Discrimination In Top US Colleges

Russell K. Nieli in Minding the Campus discusses a study by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford that details the extent and depth of the racial and social discrimination practiced by America's top colleges.

"Consistent with other studies, though in much greater detail, Espenshade and Radford show the substantial admissions boost, particularly at the private colleges in their study, which Hispanic students get over whites, and the enormous advantage over whites given to blacks. They also show how Asians must do substantially better than whites in order to reap the same probabilities of acceptance to these same highly competitive private colleges. On an "other things equal basis," where adjustments are made for a variety of background factors, being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white (for those who applied in 1997) equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310 SAT point advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points.

The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student's chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database. To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550. Here the Espenshade/Radford results are consistent with other studies, including those of William Bowen and Derek Bok in their book The Shape of the River, though they go beyond this influential study in showing both the substantial Hispanic admissions advantage and the huge admissions penalty suffered by Asian applicants. Although all highly competitive colleges and universities will deny that they have racial quotas -- either minimum quotas or ceiling quotas -- the huge boosts they give to the lower-achieving black and Hispanic applicants, and the admissions penalties they extract from their higher-achieving Asian applicants, clearly suggest otherwise."

The advantage accorded to Non-Asian minority students, even those whose claim to moral reparation for generations of slavery or dispossession is questionable, is well known. What is surprising about Espenshade and Radford's study is the extent of the discrimination against poor, rural and working class whites.

In part, this is a consequence of the indicators used by American ranking organizations. Selective colleges are apparently reluctant to offer places to students who might not take up an offer for financial reasons since this would push down their acceptance rates and yield scores.

But there is more. Espenshade and Radford found that less affluent whites were dramatically less likely to be offered a place in a competitive private college even when SAT scores, a reasonable proxy for general intelligence, and high school grades were controlled for. In addition, they found evidence of serious discrimination against students who were involved in incorrect activities such as ROTC and Future Farmers of America, especially those holding leadership positions. Apparently "feeding the homeless" will boost one's chances of getting into a top private college if it means doling out soup in between starring in the school play and AP English classes but not if means showing an interest in growing the stuff that the homeless eat.

As cognitive skills become increasingly irrelevant to admission into America's best schools, it seems almost certain that US higher education will be less and less able to compete with those countries that continue to recruit those students most capable of demanding college-level work.