The Bell Curve Part 1V- Living Together Chapter 19-Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Affirmative action should be discussed as it is actually practiced, not as rhetoric portrays it. The author's efforts to assemble data on this secretive process, in the early 1990s, led them to predict that it could not survive public scrutiny and of course, it did not. The edge given to minority applicants to college and graduate school was not a slight nod in their favor in the case of a close call but an extremely large advantage that put blacks and Latino candidates in separate admissions competitions. On elite campuses, the average black freshman was in the 10 to 15th percentile of the IQ distribution of white freshmen. Nationwide, the gap was larger and larger yet in graduate school.

Asians, on the other hand were a conspicuously unprotected minority. At the elite schools, they suffered a modest penalty, with the average Asian freshman being in about the 60th percentile of the white cognitive ability distribution. The advantage given to minority candidates could more easily be defended if the competition was between disadvantaged minority groups and privileged white students, but that as not the case. Rather, nearly as large a cognitive difference separated disadvantaged black freshmen from disadvantaged white freshmen. Still more difficult to defend, blacks from affluent socioeconomic backgrounds were given a substantial edge over disadvantaged whites. Affirmative action has "worked" in the sense that it has put more blacks and Latinos on college campuses but it also has stimulated racism. When white students look around them, they see that blacks and Latinos constitute small proportions of the student population but high proportions of the students doing poorly in school. As a result, affirmative action has fostered racial animosity and, in part, explains the ill will towards blacks and the high black dropout rates for minority students that has plagued American campuses for decades. We now have national policies that treat people differently under the law. In the 1960s affirmative action began to be woven into American employment and educational practices as universities and employers intensified their recruitment of blacks, initially on their own and then in compliance with a widening body of court decisions and laws. By the early 1970s affirmative action had been extended beyond blacks o include women, Latinos and the disabled. Affirmative action is a part of The Bell Curve because it has been based on the explicit assumption that ethnic groups do not differ in the abilities that contribute to success in school and the workplace or, at any rate, there are no differences that cannot be made up by a few remedial courses or a few months on the job. Much of this book has been given over to the many ways this assumption is wrong. In this chapter the topic is the college campus. In the next chapter the authors deal with affirmative action in the work place. The authors provide data on Asians and Latinos, but the analysis centers on blacks, as has most of the debate over affirmative action. To understand the "edge" that affirmative action gives to blacks and Latinos it will help to have some data about how colleges and universities have translated the universal desire for greater fairness in university education into affirmative action programs. Universities and employers have been keeping detailed records on their admission and hiring practices for decades but, for the most part, the magnitude of the inherent injustices of affirmative action was hidden from the public until 1991 when a law student at Georgetown University blew the whistle on the practice in the school's student newspaper. Timothy Maguire was hired to file student records, but he surreptitiously compiled the entrance statistics for applicants to Georgetown's law school. He revealed that the mean scores on the Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT) differed markedly for accepted black and white students, a fact that had been hidden from the public previously. In the storm that ensued officials of the law school condemned his article and black student groups called for Maguire's expulsion. In an op-ed article in the Washington Post the author wrote "Incomplete and distorted information about minority qualifications for admission in to the Law Center renew the long-standing and intellectually dishonest myth that blacks are less qualified than their white counterparts to compete in school, perform on the job or receive a promotion." The magnitude of the edge given to members of certain groups- the value assigned to the state of being black, Latino, female or physically disabled- was not considered relevant by the educational elite. The Post, supported by a vast majority of liberal academics were "OK" with admission policies that assigned a premium, an edge if you will, to certain groups in addition to other individual measurements when making final determinations on college admission or hiring practices. Whether, such policies were fair or just was irrelevant. What then, is the magnitude of the edge given to minorities that apply to undergraduate schools? The authors obtained the SAT test results for 1991 1nd 1992 from 16 of the twenty top-rated private universities and 5 of the top 10 private colleges. In addition the study included data from the University of Virginia and the University of California Berkeley. The differences between black and white scores was less than 100 in only one school, Harvard and it exceeded 200 in nine schools, reaching its highest at Berkeley (288). Overall, the difference between the white mean and black mean scores on the SAT was 180 points or about 1.3 standard deviations. In all but four schools Asians were within 6 points of the white mean or above it. Overall, the average Asian was at the 60 percentile of the white