Context Is Eveything, Part II

Last week, I began the first in a series of pieces on the importance of context. My first example was to post an excerpt from a controversial book on racial preferences called Mismatch. I post it here again:

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Arcidiacono, Aucejo, and Spenner have done exemplary research here. Their data are accurate, and other experts tell me that their analysis is correct on every point. Importantly, they have demonstrated that race itself does not affect outcomes at Duke, validating our efforts to create an environment where discrimination is either absent altogether or so minimal as not to affect academic performance.

 But they have also demonstrated that relative levels of academic preparation do matter, not for every individual but in a way that is somewhat predictable when we look across large numbers of students. They matter not only for grades but perhaps for learning itself, and apparently they have an influence on one’s choice of major and chances of successfully sticking with that major. 

This merits further research, but assuming these findings hold up, they suggest three things that we in the administration should be doing. 

First, we should provide academic support counseling for students who wish to pursue STEM fields but enter Duke with lower-than-average levels of academic preparation. Through careful and rigorously evaluated support efforts, we may be able to improve successful persistence in these fields.

Second, we should work with our sister institutions to evaluate how students who struggle at Duke would have fared at other schools, and we should all pool data to evaluate postgraduate outcomes so that we better understand how the tradeoffs that students encounter at Duke affect their long-term success and career goals. 

And third, as we learn more, we should make those findings transparent to our applicants. If a high school senior we choose to admit hopes to become a physicist, we should help that student have the best possible information about his actual prospects at Duke so that she can weigh the advantages and disadvantages of

coming here rather than some other school. This transparency is not only fairer to our students, but I can think of no better way of maintaining accountability among Duke’s administrators and faculty.

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What I did not say, and why context is so important, is that no person at Duke ever said this.  The words are a fiction that the authors created.  It is what they hope an official will be able to say in public at some future date. For now, however, this is a speech no administrator at Duke, or almost anywhere else, would ever give. To do so would give credence to the underlying premise of this of this book: under-represented students are ill served at many selective colleges and universities. The achievement gap between these students and Asians and Whites is so great that instead of helping the  very students racial preferences are meant to help, they data demonstrates dramatically large preferences hurts them in terms of academic performance  in college and on into  missed future opportunities.

The real question, then, is whether there is support for the thesis of the book. Rather than try to quote from the arguments, what follows is some of the data from this book and some other sources. I would ask if anyone has data that is at odds with what I am quoting to add it as a comment to this blog entry

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Overview

[The]analysis of more recent and more comprehensive data suggests that the proportion of four-year colleges using racial preferences has probably grown to perhaps a quarter or 30 percent of the total.

Under-Represented Students

A very high proportion of Blacks—in some cases 70 percent—receiving preferences at elite colleges are either mixed-race Americans or foreign-born blacks. And a majority of African Americans receiving preferences at elite colleges and law schools themselves come from affluent families, usually with two college-educated parents.

Students who receive large preferences tend to get low grades. Every academic study on the subject confirms only 5 percent of blacks and less than one-tenth of Hispanics end up in the top fifth of the class, and  blacks are four or five times as likely as whites to end up in the bottom tenth.

A careful study at Duke University found that when one looked simply at admission preferences and not at race, the race effect disappeared; that is blacks get low grades in college not because they are black but because they disproportionately receive large preferences. The reason is not that they are bad students; it is that the vast majority of their classmates at the highly competitive school have a huge head start in terms of high school education.

So, for example, in the three years before Prop 209 a black or Hispanic applicant with an academic index in the low 600s had a 63 percent chance of being admitted to Berkeley or UCLA, compared to an 8 percent chance for a similar white applicant and a 7 percent chance for a similar Asian applicant.

For the six classes of black freshmen who entered UC schools in the years before race-neutrality (i.e., the freshman classes of 1992 through 1997), the overall four-year graduation rate was 22 percent.

After the passage of Prop 209 in California, banning the use of race in admission, the number of UC Black and Hispanic freshmen who went on to graduate in four years with STEM degrees rose 51 percent from 1995–1997 to 2001–2003.

The number of UC Black and Hispanic freshmen who went on to graduate in four years with GPAs of 3.5 or higher rose by 63 percent from 1995–1997 to 2001–2003.

Major effects of Prop 209 upon the University of California: a rise in applications and yield rates that was particularly remarkable and impressive among Black and Hispanic students. Second, the cascading of black and Hispanic students led to campuses where their credentials more closely matched those of white and Asian students lowered their numbers at the elite campuses but led to improved academic outcomes and, most notably, higher graduation rates. 

Among the top twenty-one college producers of future blacks with science doctorates, seventeen were HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and none were Ivies. HBCUs produced 40 percent of the blacks with bachelor degrees in science and engineering, even though they accounted for only 20 percent of black college enrollment.

In June 2003 a Gallup poll asked: “If two equally qualified students, one white and one black, applied to a major U.S. college or university, who do you think would have the better chance of being accepted to the college—the white student, the black student, or would they have the same chance?” Respondents were almost evenly divided, choosing “black student” by only 31 to 29 percent. And Black and Hispanic respondents chose “white student” by 67 to 5 percent and 44 to 14 percent, respectively. In the real world of selective school admissions, however, there would be no contest: The Black student would have dramatically higher odds of admission at nearly every selective school in the country.

Asian

At most undergraduate schools for which we have data, students with marginal credentials (by the school’s admissions standard) are significantly less likely to be admitted if they are Asian. When such findings are pointed out, university officials often respond that this occurs because Asian American applicants tend to have weaker “soft” credentials than do similar whites…. “Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic students, with an acceptance rate rising from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent.”

Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade had found wide discrepancies in the SAT scores needed to gain admission to elite colleges. Using data from 1997, he found that Asian-Americans scoring a perfect 1,600 (old test in which 1600 was top score) had the same chances of getting in as white students who scored 1,460 and African-American students who scored 1,150.

Class

Low-income students of all races are 70 percent less likely than their affluent counterparts to enter college.

Blacks are about 30 percent more likely to enter college than are whites with similar low socioeconomic backgrounds and academic credentials.

Average SAT score (out of 2400) of students from households with an income of below $20,000: 1322 
Average SAT score (out of 2400) of students from households with an income above $200,000: 1722

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There is a great deal more data in the book Mismatch and No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, my two main sources. I am not trying to sell either of them. I have no affiliation with them. For those who wish to see all my highlights and notes (both in support and with questions in some places), I have posted them publicly via KContextindle. So those who have a kindle can read the lengthy highlights and notes free. I wish I could post them free for everyone, but have not the permission to do so.

Questions:

Does this data lead you to any conclusions?

Is the data accurate?

Is it time for greater transparency on the part of colleges and universities about the way preferences are used? If not, why not?