Inequalities in America

ARTICLE

Just Say No to Affirmative Action

Gail Heriot

Published online: 10 December 2011 # The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

The assumption behind the fierce competition for admission to elite colleges

and universities is clear: The more elite the school one attends, the brighter one’s

future. That assumption, however, may well be flawed. The research examined

recently by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights provides strong reason to

believe that attending the most competitive school is not always best—at least

for students who aspire to a degree in science or engineering.1

Majoring in science or engineering can be difficult. As one Yale

University student told the Wall Street Journal, the science course he took

“scared the hell out of me.” “In other classes, if you do the work, you’ll get

an A,” he complained. “In science, it just doesn’t work that way.”2

Well…yes, the feeling that one is flailing about in science and engineering

courses can be very disconcerting. Many students who start out with such a

Acad. Quest. (2011) 24:449–466 DOI 10.1007/s12129-011-9257-4

Gail Heriot is a member of U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and professor of law at the University of San Diego, San Diego, CA 92110; [email protected]. This is a slightly revised version of an article that originally appeared under the title “Want to Be a Doctor? A Scientist? An Engineer? Just Say No to An Affirmative Action Leg Up,” in the December 2010 Engage.

1See, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Encouraging Minority Students to Pursue Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Careers, Briefing Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2010), http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/gpo8540/EncouragingMinorityStudentsinScienceCareers.pdf. Apart from the considerations discussed in this report, there may indeed be something special about the education available from America’s most academically competitive colleges and universities. It should be noted, however, that some of the most sophisticated research available suggests that when it comes to increasing one’s income, elite schools are not exactly the ticket. See Stacy Berg Dale and Alan B. Krueger, “Estimating the Payoff to a Highly Selective College,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, no. 4 (November 2002): 1491–1527. Graduates of Ivy League institutions are indeed high earners. But, if this research is correct, this is simply a reflection of the fact that very talented students attend those schools. If the same students had attended less prestigious schools, they would have done on average just as well financially. 2Dana Milbank, “Education: Shortage of Scientists Approaches a Crisis as More Students Drop Out of the Field,” Wall Street Journal, September 17, 1990.

major switch to something easier. Others drop out or even flunk out. And it

should surprise no one that those who wash out are disproportionately

students whose entering academic credentials put them toward the bottom of

their college class.3 Not all stereotypes about science and engineering

students are accurate. But the basic notion that they tend to be highly-

credentialed and hardworking is largely on target. They have to be.

What some do find surprising is this: Part of the effect is relative.4 An

aspiring science or engineering major who attends a school where his

entering academic credentials put him in the middle or the top of his class is

more likely to succeed than an otherwise identical student attending a more

elite school where those same credentials place him toward the bottom of the

class. Put differently, an aspiring science or engineering major increases his

chance of success not just if his entering credentials are high, but also if those

credentials compare favorably with his classmates.5

The reasons for this comparative effect are doubtless complex. But they are

based on a common everyday observation: A good student can get in over his

head and end up learning little or nothing if he is placed in a classroom with

students whose level of academic preparation is much higher than his own, even

though he is fully capable of mastering the material when presented at a more

moderate pace. Discouraged, he may even give up—even though he would have

persevered had he been in a somewhat less competitive environment.

Science and engineering are ruthlessly cumulative. A student who has

difficulty with the first chapter in the calculus textbook is apt to have

difficulty with the second, third, and fourth chapters. Indeed, all the

subsequent courses in the mathematics curriculum may be a problem. By

3See part C. 4See part C. 5As one early researcher on this topic put it, there is an academic advantage to being a “big frog” in the “frog pond.” James A. Davis, “The Campus as a Frog Pond: An Application of the Theory of Relative Deprivation to Career Decisions of College Men,” American Journal of Sociology 72, no. 1 (July 1966): 17–31. This article was written well before the concept of mismatch came to be associated with the controversy over affirmative action and was not focused specifically on science and engineering. Davis found that college GPA is more strongly correlated with career choice than is quality of institution. In other words, while students take both their college grades and the academic quality of the school they are attending into account in evaluating their career choices, they tend to place more emphasis on college grades. A student at the bottom of his very elite class will tend to underestimate his abilities, while a student at the top of a class at a mediocre school will tend to over-estimate them. Davis concludes: “[T]hese ideas have some implications for educational policy. At the level of the individual, they challenge the notion that getting into the ‘best possible’ school is the most efficient route to occupational mobility. Counselors and parents might well consider the drawbacks as well as the advantages of sending a boy to a ‘fine’ college, if, when doing so, it is fairly certain he will end up in the bottom ranks of his graduating class” (30–31).

450 Heriot

contrast, an English literature student who simply fails to read the Chaucer

assignment is not necessarily at a serious disadvantage when it comes to

reading and understanding George Eliot. Since quitting science and

engineering is easy—ordinarily all one has to do is switch majors—the

attrition rate is quite high. By senior year, there are significantly fewer

science and engineering majors than there were freshmen initially interested

in those majors.

