are clear. Affirmative action, in turn, bolsters these benefits by diversifying the college environment. The white applicants who miss out on attending their first-choice schools due to affirmative action policies will, in all likelihood, not suffer any real long-term negative effects—they are still perfectly “qualified,” after all. So, is the principle of “race-blind” admissions worth the practical decreases in intellectual strength and social cohesiveness that would result?

If the Supreme Court declares “yes,” it won’t just be the minorities that suffer.

Kevin Wolfman is a teacher and holds a Masters degree in political science from the University of California at Davis. He is the author of Not Politics: The Student’s Guide to Political Science. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinwolfman.

The post Kevin Wolfman: The White Case for Affirmative Action appeared first on Education News.

The court is set to rehear a white student’s claims that she missed out on a place at the University of Texas because of the university’s race-conscious admissions policy, after it was ruled nine years ago that school administrators were able to take race into account as one of many factors in considering applicants.

Critics of the policy hope that the current court will eradicate affirmative action, or further restrict its use. The current court is considerably more conservative than the one that made the 2003 decision, and Edward Blum, director of the Project on Fair Representation, which is representing Abigail Noel Fisher, the student rejected by UT, said:

The case “presents the court with an opportunity to clarify the boundaries of race preferences in higher education or even reconsider whether race should be permitted at all under the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.”

However, university of Texas President Bill Powers said:

“We must have the flexibility to consider each applicant’s unique experiences and background so we can provide the best environment in which to educate and train the students who will be our nation’s future leaders.”

Yet, a broad ruling in favor of the student, Abigail Fisher, could threaten affirmative action programs at many of the nation’s public and private universities, writes Pete Williams at NBC News.

Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law scholar and dean of the University of California Irvine’s law school, has called the Fisher case “potentially momentous.”

Pacific Legal Foundation urged the Supreme Court to take the case in a friend-of-the-court brief, and called the announcement “good news for everyone who believes in equal rights and equal opportunities.”

PLF attorney Joshua P. Thompson said:

“Using race in admissions decisions, to achieve diversity, amounts to stereotyping people by their race.

“In the real world, shared skin color does not automatically translate into shared backgrounds or beliefs.  Racial diversity in a student body does not guarantee a diversity of experience and perspectives.  It is unrealistic and wrong to try to pigeon-hole people by their race.”

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the Texas plan, but a number of high-profile conservative judges from the circuit loudly objected and urged the high court to consider the case, writes Barnes.

After the 2003 decision, Fisher enrolled at Louisiana State University and is set to graduate this year.

The post Supreme Court Revisits Affirmative Action appeared first on Education News.

Kevin Wolfman

Affirmative action is most often discussed in the context of the college admissions process. Should students from certain minority backgrounds receive special consideration from admissions committees, in light of the unique challenges they face growing up in a historically (and presently) discriminatory society? Or is such consideration itself racially discriminatory against white students, and therefore immoral (if not illegal)?

The focus of both supporters and opponents of affirmative action has been relentlessly narrow: on how it helps minorities, and how it hurts whites. As a result, the debate has grown frustratingly stale over time. Both sides keep talking fast and furiously, but in circles. So it might be refreshing to examine affirmative action from a fresh angle, and ask a new, intriguing question—one long lost and/or ignored in the issue’s emotionally charged crossfire.

Does affirmative action help white students, too?

In the early 2000s, a research team headed by Stanford’s Dr. Anthony Lising Antonio conducted a study on the impact of racial diversity in college. The researchers recruited a pool of undergraduate volunteers, and divided these volunteers into several different discussion groups. Once in the groups, which were moderated by research assistants, each volunteer was asked to both state and justify their opinions on a few different important social issues. Simple enough—opinion research like this has been around almost as long as politics itself, in one form or another.

