Compelling Interest

Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Colleges and Universities

Mitchell J. Chang, Daria Witt, James Jones, Kenji Hakuta, Mitchell J. Chang, Daria Witt, James Jones, Kenji Hakuta

• Publisher: Stanford Education
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780804764537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Hochschulausbildung

In recent years American colleges and universities have become the locus of impassioned debates about race-conscious social policies, as conflicting theories clash over the ways to distribute the advantages of higher education in a fair and just manner. Just below the surface of these policy debates lies a complex tangle of ideologies, histories, grievances, and emotions that interfere with a rational analysis of the issues involved. As never before, the need for empirical research on the significance of race in American society seems essential to solving the manifest problems of this highly politicized and emotionally charged aspect of American higher education.

The research evidence presented in this book has a direct relevance to those court cases that challenge race-conscious admission policies of colleges and universities. Though many questions still need to be addressed by future research, the empirical data collected to date makes it clear that affirmative action policies do work and are still very much needed in American higher education. This book also provides a framework for examining the evidence pertaining to issues of fairness, merit, and the benefits of diversity in an effort to assist courts and the public in organizing beliefs about race and opportunity.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

Daria Witt, Mitchell J. Chang, and Kenji Hakuta

Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the pioneering Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which reversed Plessy v. Ferguson and made racial segregation illegal. The lawyers arguing the case for Brown used social science evidence to disprove the many commonly held beliefs about race and racism that had been used to justify segregation. Now, nearly fifty years later, as success and prestige become increasingly associated with advanced degrees, and as the U.S. population grows more diverse, the debates surrounding the consideration of race in higher education admissions and hiring decisions are growing more contentious, and the courts of law and public opinion are once again struggling with issues in this area that social science evidence has the potential to address.

Many questions pervade public discussions and underlie current court cases and ballot initiatives: What would a fair admissions and hiring process look like? Are standardized tests such as the SAT the best way to measure academic worth and potential? For whom are they valid and in what conditions ? Who benefits from racially diverse campuses and in what ways? Should individual students all be judged by the same criteria regardless of group membership? Has the educational playing field been leveled for students of different races? Is affirmative action inherently discriminatory? To what extent does racism still exist? Does affirmative action compromise the quality of the student body? Will using only test scores and high school grades enable universities to admit enough students of color or do universities need to use alternate criteria to admit sufficient numbers? What should the role of colleges and universities be in helping to improve race relations in this country and to diversify future cadres of leaders? The research literature has much to say about these pressing questions, yet it has not received sufficient public, governmental, or legal attention. This book examines the potential of existing social science evidence to inform these very complex issues and questions in the hope of engendering more informed policies and public discourse about what has mostly been an ideologically driven topic.

Legal arguments for diversity and affirmative action are predicated on the notion that diversity (racial, ethnic, gender, and class) in higher education serves a compelling interest both to the institutions and to the society into which students will enter. Until recently, there was an assumption in much of higher education that the benefits of diversity are self-evident. Ample anecdotal evidence existed that convinced most educators of the validity of the claim. During the past few years, however, there have been many attacks on affirmative action and diversity programs in selective colleges and universities around the country. The passage of ballot initiatives in California and Washington state to end affirmative action, and court cases such as those against the University of Georgia, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas law school have threatened the ability of higher education institutions to preserve the diversity of their student bodies. These challenges essentially question the judgments of educators about the best way to provide their students with a quality education. Although the judgments of educators may be disputable, an examination of existing research can help raise the level of discussion.

What does empirical research have to say about the educational effects of diversity? To answer this question, we conducted an extensive review of the social science literature. The research we uncovered, which we present in the following chapters, is closely aligned with the judgments of educators. In short, the evidence consistently demonstrates that a diverse student body adds value to the educational process and to institutions of higher learning when colleges and universities are committed to implementing and sustaining initiatives that promote the unique benefits that diversity provides.

Despite the general public’s appearing to espouse the ideals and benefits of diversity (Ford Foundation press release, September 6, 1998), people often believe that affirmative action is not the best means for achieving a racially diverse campus and that any policy that takes race into account when apportioning opportunity inevitably harms members of racial groups who are not awarded preferences. For the most part, people acknowledge that slavery, legalized segregation, discrimination, and racism have hurt members of minority groups, particularly African Americans, in the past. A good portion of the public discourse, however, proceeds as if the Civil Rights movement brought an end to the harmful effects of policies and laws that existed for centuries and to discrimination and racism themselves. The popular belief seems to be that if they have not ended, it is time they did, but there is little that higher education can do to stamp them out completely; therefore, it is better for colleges and universities to proceed without accounting for racial differences (D’Souza 1991; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1997).