Some call this comparative effect the “mismatch” effect.6 And although

there is reason to believe that it applies to other kinds of learning, science and

engineering examples are perhaps the easiest to imagine: I have every

confidence that I can learn basic physics, despite the fact that I have never

taken a course in it and my mathematics skills are a little rusty. If I ever lose

my job as a law professor, I suspect that I am fully capable of re-tooling as a

physics teacher if that is where the available jobs turn out to be. But if I were

thrown into the Basic Physics course at Cal Tech, with many of the very best

science students in the world, I would be lost and likely learn little if

anything. I would be mismatched—negatively mismatched in this case, since

my level of preparation is below that of the other students rather than above.7

On a good day I might make a few lame jokes about my unhappy situation;

on a bad day I might even get a little testy about it. But I would be unlikely

to come out of that class as competent in the basic principles of physics as I

would have in a less high-powered setting.8

6See, e.g., Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas (New York: The Free Press, 1993). 7Mismatch may be positive or negative. If a typical Cal Tech freshman were to take a Basic Physics class designed for law professors like me, many of whom have never excelled at science, he would likely learn less than he would have in a class with his fellow Cal Tech students. Coasting through a “Basic Physics for Dilettantes” course, he would be the victim of positive mismatch, while I am negatively mismatched in the hypothetical. 8The empirical studies discussed in part C do not distinguish among the reasons that mismatched students might drop out of science and engineering more often than non-mismatched students with similar credentials. They simply record that they disproportionately do so. Is it just because they perceive that they aren’t doing well relative to other students and hence lack confidence in themselves? Or are they actually learning less than their similarly-credentialed counterparts who persevere in science or engineering at somewhat less elite institutions? Or both? There is, at present, no national examination for science and engineering achievement that would allow researchers to determine whether college students who were mismatched and dropped out of science or engineering actually learned less than their counterparts at less elite schools who took similar courses. The intuitive answer is that they did and that their self-confidence was also shaken in the process. But it is unnecessary at this point to draw a distinction. The law school experience is clearer, since law students must pass a bar examination in order to practice law. There is empirical evidence that mismatched law students are less likely to pass the bar examination than their non- mismatched counterparts at less elite schools. See Richard Sander, “A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” Stanford Law Review 57, no. 2 (November 2004): 393.

Just Say No to Affirmative Action 451

That doesn’t mean, however, that those who aspire to a career in science or

engineering must graduate from high school already prepared for the rigorous

science curriculum at the world’s most competitive science-oriented

university. There are many careers in science and engineering. Many have

been filled by latecomers to these fields. It simply means that for those who

are not already well-prepared when they begin to study science or

engineering in earnest, the best strategy may be to avoid going immediately

head-to-head with better prepared students.

The interest of the Commission on Civil Rights in mismatch centers mainly

on its effect on members of underrepresented racial minorities—primarily

African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians. Since admissions

standards are frequently relaxed in order to admit a more diverse student body,

minority students constitute a disproportionate share of the students with

entering academic credentials toward the bottom of any particular class.9

Obviously, however, there are other categories of students, such as athletes,

children of alumni, and other special admittees, who should also be mindful of

the risk of mismatch that comes with preferred treatment in admissions.

All such students face a dilemma. Should they accept the supposed “leg

up” they have been offered? Or should they reject it and attend a school

where such an advantage would have been unnecessary? The answer is likely

to vary from student to student and may be a question of priorities. Which is

more important—that student’s desire to attend the most elite school or his or

her desire to be a physician, engineer, or scientist?

9While the Supreme Court case of Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003), was pending before the Supreme Court, much publicity centered around the fact that the University of Michigan routinely added the equivalent of an entire letter grade to the admissions index of underrepresented minority students. An African American student with a high school grade point average of 2.95 would thus be preferred to an Asian American student with a high school grade point average of 3.94 (just shy of straight As), all other things being equal. The Gratz case rejected such a formulaic approach, but it did not reject the size of the preference granted to minority students. And indeed, the evidence suggests that the size of the preference actually grew at the University of Michigan in the period following the Gratz decision (see note 34).

Michigan’s policies were not more over-the-top than those of other universities. Lawsuits filed against the University of Georgia, the University of Texas, and the University of Washington prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Gratz brought to light similar practices. Hopwood v. Texas, 78F.3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996), cert. denied 518 U.S. 1033 (1996) (law school); Smith v. University of Washington, 233F. 3d. 1188 (9th Cir. 2000) (law school); Johnson v. Board of Regents, 106F. Supp. 2d 1362 (S.D. Ga. 2000), aff’d, 263F.3d 1234 (11th Cir. 2001) (undergraduate admissions). See also Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai, “Racial and Ethnic Preferences in Undergraduate Admissions at Six North Carolina Public Universities,” Center for Equal Opportunity, May 28, 2007, http://www.ceousa.org/content/view/442/100/, which found similar preferences at competitive North Carolina universities.

Some of the most discriminatory policies are at professional schools. At law schools, for example, the average black student has an academic index that is more than two standard deviations below that of his average white classmate. See Sander, “Systemic Analysis,” 367, 393.

