The Chronicle: 10/24/2003: Closing the Nagging Gap in Minority Achievement

The Chronicle: 10/24/2003: Closing the Nagging Gap in Minority Achievement

POINT OF VIEW

From the issue dated October 24, 2003

Search The Site

Go More options | Back issues

Home News Opinion & Forums

The Chronicle Review Forums Live Discussions

Careers Multimedia Presidents Forum Technology Forum Resource Center Campus Viewpoints Services

Help Contact us Subscribe Manage your account Advertise with us Rights & permissions Employment Opportunities

/r

Closing the Nagging Gap in Minority Achievement

By DEREK BOK

The recent Supreme Court decision upholding race-based admissions offers many reasons to celebrate. Selective universities have received a carefully circumscribed authorization to continue a practice that almost all of them consider valuable; Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has written a clear, well-reasoned opinion; and the University of Michigan has shown exemplary leadership in rallying corporations, professions, and the military to the defense of affirmative action.

Article: Affirmative Action Remains a Minefield, Mostly Unmapped

Printer friendly

Subscribe

E-mail article

Order reprints

Even as they celebrate, however, educators must also ponder the warning that Justice O'Connor added at the end of her opinion: "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." If they are to meet Justice O'Connor's deadline, universities will have to overcome a major challenge: closing the gap in academic achievement and standardized test scores separating black and Hispanic students from their white and Asian-American counterparts. The gap is nationwide, it is substantial, and it has not diminished in the last 15 years.

The task is all the more difficult because most experts attribute the gap to racial differences in child-rearing, preschool preparation, and opportunities for a quality public-school education. Those are not differences that colleges can do a great deal to overcome. Still, much remains that they can do.

To begin with, universities can encourage more research to discover the causes of the gap. According to Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, in their edited volume The Black-White Test Score Gap (Brookings Institution Press, 1998), "Psychologists, sociologists, and educational researchers have devoted far less attention to the test score gap over the past quarter century than its political and social consequences warranted." For example, while most experts cite differences in child-rearing as part of the problem, no consensus exists on exactly which differences are most critical. The achievement gap widens during the school years, but once again, the reasons remain unclear. Over all, as Jencks and Phillips

(1 of 5)11/7/2007 12:56:12 PM

The Chronicle: 10/24/2003: Closing the Nagging Gap in Minority Achievement

point out, "most social scientists have chosen safer topics and hoped the problem would go away. It didn't. We can do better."

Universities can also seek new ways to identify minority high-school students with personal qualities that would allow them to overcome modest grades and test scores and succeed in college. The problem is not, as some liberal critics continue to assert, that minority scores are artificially low because of a cultural bias in the tests. In fact, the reverse is true: Standardized tests consistently overpredict the academic performance of minority students in college and professional school. Even so, tests and high-school records are far from infallible; many minority students can do much better than their prior records would predict. If admissions committees could identify more of those young people, larger numbers of poor and minority students could gain access to selective colleges.

One organization, the Posse Foundation, specializes in working with inner-city high schools to find such students and sending them in groups ("posses") to selective colleges. The students have had remarkably high graduation rates and have often achieved leadership positions on campuses. Not all applicants chosen are from minority groups, nor could such programs be reserved exclusively for them without risking lawsuits by the government and disgruntled majority applicants. Still, many inner-city students with the ability to succeed in college will be black or Hispanic -- and all could give a sorely needed element of economic diversity to selective institutions that find it increasingly difficult to find low-income applicants who can gain admission by conventional standards.

A third step would be to improve the academic performance of minority students during college and professional school. It is well known that the grades of most minority students lag well behind those of their white and Asian classmates. For example, in our book, The Shape of the River (Princeton University Press, 1998), William G. Bowen and I found that black undergraduates in 26 selective colleges finished with grades that placed them in the 23rd percentile -- the bottom quarter -- of their class, and Hispanic students graduated at the 36th percentile. Observing those records, many people assume that they merely reflect the lower board scores and high-school grades that minority students bring to college. Not so. Lower grades and test scores account for slightly less than half of the racial gap in college grades. The remaining difference is commonly described as "underperformance."