Because of such interpretations, when it comes to determining how to allocate prized positions in highly selective institutions of higher education, “fairness” and “justice” are accepted at face value and not in relation to broader social circumstances. In other words, instead of understanding affirmative action as a policy that affords opportunity to students who have demonstrated merit despite the many obstacles that have arisen largely as the result of the historical vestiges of racism, it is understood as denying opportunity to more “qualified” individuals who happen to be white. The ways in which being white has afforded privileges to many individuals and generations of their family are not acknowledged. Indeed, this view of fairness ignores the very segregated nature of our society in which the majority of racial groups continue to lead almost completely separate existences and the different opportunities that those separate existences afford or deny (Hacker 1992; Massey and Denton 1993; Schuman et al. 1997).

This book takes the arguments concerning affirmative action in higher education and places them within the frame of reference that the last twenty years of social science research provides. It synthesizes the rapidly expanding, cumulative body of evidence on these issues in order to bring both contemporary and historical context into the discussions taking place in the courts and in public discourse. Although this book brings evidence to bear on what the benefits of diversity are, such evidence cannot be disentangled from the larger issues of the role of higher education, fairness and merit, and the ways in which race continues to matter in the United States. A broader consideration of the arguments can help clarify the compelling interest that diversity serves to individuals, institutions, and society. Before addressing some of those larger issues, we first present an overview of the status of affirmative action in higher education.

Case Lam and the Benefits of Diversity

The legal notion of diversity as a compelling interest of an institution of higher education was defined by Justice Lewis Powell’s decision in the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. This case challenged the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) medical school’s practice of reserving sixteen spots in each entering class of one hundred for African American, Latino, and Asian American students—students who, as a group, commonly experienced racial discrimination. Allan Bakke, a white applicant, sued UC Davis claiming that the admissions process violated the Equal Protection Clause as well as Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars racial discrimination by federally assisted institutions.

Justice Powell, who supplied the pivotal vote on this decision, held that racial quotas were unconstitutional but that a university should be permitted to take into account an applicant’s race as part of the admissions process. Applying the strict scrutiny standard, Powell stated that the plan was permissible if (1) its objective was compelling and (2) the racial classification was necessary to achieve the objective. Powell wrote that diversity could be achieved through a process in which all factors being equal, race could be considered as a “plus” factor. He rejected other proposed objectives, including the need to reduce the shortage of minority medical students and doctors, the need to cure the results of past discrimination by society, and the need to increase the number of doctors who will practice in currently underserved communities.

Powell identified the medical school’s interest in providing the educational benefits of a diverse student body as a permissible basis for the consideration of race in student admissions. Explaining this decision, Powell stated that qualified students with a background that is diverse in some way, whether it be ethnic, geographic, or economic, may bring to a professional school experiences, outlooks, and ideas that enhance the training of the student body and better equip the institution’s graduates. Powell maintained that in addition to producing leaders trained through wide exposure to a robust exchange of ideas, a diverse student body encourages speculation, experimenting, and creativity that is central to the mission and quality of higher education.

Although in this case Justice Powell was writing solely for himself and not the majority of a deeply divided Supreme Court, his opinion in Bakke is now regularly upheld to defend race-conscious admissions programs. The extent to which Powell’s opinion represents the opinion of the Court and educational realities is now being challenged on legal, civic, and empirical grounds.

Current Status of Minority Student Admissions

Although Bakke is still the law of the land in most of the country, the 1996 Hopwood decision in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court (affecting Texas, where the suit was filed, as well as Louisiana and Mississippi) and the passage of the ballot initiatives Proposition 209 in California and Initiative 200 in Washington have outlawed the consideration of race in higher education admissions and hiring decisions in these states. Other ballot initiatives in states such as Florida threaten to overturn Bakke as well. Without Bakke and the permissibility of considering race as a “plus factor,” the numbers of non-Asian minority students at selective public institutions in those states have drastically decreased.¹ In 1998, the first year Proposition 209 was in effect in the undergraduate admissions process, there was a 66 percent decline in the number of black students and a 53 percent decline in the number of Latino students admitted to the University of California at Berkeley, one of the flagship campuses of the University of California system.

At Boalt, California’s most selective public law school, when Proposition 209 went into effect in the fall of 1997, the entering class included only one African American and fourteen Latino students.² To counter this alarmingly small enrollment of African American and Latino students, Boalt administrators implemented a number of changes and efforts in 1998. Among those efforts were reducing the importance of minute differences in grade point averages and law school board scores, abolishing the practice of granting bonus points to Ivy League applicants, encouraging students to write about their experiences with overcoming adversity (including discrimination), and granting extra consideration to qualified applicants who came from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Moreover, University of California campuses in general have engaged in stronger outreach to recruit qualified minority students from around the state. Overall these efforts resulted in more than doubling the previous year’s number of underrepresented minority students choosing to attend Boalt (Boalt Hall news release, August 17, 1998).³ Nevertheless, the number of underrepresented minority students attending both Boalt and the University of California, Berkeley, as a whole is still less than 50 percent of what it was before the elimination of affirmative action.