452 Heriot

The problem is that few students who receive a preference realize that their

entering academic credentials are well below the institutional median. Fewer

still realize that relatively low academic credentials are likely to handicap

their ability to earn a degree in science or engineering there and that their

odds would be better elsewhere. Instead, they are recruited, indeed romanced,

by colleges and universities who allow the scramble for a racially diverse

campus (or a winning football team or happy alumni) to overcome their

commitment to full and fair disclosure.

It is for this reason that the Commission on Civil Rights has recommended

that schools inform the students they are attempting to recruit of the

mismatch issue and its potential impact. Tuition for the 2011–2012 academic

year at the University of San Diego, for example, where I am on the faculty,

is $38,150. That, of course, does not include room and board or various fees.

Many students are willing to incur such debt because they envision their

future career will be in a well-paying field like medicine or nuclear

engineering. When they graduate four years later with a less marketable

degree, they may be saddled with a large debt that they would have been

unwilling to undertake had they understood that the odds were stacked

against their success in science or engineering. But no one told them.

At minimum, this is an issue that students should be informed of so that

they, with assistance from their parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and

other advisors, can decide for themselves how to proceed. But let’s look at

the evidence step-by-step.

A. Minority Students Are Indeed Underrepresented in Science and Engineering

There is no segment of the labor force that proportionally reflects the nation’s

demographic profile. Physicians are disproportionately Jewish. Jockeys are

disproportionately Hispanic. The wine industry employs more than its share of

Italian Americans. Even within professions, disproportionality is the rule, not

the exception. Among lawyers, litigators are often Irish American. Among

physicians, radiologists are disproportionately Subcontinent Indian American.

Lack of proportionality is not necessarily the result of systematic

discrimination. There are many ways in which one’s family background,

language, and cultural traditions directly or indirectly affect career choices.

As a result, it would be hard to find a single profession or occupation that

“looks like America.” The world is always more complex than that.

Just Say No to Affirmative Action 453

But science and engineering are special. For one thing, they are not single

fields. Instead, obtaining an initial degree in a field of science or engineering is

the gateway to a large number of respected professions and occupations—from

aviation inspector to zoologist. These fields represent a significant portion of the

most lucrative and dynamic sectors of the world economy. If African Americans,

Hispanics, and American Indians are facing significant impediments in entering

these fields, that is a situation that calls for attention.10

Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates conducted by

the U.S. Census Bureau, UCLA law professor Richard Sander and UCLA

Medical School senior statistician Roger Bolus have calculated the following

racial gap in science among college graduates, including immigrants

educated or partly educated abroad, age thirty-five and under:

Table 1: How Significant Is the Racial Gap in Science?11

Frequency Relative to Population White Black Hispanic Asian General Population 100 100 100 100 Bachelor’s Degree Science 100 36 41 454 Ph.D. Science 100 15 26 703

As table 1 indicates, blacks and Hispanics are only 36 percent and 41 percent

respectively as likely as whites to have a bachelor’s degree in science or

engineering. An Asian, by contrast, is more than four and a half times more

likely than a white to hold such a degree. Blacks are only 15 percent and

Hispanics only 26 percent as likely as whites to have a Ph.D. in science. Asians,

on the other hand, are more than seven times as likely as whites to hold this

degree. The underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics in science and

engineering is real (although these figures are in part a reflection of the

immigration of highly-qualified individuals from Europe and Asia).12

10In addition, many have asserted that there is a shortage of Americans trained in science and engineering and that this shortage will likely get worse. If a particular segment of the population is underrepresented in these fields, it is only prudent to look into what can be done to increase their participation. National Science Foundation, Division of Policy Research and Analysis, Future Scarcities of Scientists and Engineers: Problems and Solutions (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 1990). 11Richard Sander and Roger Bolus, “Do Credentials Gaps in College Reduce the Number of Minority Science Graduates?” working paper 2, July 2009 draft (using data from 2003). 12Ibid. Unlike African Americans, Hispanics in science and engineering do not appear to be underrepresented relative to Hispanics in other college disciplines, such as the humanities. Relative to their initial interest, however, they are underrepresented. Ordinarily, one would expect a language minority to be overrepresented in science and engineering, since those disciplines do not require the same language skills as the humanities.

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Of course, concern over underrepresentation in science and engineering is not

new. On November 13, 1992, the popular magazine Science issued a special

news report entitled “Minorities in Science.” In it, the editors lamented:

For 20 years, science has been wrestling with “the pipeline problem”:

how to keep minorities from turning off the obstacle-strewn path to

careers in science, mathematics, and engineering. Thousands of

programs have been started since the late 1960s to bring diversity to

the scientific work force. But their results have been dismal.13

One thing, however, is clear. The problem has not been an unwillingness to

spend money. By 1992, the National Science Foundation had already spent over

$1.5 billion on programs designed to increase the number of minorities in

science or engineering. Officials at the National Institutes of Health estimated

that they had pumped an additional $675 million into the system. Uncounted

state, local, foundation, and industry programs contributed millions more.14

But the consensus of opinion has been that much of the money had been

spent unwisely. In their eagerness to qualify for the vast grants available to

educate future minority scientists and engineers, many colleges and

universities admitted minority students with little background in science or

mathematics. In the early days of affirmative action, “colleges took any

person of color who wanted to become an engineer, regardless of their

background,” said Mary Perry Smith, a former Oakland schoolteacher and

founder of California’s Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement

program, which promotes minority student participation in those fields.