If colleges could help minority students overcome underperformance, the class rank of black and Hispanic students would jump to approximately the 38th and the 44th percentiles, respectively. Such improvement would bring many rewards. With the average ranking of blacks and Hispanics rising much closer to the midpoint of the distribution, the academic consequences of affirmative action would seem much less objectionable to critics. More minority undergraduates would qualify for admission to professional schools without the need for racial preference. Finally, as the data in The Shape of the River clearly show, the better

(2 of 5)11/7/2007 12:56:12 PM

The Chronicle: 10/24/2003: Closing the Nagging Gap in Minority Achievement

the grades, the more students appreciate their undergraduate experience and the higher their earnings in later life. That is presumably why Bowen and I found black graduates much more likely than their white classmates to look back on their college careers and wish that they had studied harder.

No one yet knows the precise reasons for underperformance, but the Princeton University sociologist Douglas S. Massey and his former colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania are making progress, as described in their book, The Source of the River (Princeton University Press, 2003). Surveying the experiences of almost 4,000 students entering 28 selective colleges in 1999, Massey discovered little evidence to support one popular theory: that black student culture and peer pressure actively discourage academic success. In fact, the black and Hispanic freshmen in his study were more likely than white students to have had friends who thought that good grades were important; they also began college studying harder than their white and Asian classmates.

Poorer preparation to learn and inferior public schools undoubtedly contributed substantially to subsequent underperformance, but they did not explain all of it. Rather, Massey found significant support for the hypothesis advanced by Claude M. Steele, a Stanford University psychology professor, who argues that minority students often labor under the suspicion that they are intellectually inferior -- or, at least, they think that others regard them so -- and the burden of trying to overcome that stereotype leads many of them to avoid academic competition by persuading themselves that grades are not really important. Massey's survey confirms that minority freshmen with significant doubts about their own intellectual ability are indeed more likely than other students to study less, drop classes, and receive lower grades. Even those with high self-esteem begin to study less and perform less well if they believe that others are stereotyping them, although the effects are much weaker than for minority students with genuine selfdoubts.

Such findings have important implications for colleges, which traditionally place students with academic difficulties in remedial programs. While such programs can help overcome the handicaps of inadequate prior schooling, they may worsen the problem of many minority students by seeming to confirm their fear that they are intellectually inferior, or that others believe that they are. Besides, remedial programs are likely to miss many of the minority students who most need special attention. Underperformance does not necessarily mean failing grades; it may also afflict students who could be getting A's but, instead, are receiving B's. In fact, some evidence exists that underperformance in college is more marked among minority students with the highest test scores. Although those students have the greatest potential for gaining admission to leading schools of law, business, and medicine -- eventually adding much-needed diversity to the pool of future American leaders -- they are not likely to qualify for remediation.

Fortunately, a handful of colleges have created successful programs to combat

(3 of 5)11/7/2007 12:56:12 PM

The Chronicle: 10/24/2003: Closing the Nagging Gap in Minority Achievement

underperformance among minority and other undergraduate students. While the details vary, those programs share common characteristics. All have high expectations for participating students. Not only is there no aroma of remediation; students are made to feel that they have been selected for their academic promise and will be held to high standards. The programs also encourage group solidarity and cooperation, building on earlier findings that studying alone can hamper academic performance. Participants receive enough financial aid to avoid economic burdens that might distract them from their studies. Finally, faculty mentors and successful minority professionals play prominent roles in strengthening motivation and ensuring appropriate help when needed.

Such efforts seem to have been successful in boosting academic achievement, often overcoming underperformance entirely. Unfortunately, however, such programs are still rare. Although almost every college catalog boasts of a commitment to help all students "realize their full potential," few institutions have even made a serious effort to discover whether their undergraduates are performing up to their capabilities.

If colleges did make that effort, they might be surprised by the results. Minority students are not the only ones who tend to fall substantially below the levels predicted by their prior grades and test scores. Recruited male athletes in the major sports also perform well below their apparent ability. So do women in math and the physical sciences. Goodness knows what other groups would turn out to achieve less than their full potential if colleges only bothered to investigate. To have gone this long without ascertaining such important facts seems plainly inexcusable.

In failing to address this problem, colleges, too, are underperforming. Perhaps Justice O'Connor's opinion, with its 25-year timetable, will provide a wake-up call to push educators into doing what they should have been attending to all along. Should this come to pass, the Grutter case may prove to be an even greater boon than any of us could have dared to hope.

Derek Bok is a university professor at, and president emeritus of, Harvard University.

Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 9, Page B20

Copyright ? 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

(4 of 5)11/7/2007 12:56:12 PM

The Chronicle: 10/24/2003: Closing the Nagging Gap in Minority Achievement (5 of 5)11/7/2007 12:56:12 PM

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download