By CAMILLE Z. CHARLES, MARY J. FISCHER, MARGARITA A. MOONEY and DOUGLAS S. MASSEY
The use of race-sensitive criteria in admissions continues to be controversial, and critics have leveled three basic charges against it.
For one, opponents say the practice constitutes reverse discrimination, lowering the chance of admission for better-qualified white students. They also contend that it creates a mismatch between the skills of minority students and the abilities required for success at selective institutions, setting those students up for academic problems. And they claim that it stigmatizes minority students as less than fully qualified, which results in demoralization and substandard performance, when in fact those students may be well qualified.
The first criticism has not stood up to empirical scrutiny. In fact, studies show that affirmative action generally has had only small and insignificant effects on the admission prospects of white students. The second criticism, or "mismatch hypothesis," also has not been supported by hard data. For example, in their research for The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (1998), William G. Bowen and Derek Bok found that black students who attended selective institutions were more likely to graduate than their counterparts at less-selective institutions.
The third argument, however, merits further consideration. If white students believe that many of their black peers would not be at a college were it not for affirmative action and, more important, if black students perceive whites to believe that, then affirmative action may indeed undermine minority-group members' academic performance by heightening the social stigma they already experience because of race or ethnicity. In addition, we have uncovered a fourth possibility: the idea that affirmative action exacerbates the psychological burdens that minority students must carry on campuses. Those who feel threatened because they have internalized negative beliefs about their group will find that they feel even more so if they themselves fall below the institutional norm for SAT performance. Likewise, those who feel they are representing their race every time they are called on to perform academically will have a heightened sense of responsibility, or what we call a "subjective performance burden," when their group's average SAT score is known to be well below that of other students at the institution. Given the plethora of guides that publish institutional average SAT scores, a person from a minority group may well be aware that his or her score is below the usual level for the institution. In addition, students can observe a gap between groups either directly, because the data are often published online or by a college rating service, or indirectly, because group differences can sometimes be apparent in class.
We have based our views on extensive research that we've conducted to gauge the effects of affirmative action on academic performance. We have used SAT scores to measure the impact of affirmative action not because they are ideal, but because they offer a practical method that can be applied across groups and institutions. (One must devise some operational measure by which students from extremely diverse backgrounds can be compared, and despite vocal criticisms, the SAT remains a staple of the admissions process.) In essence, we take the critics at their word and reason that if admissions standards have indeed been "loosened" to facilitate the entry of underrepresented minorities, then we would expect a gap in SAT scores between minority-group members and other students.
To measure affirmative action at the individual level, we computed the difference between the SAT scores earned by specific black and Latino students and the institutional average at 28 colleges and universities. According to our calculations, 84 percent of black students had test scores below their institutions' averages, compared with around 66 percent of Hispanics. Such results assume that minority-group SAT scores fall below the institutional average because admissions officers trade off test scores against other criteria associated with their desire to recruit more minority students — the essence of affirmative action.
Full Story: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i29/29a02901.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
No comments:
Post a Comment