“They tried to turn students who barely knew algebra into engineers and it

was a total failure.”15

“The country cannot repeat the experiment of the last 20 years,” said

Luther Williams, then National Science Foundation assistant director of

education and human resources, in 1992. Williams, who later went on to

become provost of Tuskegee University, a historically black university with a

reputation for emphasizing a science and engineering curriculum, was blunt:

13Elizabeth Culotta and Ann Gibbons, “Minorities in Science: Two Generations of Struggle: Special Report Overview,” Science 258, issue 5085 (November 13, 1992), 1176. 14Calvin Sims, “What Went Wrong: Why Programs Failed,” Science 258, issue 5085 (November 13, 1992), 1185. 15Ibid., 1187.

Just Say No to Affirmative Action 455

Those vast expenditures were “an incredible waste of financial and human

resources.”16

Perhaps Williams was being too harsh. Progress has been made and it will

continue—even though it is not as much progress as we would like. But if

the problem is going to be solved, it will not be solved by more of the same

thinking that has characterized the efforts of the last forty years. A

reexamination of the assumptions behind those efforts is in order—even if

it steps on a few well-entrenched toes.

B. There Is No Problem with Lack of Interest in Science and Engineering among Minority Students—Disproportionate Attrition Is the Cause for Concern

The problem with minority underrepresentation in science and engineering

is not the result of lack of interest among college-bound African Americans,

Hispanics, and American Indians. Study after study has found just the

opposite.17 Indeed, if anything, such students are slightly more interested in

pursuing science and engineering degrees than white students. For example,

Professors Alexander W. Astin and Helen S. Astin of UCLA’s Higher

Education Research Institute examined a sample of 27,065 students enrolling

as freshmen at 388 four-year colleges in 1985. They found that the rate of

initial interest in majoring in a biological science, a physical science, or

engineering was, in descending order, 52.6 percent for Asians, 35.7 percent

for Chicanos, 34.5 percent for American Indians, 34.2 percent for African

Americans, and 27.3 percent for whites.18 If there is a problem with lack of

interest in science and engineering, it is with college-bound whites, not

college-bound African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians.

These findings were consistent with later efforts to study the issue. When

Dartmouth College psychology professor Rogers Elliott and his co-investigators

looked at a sample of 4687 students enrolling at four elite colleges and

universities in 1988, they found that 55 percent of the Asians, 44.2 percent of the

16Ibid. 17Frederick L. Smyth and John J. McArdle, “Ethnic and Gender Differences in Science Graduation at Selective Colleges with Implications for Admission Policy and College Choice,” Research in Higher Education 45, no. 4 (June 2004): 353, 357, calling this finding “consistent” and citing a number of studies dating back to the late 1970s. 18Alexander W. Astin and Helen S. Astin, table 3.5, Undergraduate Science Education: The Impact of Different College Environments on the Educational Pipeline in the Sciences (Los Angeles, CA: University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute, 1992), 3–9, http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED362404.pdf.

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African Americans, 44 percent of the Hispanics, and 41.4 percent of the whites

were initially interested in majoring in science.19 Similarly, Richard Sander and

Roger Bolus, in analyzing all students enrolling in the University of California

between 2004 and 2006, found that 57.1 percent of Asians, 40.5 percent of

African Americans/Hispanics, and 34.7 percent of whites declared an intention

to major in science or engineering.20

To be sure, that doesn’t mean that there is no point in encouraging even more

underrepresented minorities to aspire to careers in science and engineering.

Programs that are proven to encourage such interest may be money well spent.

But if one wants to understand the root of the problem, one must look elsewhere.

And some researchers have. Their work has shown that the problem for

minority college students comes a little further down the pipeline. While African

Americans, Hispanics, and probably American Indians have high rates of initial

interest relative to whites, they are less likely to follow through with that interest.

Somewhere in college, the intention to graduate with a degree in science or

engineering dies. Astin and Astin report, for example, that while 68 percent of

Asians and 61 percent of whites in their sample followed through on their

intention to major in biological science, physical science, or engineering

four years later, only 47 percent of African Americans and 37 percent of

Hispanics did the same. The rest had apparently changed majors, dropped out, or

flunked out.

Consequently, while one might expect, given their level of interest, that

African American college students would be somewhat overrepresented

among science and engineering college graduates, they turn out to be

underrepresented instead. Hispanics are a special case. English mastery is

sometimes a problem among Hispanics. One would therefore expect very

high perseverance in science and engineering, since transfer to a discipline

that requires skill in English can be daunting. All other things being equal,

overrepresentation in science and engineering should be expected for a

language-based minority. But attrition rates for Hispanics in science and

engineering were also unusually high.

