Black America made a mistake 25 years ago when we decided to put so much of our political, economic and social capital into integrating the public schools. Are we about to repeat the mistake now with regard to higher education?
The earlier mistake, I hasten to say, was not that we chose integration over segregation; it was that we chose integration over education. We saw two associated phenomena–segregated schooling and poor performance by some black youngsters–and concluded that the former must have caused the latter. From that premise came the question: How can we best achieve integration? It was, a lot of us now believe, the wrong question.
Is our reaction to the dismaying news out of California, Texas and elsewhere goading us into asking the wrong question again?
We look at the carnage resulting from recent laws and court rulings–black enrollments down by 80 percent at Boalt Hall, the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, with a single black member of the freshman law class; law school applications down by 42 percent at the University of Texas at Austin, and undergraduate applications down by 32 percent–and we know something has to be done.
But the question we are asking ourselves–How do we save affirmative action?–may be the wrong question. Wrong pragmatically because, at least in the two most alarming cases, the thing has moved beyond political reach. Texas is bound by a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that race may not be considered even as one factor in college admissions decisions; the ruling, thus, is the law in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi unless and until the Supreme Court decides otherwise. The Supreme Court already has declined to review California’s Proposition 209, which forbids racial preference in admissions.
But it may also be the wrong question for the same reason school integration was the wrong question: because it distracts us from far more fundamental questions.
In the present case, the bedrock question we seem loath to ask is: Why? Why is it that, absent affirmative action, black–and brown–enrollments at America’s elite institutions sink so low?
The old, once-reliable answer–discrimination–seems ludicrously wide of the mark. Two answers seem more reasonable. The first is inadequate recruiting. Perhaps it is true, as some have argued, that many of the top universities don’t know how to spot and recruit talented African-Americans and Hispanics–or how to retain them once they are on campus. The second possibility is that black and brown minorities are disproportionately likely to have graduated from inferior and less challenging public schools.
Berkeley, acting on the first assumption, has redoubled its recruitment efforts. Boalt Hall’s admissions director is visiting more historically black colleges than in the past. Black and Hispanic alumni hosted receptions for prospects in several cities. This outreach effort–which is what affirmative action used to mean before it came to embrace racial preference–seems to be working. Thirty-two blacks have been accepted for the fall compared to 15 a year ago; 60 Hispanics have been accepted, compared to 44 last year. (In 1996, the last year before Prop 209, 20 black and 14 Latino students enrolled.)
To the extent that the second assumption–inadequate public schools–is also true, it raises other questions that deserve more attention than we’ve given them. Is the scheme Texas is now adopting–admitting the top 10 percent of the graduates of any Texas high school–better, and more immune to legal challenge, than special admissions based on race? Is it a good thing for elite universities to recruit minority youngsters who, though bright, score significantly below their white and Asian counterparts? Even if they run a higher than average risk of not finishing? Would many of these young people be better off in schools in the tier just below the elite universities, and those who are now struggling in those second-tier schools in schools just below that?
As we used to point out, many minority youngsters do quite well in college even when their admissions scores suggest they won’t. It was true and no doubt still is. The problem is how to tell which of the lower-scoring minorities will succeed–and what to do about those who don’t. Of Berkeley’s freshmen classes of 1987 to 1990, 84 percent of white students but only 58 percent of black students earned a degree within six years.
Some argue that having more black students on elite campuses–even if they struggle–is a good thing: for minorities, for the universities themselves, and for America. Is it? I don’t pretend to know all the answers. My caution is that we ought to take some care to get the questions right.