In this particular study, however, there was an interesting twist. In some of the groups, all the participants were white. But in some of the other groups, all the participants were white except for one. Antonio’s team wanted to know what kind of impact, if any, the presence of a minority participant would have on the white’s responses. Keep in mind that the subjects being discussed were social issues, which often have a clear and contentious racial divide. Would the white participants speak more delicately, even censor themselves? Perhaps decline to answer entirely?

None of the above, as it turned out. Here’s what actually happened: When asked, the white students in the “diverse” groups responded to the questions in more intellectually sophisticated ways than those in the all-white groups. They did a better job at both integrating outside perspectives into their arguments—in other words, giving the “other side” credit for valid points, where such credit was due—and at avoiding the tendency to base their opinions on simplistic, “evaluative” reasoning. They went into greater depth in their responses, pulling from multiple sources and experiences to construct more well-rounded argument. Overall, the whites in the diverse groups demonstrated a greater acknowledgement and understanding of the “trade-offs among perspectives and solutions” in the social issues being discussed, compared to those in the all-white groups. This difference was fairly small, but clear.

Note that the presence of a racial minority did not change the white students’ opinions. It did, however, compel them to formulate and back up their opinions in more comprehensive, intellectually solid ways.

Discerning observers will point to an obvious flaw in this experiment: it only measured the students’ reasoning skills at one specific point in time, in a single (and highly artificial) situation. Luckily, then, Antonio and his team went one crucial step further.

After the discussion groups dissolved, each volunteer was given the opportunity to elaborate on their opinions by writing a short essay. They were also asked some questions, one of which concerned the racial composition of their friendship group—the collection of peers they socialized with regularly, outside the classroom. How might the response impact of a racially mixed friendship group—with whom unmonitored interaction was long-term, casual, and unmonitored—compare with the impact of a racially mixed discussion group, with whom interaction was moderated, regimented, and fleeting?

Analyzing the essays, the researchers found that the students whose written arguments were the most intellectually sophisticated were also, on average, the ones who claimed membership in a diverse friendship group. And this time, the difference was both clear and substantial. As a group, the responses of the white students who associated the most frequently and consistently with non-white students easily scored the highest in “Integrative Complexity”—the researchers’ measure of a response’s intellectual sophistication.

What does this mean? It means that concerted efforts to increase racial diversity on campus may also encourage the development of a student body that thinks more critically and deeply about social and political issues. Diversity does not necessarily change white students’ positions on the issues—there is no indoctrinating going on here—but it does, apparently, compel them to support their positions using greater levels of nuance and sophistication. By the same token, racial diversity seems to discourage the urge to fall back on simplistic, “evaluative” arguments that don’t stand up well to reason and persistent scrutiny.

With that in mind, one implication of this study’s findings is that affirmative action, discriminatory or not, may in fact help white students—at least once the admissions process wraps up and classes commence. Systematic efforts to bring more racial minorities to campus—especially ones whose life experiences are markedly different than those of the average white student—might unexpectedly result in a more intellectually robust white student population.

In the end, of course, the question of whether or not it is “right” to use race as a factor in college admissions still lingers. That debate will doubtless rage on, as charged as ever, for the foreseeable future. But steadfast opponents of race-conscious admissions policies should at least be willing to recognize that, whether ultimately “right” or “wrong,” such policies could be having a positive impact on the intellectual development of the white students whose rights they are trying to protect. If affirmative action is viewed as just one more cloud hanging over the world of higher education, maybe this is the silver lining.

Kevin is a teacher and holds a Masters degree in political science from the University of California at Davis. He is currently writing a book about the relationship between higher education and political beliefs. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinwolfman.

References

Antonio, Anthony Lising; Chang, Mitchell J.; Hakuta, Kenji; Kenny, David A.; Levin, Shana; and Milem, Jeffrey F. 2004. “Effects of Racial Diversity on Complex Thinking in College Students.” Psychological Science 15(8): 507-510.

The post Kevin Wolfman: Affirmative Action Helps White Students Think appeared first on Education News.