Similar results were obtained by Rogers Elliott and his co-investigators,

who found that 70 percent of Asians persisted in their ambition, while

19Rogers Elliott et al., “The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions,” Research in Higher Education 37, no. 6 (1996): 681, 692–93. 20Sander and Bolus, “Credentials Gaps in College,” 3. Sander and Bolus also report that among the University of California students enrolling from 1992 to 2006, 52.6 percent of Asians declared an intention to major in science and engineering, as did 37.5 percent of blacks/Hispanics and 34.7 percent of whites.

Just Say No to Affirmative Action 457

61 percent of whites, 55 percent of Hispanics, and 34 percent of blacks did.21

Others had similar findings.22

C. Students with Low Entering Credentials in Science, Both in Absolute and in Comparative Terms, Are More Likely to Leave Science and Engineering

It is tempting to ask first, “What accounts for disproportionate minority

attrition?” But that temptation should be avoided. Instead, the first question

should be, “What accounts for student attrition in general?” Once that

preliminary question is answered, the question about disproportionate

minority attrition essentially answers itself.

It is no secret that entering science credentials—like Math SAT score and the

number of high school courses in mathematics and science and the grades earned

in them—are strongly correlated with persistence in science.23 Since African

Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians tend as a group to have lower

entering science credentials, they are almost certain to have a higher attrition rate.24

It would be nice if the disparities among races, including the disparities

between Asians and others, could be eliminated overnight by improving the

performance of the lower-performing groups. For that matter, it would be

nice if disparities between individuals could be eliminated and everyone

could perform better in mathematics, science, and all subjects. And there is

no doubt that improvements can be made.

But if there is one thing that we have learned during the many decades that

this problem has been receiving attention, it is that few improvements can be

made quickly. The mismatch problem, however, may be a partial exception.

Matching students to the right college or university for their level of

developed academic ability could increase the number of science and

engineering majors in fairly short order.

21Elliott et al., “The Role of Ethnicity,” 694. See also National Science Foundation, Future Scarcities of Scientists and Engineers, finding persistence rates of 43 percent for majority students and 21 percent for minority students; T.L. Hilton, J. Hsia, D.G. Solorzano, and N.L. Benton, “Persistence in Science of High Ability Minority Students,” Journal of Higher Education 69, no. 6 (November-December 1998): 589–620, reporting that 54 percent of Asian, 44 percent of white, 36 percent of black, and 29 percent of Latino high school seniors who had intended to attend college and major in science or engineering were doing so two years later. 22Smyth and McArdle, “Ethnic and Gender Differences,” 361–63. 23Astin and Astin, Undergraduate Science Education, table 3.5, 3–9; Elliott et al., “The Role of Ethnicity,” 694; Smyth and McArdle, “Ethnic and Gender Differences,” 357; Sander and Bolus, “Credentials Gaps in College.” 24Ibid. See also William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

458 Heriot

As three independent studies have now concluded, absolute credentials are

not the only thing that matters in keeping students in science and

engineering. Relative credentials are also important. A student whose

entering credentials are at the bottom of the class at the school he attends

is less likely to persevere in his quest for a degree in mathematics or

engineering than a student with identical credentials who attends a school

where those credentials place him higher in the class.

The first of these studies was published by Rogers Elliott and his co-

investigators in 1996.25 The single most important culprit they found was the

“relatively low preparation of black aspirants to science in these schools.”26

The Elliott team was careful to put the emphasis on “relatively.” It wasn’t just

entering credentials demonstrating high developed ability at science that

mattered, but comparatively high credentials. A student who attended a

school at which his Math SAT score was in the top third of his class was

more likely to follow through with an ambition to earn a degree in science or

engineering than was a student with the same score who attended a school at

which his score was in the bottom third. The following table was presented:

Table 2: Percentage of Earned Degrees in the Natural Sciences as a Function of Terciles of the SAT-M Distribution in 11 Institutions27

Tercile 1 Tercile 2 Tercile 3

Institution % Degrees SAT-M % Degrees SAT-M % Degrees SAT-M

Institution A 53.4 753 31.2 674 15.4 581 Institution B 57.3 729 29.8 656 12.9 546 Institution C 45.6 697 34.7 631 19.7 547 Institution D 53.6 697 31.4 626 15.0 534 Institution E 51.0 696 34.7 624 14.4 534 Institution F 57.3 688 24.0 601 18.8 494 Institution G 62.1 678 22.6 583 15.4 485 Institution H 49.0 663 32.4 573 18.6 492 Institution I 51.8 633 27.3 551 20.8 479 Institution J 54.9 591 33.9 514 11.2 431 Institution K 55.0 569 27.1 472 17.8 407

Medians 53.6 31.4 15.4

25Elliott et al., “The Role of Ethnicity.” 26Ibid. Among the credentials that mattered most were number of science courses taken, average grades in high school science courses, and SAT Mathematics score. 27Ibid., 701