distribution. This means that the average edge given blacks was 180 SAT points while the average Asian faced a mean penalty of 30 points. The average black was at the 5th to 7th percentile of the Asian distribution. The Latinos were between the blacks and whites having a mean SAT score 129 points below the white mean or about 0.9 standard deviations below the white mean. The puts the average Latino at about the 20th percentile of the white distribution. The authors would have preferred to have a sample of non-elite state universities, but these numbers are closely guarded and unavailable for scrutiny. They were able to obtain similar data from the University of California Davis for 1979. The black-white difference was 271 SAT points and the Latino-white difference was 211 points. The Asian mean at Davis was, atypically 54 points below the white mean, the largest difference the authors found. Of note, was the fact that, nationwide, in 1993, only 129 blacks and 234 Latinos had SAT-verbal scores in the 700s compared to 7,114 whites. What is the magnitude of the minority edge in graduate schools? Again, the data is scanty because most law schools hit the LSAT scores of their freshmen class from the public. Only 10 law schools reported in 1977. Of these schools the smallest black-white difference was 2.4 standard deviations, the largest was 3.6 standard deviations and the average for the ten schools was 2.9 standard deviations, meaning that the average black law student was in the bottom one percent of the white distribution. For medical schools, the black-white gap was about the same as it was for law schools, with the average black first year medical student in the 8th to 10 percentile of the white distribution. Latino first year medical students scores slightly better than blacks standing in the 20th to 23rd percentile of the white distribution. Asian scores were slightly better, on average, than whites scoring in the 56th percentile of the white distribution. Applicants to graduate schools other than law and medicine typically take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).The ethnic differences in the most recent year available, 1988, put blacks at the 10th to 12th percentile of the white distribution. Latinos scored somewhat better than blacks being in the 20th to 24th percentile of the white distribution and, as is the usual case, Asians were higher than whites on the quantitative and lower on the verbal GRE. What are the reasons for affirmative action as touted by the liberals who favor these programs? First, considerations of social utility argue that it is desirable to have more minority students getting good college educations so that society may alter the effect of past discrimination and provide a basis for an eventual color blind society To achieve this goal, a relatively large deficit in the minority applicants test scores may properly be overlooked. Second, no matter how personally harmful it is the white applicant who is being unjustly denied a position in a college freshman class, it is relatively minor in the grand scheme of things (achieving a color- blind society). After all, a privileged white with strong credentials and wealthy parents, will get into a good college someplace, although it may not be the college of his choice. So, no real harm is done in the long run. However, these goals do not drive the admission committees at most colleges; rather, the goal is simply to have "enough" blacks and minorities in the incoming class, it's really as simple as that, and they will move heaven and earth to achieve this goal. Meanwhile, white applicants are judged in competition with other white candidates and, with the exception of athletes and those gifted in music and the arts, IQ will most often be the deciding factor. What are the costs of affirmative action? Here is the real question. How much harm is done to minority self-esteem, to whites perceptions on minorities and ultimately to ethnic relations by a system that places academically less able minorities side by side with students who are more capable? Two types of students standout in college, those that seem to be especially out of place and those who stand out because these seem to be especially smart. The fact that 52 percent of black students are in the bottom 10 percent of IQ is obvious to and all serves to strengthen the white students inherent belief that blacks are an inferior race, at least intellectually. This cannot be good for racism in America (my conclusion not the authors). Comment: The Bell Curve was first published in 1995 the pinnacle of affirmative action in American education. Since then it has been in decline at least as it was practiced in the period between 1965 and 1995; but, have no doubt, this unseemly system of reverse discrimination is still with us, although cleverly disguised as something else. For example, preference is now given to those who participate in community service while in high school, a dubious indicator of later success in college. No matter how you slice it, affirmative action runs counter to everything America is supposed to stand for, in particular, equal opportunity for all its citizens. Everyone seems to agree that no one should be discriminated against because of his skin color unless, of course, they are Asian or a white male. If white or Asian these simple tenets of a free and open society simply do not apply in today's America. Finally, the authors of The Bell Curve do not address one of the most important aspects of affirmative action, the production of incompetent professionals who harm the unsuspecting public every minute of every day. This is particularly true in the medical profession where medical schools have been turning out low IQ minority graduates who prey on the unsuspecting public for the past 50 years. I wrote about the negative effects of affirmative action in medicine in my blog Low Pass.