Inside American Education (23 page)

Not all black students reacted like this young man—and not all white students reacted like those in his class. Many black students organized to make demands on campus authorities, some sought—and received—special favors from professors,
³⁶
and many whites increasingly resented the double standards in academic performance and personal behavior.

Just as these patterns were not confined to law schools, so those who warned against the policies behind such patterns were not all white. Among the early warnings was one in an article appearing in the
New York Times Magazine
of December 13, 1970, by a black professor named Thomas Sowell:

When the failures of many programs become too great to disguise, or to hide under euphemisms and apologetics, the conclusion that will be drawn in many quarters will not be that these were half-baked schemes, but that black people just don’t have it.
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Such conclusions are now part of the “new racism” spreading across college campuses from coast to coast.

PATTERNS VERSUS DOGMAS

One of the remarkable characteristics of many discussions of the statistical “representation” of various minority group students or professors on elite college campuses is an
utter disregard
of the size of the pool of minority individuals who meet the normal standards of such institutions.

Typically, students attending elite colleges average 1200 or above on their composite SAT scores, or 600 each on the verbal and quantitative portions of the test. As of 1985, fewer than 4,000 black, American Indian, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican students in the entire country scored 600 or above on the quantitative SAT and fewer than 2,000 scored 600 or above on the verbal SAT. The specific racial and ethnic breakdown of minority students scoring 600 or above on the verbal or quantitative SAT was as follows:
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If all these 3,929 minority students with quantitative SATs of 600 and above went exclusively to the 58 colleges, universities, engineering schools, and military service academies with composite SATs of 1200 and above, that would still average out to fewer than 70 minority students per institution. Based on verbal SAT scores, the average would be fewer than 35 minority students per institution. Yet, among schools in this bracket, Harvard has not admitted less than a hundred black students alone in any given year since 1970.
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Stanford has had more than a thousand black, Mexican American and American Indian students combined on campus at a given time
⁴⁰
—or about 250 per class—this at an institution where 88 percent of the students admitted in 1990 had composite SAT scores above 1200 and nearly half had composite SATs of 1400 or above.
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Many other elite institutions have likewise had several times as many minority students as the average number with the same median test scores as their other students. Clearly, these elite institutions are going well beyond the pool of minority students who match the qualifications of their other students.

Asian Americans represent a radically different situation. More Asian American students scored above 600, on either verbal or quantative SATs, than these other four racial or ethnic groups combined. As of 1985, 3,572 Asian Americans scored 600 or above on the verbal SAT and 11,903 scored above 600 on the quantitative SAT.
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Although Asian Americans are a minority—as are Jews, Armenians, and many other groups—they are seldom, if ever, given preferential admission. The term “minority,” as it is used in academic admissions policy, is neither statistical nor social. It usually refers to such groups as must be preferentially admitted if they are to approach the same share of the student body as they are in the general population.

Sometimes qualifications are simply not mentioned. At other times, they are dismissed as arbitrary, irrelevant, or biased barriers. But, as the case of the preferentially admitted law students indicates, qualifications make a difference in the end results. When the same pattern was found among the preferentially admitted sons of Harvard alumni, then the effect of lower admissions standards are clear, even if those admitted are predominantly affluent and white.

In those very rare cases where an institution releases its students’ test scores by race, the double standards are blatant. At the University of Texas Law School, for example, the admissions office uses an index incorporating test scores and college grades. The median index among black students admitted was lower than the lowest index with which any white student was admitted. There were 81 whites turned down in 1990 with a higher index than all but one of the black students admitted. Only two white students were admitted with an index as low as the median index among Mexican Americans admitted.
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At Georgetown University Law School, similar data were revealed by a student who had worked in the admissions office. In a sample of more than a hundred white students accepted, none had an LSAT score (new scale) less than 39, while the median LSAT scores for blacks admitted was 36.
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The student who revealed this was, predictably, denounced as “racist” and his expulsion was demanded. Equally predictably, the dean of the law school said that “median LSAT scores for a group tell nothing about what individuals can and will achieve”
⁴⁵
—this despite empirical studies to the contrary.

Having admitted minority students mismatched with the other students and with the institution’s own academic standards, many colleges and universities have been surprised by results which were not only predictable but almost inevitable. While there have been variations from campus to campus, the general pattern of these results has included minority student academic problems, social problems, and militant political activism centering on demands for special admissions, special programs, and special hiring of minority faculty. Most of the more prominent colleges and universities have not only acceded to most of these demands but have also promoted double standards—both academic and social—for minority students.