Just Say No to Affirmative Action 459

According to the authors, the bottom line was this: A student with an SAT

Math score of 580 “who wants to be in science will be three or four times

more likely to persist at institutions J and K, where he or she is competitive,

than at institutions A and B, where he or she is not.”28

For some this is counter-intuitive. The more prestigious the school, they

believe, the more adept it should be at graduating future physicians, scientists,

and engineers, no matter what their entering credentials. But instructors

everywhere must pitch the material they teach at a particular level. They can

pitch to the top of the class, to the middle, or to the bottom, but they can’t do all

three at the same time. At elite colleges and universities, pitching to the bottom

of the class is uncommon—especially in the science and engineering depart-

ments. The whole point of these institutions is to teach to the top. That is the

reason that students, who may have been positively mismatched in high school,

are willing to travel thousands of miles and incur significant debt to attend them.

If they were to abandon that practice and resolve to teach to the bottom of the

class, they would no longer be elite institutions.29

The extraordinary record of Historically Black Colleges and Universities

(HBCU) was one source of evidence cited by the Elliott team in favor of their

conclusion. With only 20 percent of total African American enrollment, these

schools produce 40 percent of the African American graduates with natural

science degrees, according to the National Science Foundation. These

students frequently go on to earn Ph.D.s from mainstream universities. The

National Science Foundation reports, for example, that of the approximately

700 African Americans who earned a doctorate in science or engineering

between 1986 and 1988, 29 percent earned their undergraduate degree

28Ibid, 702. This estimate, of course, was based on the assumption that the student started out with a desire to major in science or engineering. Whether a student with no particular plans to major in science or engineering is more likely to graduate with a science or engineering degree if he attends a school to which he is properly matched is a more complex matter. As the Elliott team demonstrated, students with higher SAT Mathematics scores are more likely to begin college with a desire to major in science. Consequently, institutions A–E likely have more students interested in pursuing science than institutions F–K and thus would naturally be expected to award a higher proportion of science degrees, since that is what their students desire. And indeed they did. The Elliott team reported that institutions A–E were about twice as likely to award science degrees as institutions F–K, with about 28 percent of the first group’s bachelor’s degrees and about 15 percent of the second group’s being in science. Nevertheless, as they point out, “a 54% chance of getting one of the 15% of the degrees that are in science is nearly twice as good as a 15% chance of getting one of the 28% of degrees that are in science.” Ibid., 702. 29In theory, intensive remedial instruction is supposed to bridge the gap between the top and the bottom. But not every theory works out in reality. The educational experience at elite institutions is meant to be a full-time job and then some. With only twenty-four hours in a day, something has to give. Every hour a minority student spends in a remedial classroom, sometimes struggling to stay on top of material other students are having less trouble with, is an hour other students can spend getting a deeper understanding of that material. The game of catch-up is thus never-ending.

460 Heriot

from an HBCU. For biologists, the figure was 42 percent and for engineers it

was 36 percent.30 Even those who have mixed feelings about HBCUs (and I

am such a person) must admit this is impressive.

Why have HBCUs been so successful? Unlike at mainstream institutions

with their high levels of affirmative action, African American students at

HBCUs are not grouped at the bottom of the class. Roughly half of African

American students at HBCUs will be in the top half of the class. Many will

be honor students. As a result, systematic mismatch is just not an issue.31

The problem is not that there are no minority students capable of doing

honors work at mainstream college and universities. There are many. But there

are not enough at the very top tier to satisfy the demand for diversity. And when

elite universities like Cal Tech, MIT or the Ivies lower their academic standards

in order to admit a more racially diverse class, schools one or two tiers down feel

they must do likewise, since the minority students who might have attended

those schools based on their own academic record are instead attending the more

elite schools. The problem thus cascades downward to the fourth and fifth tiers,

which respond similarly. As a result, a serious gap in academic credentials

between minority and non-minority students is created at all competitive levels

at mainstream universities—a gap that results in seriously disappointing grades

for many minority students, especially in science and engineering classes where

good grades are hard to come by.

At least one HBCU faculty member—Walter Pattillo, Jr., of North

Carolina Central University—intuitively grasped the mismatch problem even

before the Elliott team was able to demonstrate its existence empirically. As

then-chairman of the biology department, he vented his frustrations to

Science in 1992: “The way we see it, the majority of schools are wasting

large numbers of good students. They have black students with admission

statistics [that are] very high, tops. But these students wind up majoring in

sociology or recreation or get wiped out altogether.”32

30Elizabeth Culotta, “Black Colleges Cultivate Scientists,” Science 258, issue 5085 (November 13, 1992), 1216. 31The Elliott team members were particularly impressed that HBCUs are able to graduate large numbers of students in science and engineering despite entering credentials that were significantly lower than those ordinarily found at elite institutions. Students at Xavier University, for example, were reported to have SAT Math scores averaging around 400, yet half of the class was majoring in science. If elite schools could do the same with minority students (or with students in the bottom third of the class generally), it would be astonishing. In fact they do the opposite. They are able to award far fewer science or engineering degrees to African Americans than one would expect given the number of African American students in their classes. Elliott et al., “The Role of Ethnicity,” 700. 32Culotta, “Black Colleges Cultivate Scientists,” 1218.