The University of California has also implemented some of the above changes at the undergraduate level. In addition, Governor Gray Davis in 1999 approved a Four Percent Plan in which the top 4 percent of each high school class would be admitted to the University of California system regardless of SAT score. Deemphasizing standardized test scores may well increase the acceptance rate of underrepresented students into the University of California system because this strategy addresses the persistent test score disparities between different racial groups. However, it is unclear whether this plan will significantly increase the enrollment of underrepresented students at both Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the state’s public flagship institutions. The numbers and proportion of African American and Latino students on these two campuses have shrunk as a result of Proposition 209, whereas the enrollment figures for these two groups of students have increased at less selective universities in the University of California system (i.e., University of California at Riverside; see Traub 1999). Interestingly, Proposition 209 has not resulted in the absence of non-Asian minorities from the University of California system. It has, instead, seemingly produced a significantly more segregated system in which the flagship institutions are predominantly white and Asian and the least selective institutions are disproportionately black and Hispanic. If this trend continues, it will have serious implications for not only de facto racial segregation but also equal educational and postgraduate opportunities (Karabel 1999). An effective plan will need to take into account both the overall enrollment of underrepresented students in the University of California system as well as their enrollment in the two most prestigious institutions.

In Texas, after the Hopwood decision, the decline in minority admissions was equally dramatic. In 1996, before the decision, there had been 266 matriculating black undergraduate students in the state’s flagship university, the University of Texas at Austin. In 1997, the number had dropped to 190. Alarmed by this precipitous drop, the Texas legislature passed a Ten Percent Plan in which the top 10 percent of students from every high school in the state would automatically qualify for admission regardless of their SAT scores. This plan did not, however, increase the number of African American students to the level hoped—in 1998, only 199 African American students matriculated. By comparison, Latino student enrollment was not set back as much: in the fall of 1996, 932 Latino students enrolled, compared with 892 in 1997, and 891 in 1998 (University of Texas, Austin Office of Institutional Studies, November 4 1998, personal communication).

More recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education (Hebel 2000) reported that debates over affirmative action at the University of Virginia, which triggered the elimination of a scoring system that gave “booster points” to black applicants, may account for the largest single-year drop in black applicants in the institution’s history. The number of black students seeking undergraduate admission to the University of Virginia fell by more than 25 percent, dropping from 1,287 in 1999 to 961 in 2000. According to the Chronicle, this drop fueled more campus debates over admissions policies and the wisdom of retreating from more aggressive affirmative action practices.

The Significance of Attending a Selective Institution

As a wide range of strategies are developed and implemented to increase the enrollment of underrepresented students in the wake of regional bans on affirmative action, a competing perspective has recently gained wider public attention. This perspective, which is typified by a recent article by James Traub (1999) in the New York Times Magazine, argues that the “end” of affirmative action is actually the “beginning of something better.” In the absence of affirmative action, according to this argument, more legitimate efforts such as enhanced outreach programs will eventually bring the numbers of minority students back (almost) to their original levels. In the mean time, students who are not accepted to the most selective institutions “cascade down” to the less selective ones. The result, Traub hypothesizes, is that everyone is better off because no students are asked to do work that is over their heads and no students feel undeserving of the spots awarded them by their institutions.

This rethinking of race-conscious policies appeals to popular sentiments about educational access and meritocracy. Critiquing this argument, which he refers to as the new “conventional wisdom,” Jerome Karabel (1999) points out that today’s situation with professional schools easily belies the notion that everyone will be accommodated somewhere so affirmative action is not necessary. For example, according to Karabel, 62 percent of those who apply to medical school each year are not accepted by a single one. Therefore, a student cannot necessarily “cascade down” to another school lower down the pecking order. As Karabel states: “if you cascade down, you cascade out,” and you are prohibited from joining the future ranks of doctors. The new “conventional wisdom” also fails to acknowledge that attending a selective undergraduate institution dramatically increases minority students’ chances of both graduating and being accepted into a graduate or professional school (Bowen and Bok 1998). The latter is especially significant at a time when advanced degrees are becoming increasingly necessary for obtaining high-ranking leadership positions in many fields.

If admission to selective universities were not seen as a gateway to other golden financial and social opportunities, then race-conscious policies that grant access to that gateway would draw little fire. But clearly, attending and graduating from an elite institution afford significant tangible benefits. The groundbreaking study by two former university presidents, William Bowen and Derek Bok (1998), offers strong evidence for sizable economic advantages (in addition to other benefits) that attending a selective institution brings to students of all races. Among their many findings is that on average, relative earnings for white male graduates who in 1976 entered one of the twenty-eight selective schools in their study were 61 percent higher than were the earnings of their counterparts—that is, others who had received a B.A.—nationwide. They also found that the salaries of white female graduates of these schools who had matriculated...