Academic Double Standards

The mismatching problem was dramatically demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the average black student scored in the top 10 percent, nationwide, on the mathematical portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test—and in the bottom 10 percent at M.I.T. Nearly one-fourth of these students failed to graduate at M.I.T., and those who did had significantly lower grades than their classmates.
⁴⁶
Such wholly needless failures among highly qualified students was the price of M.I.T.’s having a racial “representation” that would enhance its image and keep hundreds of millions of federal dollars coming in, without being jeopardized by charges of discrimination based on “under-representation” statistics. As for the other students at M.I.T., the
Wall Street Journal
reported “a widespread if rarely stated perception that black students somehow lack what it takes to make the grade.” Nor is this perception lost on the black students at M.I.T. “It’s not blatant,” one of them said, “It’s like you’re the last person picked as a lab partner, or someone will lean over you and ask the person sitting next to you what the professor said—like you wouldn’t have understood it.”
⁴⁷

M.I.T. is not unique. At Berkeley, where black students’ average composite SAT scores of 952 were above the national composite average of 900, though well below the Berkeley average of 1181, more than 70 percent of the black students failed to graduate.
⁴⁸
Again, these were
artificial
failures, on an even larger scale than at M.I.T., in the sense that these black students’ academic qualifications would have been more than adequate for the average American college or university, though not adequate for competing with Berkeley’s white students who scored 1232 or Berkeley’s Asian students who scored 1254.
⁴⁹

Despite a rising number of blacks admitted to Berkeley over the years—the great majority under “affirmative action” standards—fewer blacks graduated in 1987 than graduated eleven years earlier.
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What was accomplished by admitting more black students and graduating fewer? The benefits are far more obvious for Berkeley than for the students. The racial body count enabled the university to proclaim that its student body is “wonderfully diverse” and that “we are excited that the class closely reflects the actual ethnic distribution of California high
school graduates.”
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It also enabled Berkeley to continue receiving vast sums of state and federal money without being distracted by the inevitable legal and political complications which an “under-representation” of blacks or Hispanics would have entailed.

The U.S. Air Force Academy likewise sought racial “diversity” through double standards. A 1982 memorandum on Air Force Academy stationery, with the notation “for your eyes only,” listed different cut-off scores to use when identifying possible candidates for the Academy from different racial ethnic groups.
Composite
SAT scores as low as 520 were acceptable for blacks, though Hispanics and American Indians had to do somewhat better, and Asian Americans had to meet the general standards. For athletes “lower cut-offs” were permissible.
⁵²
Given that composite SAT scores
begin
at 400 (out of a possible 1600) a requirement of 520 is really a requirement to earn only 120 points out of a possible 1200 points earned. Given that the general composite SAT average for students admitted to the Air Force Academy is 1240,
⁵³
a special cut-off score of 520 composite for black students is an invitation to mismatching.

At the University of Texas, where the SAT scores of black undergraduates averaged more than 100 points below the SAT scores of white undergraduates, the grade point average of black freshmen was 1.97, compared to 2.45 for white freshmen.
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Their graduation rates have been about half that of whites.
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Many other colleges and universities keep such information under lock and key. At Stanford University, for example, voluminous statistics are published on all sorts of other things, including numerous body-count statistics on minority students and faculty,
⁵⁶
but
not
information on the academic qualifications and performances of minority students. Even statistics on the percentage of minority applicants who are admitted have been characterized by an official Stanford publication as “so confidential that we cannot even discuss trends.”
⁵⁷
But wherever hard data have been available from other colleges and universities, these data have shown time and again, at otherwise disparate institutions, that test scores cannot be dismissed as “irrelevant” without disastrous results for minority students.

The issue is not whether minority students are “qualified” to be in college, law schools, etc., but whether they are systematically
mismatched
with the particular institutions they are attending. In the Georgetown University Law School case which attracted national media attention, the median test scores of the black students was at the 75th percentile
⁵⁸
—higher than the median test scores of all students at many respectable law schools, though lower than the score with which any white student in the sample was admitted to Georgetown. Although the student who revealed the LSAT scores was denounced by
The New York Times
for “an obsession with numbers”
⁵⁹
and was falsely accused by
Chicago Tribune
columnist Clarence Page of claiming that black students were “unqualified,”
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his real complaint was about double standards. The larger issue is the impact of such double standards—both academically and socially.

Dogmatists have attributed the high attrition rates of minority students to racism on white campuses,
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rather than to the mismatching indicated by test scores. However, if one goes beyond dogmas to evidence, the role of supposedly “irrelevant” academic criteria becomes clear: While only 22 percent of the Hispanic students preferentially admitted to Berkeley had graduated five years later, more than half the Hispanic students admitted under normal academic standards had graduated. Figures for black students were similar.
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If the all-purpose explanation is racism, then why did this racism have such radically different effects on people of the same race with different test scores?

As Professor Clyde Summers predicted long ago, this mismatching problem has not been confined to the top echelon schools. As each tier finds its normal pool of minority students pre-empted by a higher tier, it must in turn pre-empt the minority students who would normally qualify for the colleges in a lower tier. Thus San Jose State University ended up, like Berkeley, with more than 70 percent of its black students failing to graduate.
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The problems of mismatching and artificial failure proceed on down the academic pecking order. Nationwide, 74 percent of black students have failed to graduate, five years after entering college.
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