Just Say No to Affirmative Action 461

Neither Prof. Pattillo nor the Elliott study received attention from

mainstream college or university administrators. Admissions policies at

competitive schools continued to emphasize recruiting minority students

even if their entering credentials would put them toward the bottom of the

class. Instead, emboldened by their perception that the Supreme Court had

given a constitutional green light to racially preferential admissions policies

in Grutter v. Bollinger,33 selective schools ramped up those policies.34 The

supposed beneficiaries of these policies were not informed.

Around that time, however, the tide of opinion among social scientists

studying the issue was beginning to turn, even as it remained frozen among

college and university administrators.35 One of the milestones was the

publication of Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber’s Increasing Faculty

Diversity: The Occupational Choices of High Achieving Minority Students

in 2003. The long-term project was funded by the Mellon Foundation, which

had been and remains one of the nation’s most zealous institutional backers

of race-based admissions policies. The authors’ mission was to determine

why more minority students are not attracted to careers in academia. Their

conclusions, reached after extensively questioning 7,612 high-achieving

undergraduates at thirty-four colleges and universities, pointed to mismatch

as a significant culprit:

The best-prepared African Americans, those with the highest SAT

scores, are most likely to attend elite schools, especially at the Ivy

League….Because of affirmative action, these African Americans (those

with the highest scores on the SAT) are admitted to schools where, on

average, white students’ scores are substantially higher, exceeding those

of African Americans by about 200 points or more….Not surprisingly,

in this kind of competitive situation, African Americans get relatively

low grades….It is a fact that in virtually all selective schools (colleges,

law schools, medical schools, etc.) where racial preferences in admission

is practiced, the majority of African American students end up in the

lower quarter of the class.

33Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). 34Althea K. Nagai, “Racial and Ethnic Preferences in Undergraduate Admission at the University of Michigan,” Center for Equal Opportunity,” October 16, 2006, http://www.ceousa.org/content/view/521/100/. See also Fisher v. University of Texas, 645 F. Supp. 2d 587 (W.D. Tex. 2009). 35See Russell K. Nieli, “The Changing Shape of the River: Affirmative Action and Recent Social Science Research,” Academic Questions 17, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 7.

462 Heriot

African American students at the elite schools…get lower grades than

students with similar levels of academic preparation (as measured by SAT

scores) than African American students at the nonelite schools….Lower

grades lead to lower levels of academic self-confidence, which in turn

influence the extent to which African American students will persist with a

freshman interest in academia as a career. African American students at elite

schools are significantly less likely to persist with an interest in academia

than are their counterparts at the nonelite schools.36 (Emphasis added)

To say that the Mellon Foundation was unhappy with the conclusions of its

grant recipients would be an understatement. Soon after publication, the

Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the foundation was “trying to

distance itself” from the book’s findings.37 Dr. Cole told the Chronicle that there

was “no chance” that he would receive money again from the Mellon

Foundation. “And I don’t care,” he said. “I was trained at a time before social

science became so politicized….I believe that social science should be objective

and value-free, and you should design a study to answer a question and whatever

the answer is, that’s what it is.”38

A year after Cole and Barber’s research became public, a second study on

science and engineering mismatch was published. University of Virginia

psychologists Frederick L. Smyth and John J. McArdle used a different

methodology and database from those of Elliott and his co-authors. But they

reported findings that “are consistent” with the earlier article’s conclusion

that “race-sensitive admissions, while increasing access to elite colleges, was

inadvertently causing disproportionate loss of talented under-represented

minority students from science majors.”39

Indeed, Smyth and McArdle went further. They developed a model that

attempts to measure how many more minority students would have

succeeded in their goal of a science or engineering degree if race-neutral

admissions criteria had been employed. They wrote:

According to our model,…if all the [science-mathematics-engineering]-

intending under-represented minority students had enrolled in similarly

36Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber, Increasing Faculty Diversity: The Occupational Choices of High Achieving Minority Students (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 124, 212. 37Robin Wilson, “The Unintended Consequences of Affirmative Action,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 2003, 10. 38Ibid. 39Smyth and McArdle, “Ethnic and Gender Differences,” 373.

Just Say No to Affirmative Action 463

functioning colleges where their high school grades and math test scores

averaged at the institutional means among [science-mathematics-engineer-

ing] intenders, 72 more of the women and 62 more of the men would be

predicted to persist in [science-mathematics-engineering] (45% and 35%

increases, respectively).40

Smyth and McArdle’s recommendation was clear: “Admission officials are

advised to carefully consider the relative academic preparedness of science-

interested students, and such students choosing among colleges are advised

to compare their academic qualifications to those of successful science

students at each institution.”41

The latest contribution to the literature on science and engineering mismatch

is Do Credential Gaps in College Reduce the Number of Minority Science

Graduates?42 Using a number of sophisticated methodologies, Richard Sander

and Roger Bolus arrive at conclusions like those of Smyth and McArdle and the

Elliott team.

Sander and Bolus studied data obtained from the multi-campus University

of California (UC). All UC campuses are quite selective. But some are more

selective than others. The flagship campus at Berkeley is highly selective, as

are the UCLA and UC-San Diego campuses. At the other end of the

spectrum, the campuses at Riverside and Santa Cruz are somewhat easier to

gain admittance to, but nonetheless hardly “easy.”

Employing what they call the “distance method,” Sander and Bolus measured

the distance between each student’s entering academic index and the median

academic index of all science- and engineering-interested students at that

campus. This allowed the authors to compare not just students with equal

academic indices attending different UC campuses, but also to make

comparisons based on the magnitude of mismatch.43

They found that students who are “mismatched” at one UC campus are at

a greater risk of failing to attain their initial goal of a science or engineering

degree than otherwise identically-credentialed students attending a less

selective campus of that same university at which they were not mismatched.

And the greater the mismatch, the greater the problem.

40Ibid. 41Ibid., 353. 42Sander and Bolus, “Credentials Gaps in College.” 43Ibid., 14–20.

464 Heriot

Not satisfied with confining their analysis to the “distance method,”

Sander and Bolus also employed what they dubbed the “first choice/second

choice” method. This approach involves looking at pairs of students who

were admitted to two different UC campuses, one more elite and the other

less elite. In each pair, one student chose to attend the more elite school and

the other the less elite. The results were the same: Mismatched students are at

a disadvantage in science and engineering.44

“Minority attrition in science is a very real problem, and the evidence in

this paper suggests that ‘negative mismatch’ probably plays a role in it,”

Sander and Bolus wrote. The approaches they took yielded consistent results:

“[S]tudents with credentials more than one standard deviation below their

science peers at college are about half as likely to end up with science

bachelor degrees, compared with similar students attending schools where

their credentials are much closer to, or above, the mean credentials of their

peers.”45

D. Conclusion

Decades ago, well-meaning administrators at selective college and

universities resolved to “do the right thing” by extending preferential

treatment to underrepresented minorities in admissions. At least they

thought it was the right thing. One of the consequences of that policy has

been systematically low college grades for the supposed beneficiaries of

that preferential treatment.46 No, it doesn’t apply to all such students, but it is

nevertheless a widespread phenomenon. And the reason is simple: While some

44Ibid., 20–23. 45Ibid., 23–24. 46The figures for law school grades are available and particularly instructive: In elite law schools, 51.6 percent of African American law students have first-year GPAs in the bottom 10 percent of their class as opposed to only 5.6 percent of white students. Nearly identical gaps exist at law schools at all levels (with the exception of historically minority schools). At mid-range public schools, the median African American student’s first-year grades corresponded to the fifth percentile among white students. For mid-range private schools it was seventh. With disappointingly few exceptions, African American students were grouped toward the bottom of their class. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, the gap in grades did not close as students continued through law school. Instead, by graduation, it had gotten wider. See Sander, “Systemic Analysis,” 367, 427–36, tables 5.1, 5.3, and 5.4. I am not aware of anyone who disputes these figures, and indeed some critics of Sander’s work appear to have conceded their accuracy. See Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks, “Does Affirmative Action Reduce the Number of Black Lawyers?” Stanford Law Review 57, no. 6 (May 2005): 1807–54: “Richard Sander’s study of affirmative action at U.S. law schools highlights a real and serious problem: the average black law student’s grades are startlingly low” (1807).

Just Say No to Affirmative Action 465

students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as other

students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that

their entering credentials predict; if a student’s entering credentials put him at the

bottom of the range at a given school, his grades will likely reflect this.

No serious supporter of affirmative action denies this. William G. Bowen and

Derek Bok, authors of The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of

Considering Race in College and University Admissions and long-time

advocates of race-based admissions policies, candidly admit that the credentials

gap has serious consequences. “College grades [for affirmative action

beneficiaries] present a…sobering picture,” they write. “The grades earned by

African-American students at the [schools we studied] often reflect their

struggles to succeed academically in highly competitive academic settings.”47

The long-term social and educational consequences of decades of race-

based admissions policies and the artificially low grades for minorities those

policies produce are only now beginning to be studied. The evidence

examined by the Commission on Civil Rights focuses only on the effects on

science and engineering majors. It suggests that, as a result of race-based

admissions policies, we now have fewer, not more, physicians, dentists,

engineers, scientists, and other science-oriented professionals than we would

have had under a policy of color-blindness.

While there are still a few unanswered questions, it is time for students to be

advised of the issue and allowed to make their own decision about their future.

Indeed, it is long past time. If higher education were held to the same standards

of consumer disclosure as other businesses—from securities brokerage houses

to children’s toy manufacturers—this would have been disclosed long ago.

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

47Bowen and Bok, Shape of the River, 72.

466 Heriot

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