“The Unintended Consequences Of Affirmative Action”

A new book to be published next month by Harvard University Press, INCREASING FACULTY DIVERSITY: THE OCCUPATIONAL CHOICES OF HIGH-ACHIEVING MINORITY STUDENTS, concludes that affirmative action, not discrimination, is primarily responsible for the small number of minority professors. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (link requires subscription) reports that the book, by Stephen Cole, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is so controversial that two of its sponsors, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Council of Ivy Group Presidents, are distancing themselves from it.

The result of a five year study that included a survey of over 7600 undergraduates at selective institutions and in depth interviews with over 100, the book argues that because of affirmative action minority students too frequently enroll in institutions where they are not able to perform as well as non-minority students, and their resulting lower grades discourage them from pursuing academic careers.

“Because of affirmative action, these African-Americans … are admitted to schools where, on average, white students’ [SAT] scores are substantially higher,” the authors write. “Not surprisingly, in this kind of competitive situation, African-Americans get relatively low grades.”

For example, among African-American students in the sample who scored 1300 or higher on the SAT, only 12 percent of those attending liberal-arts colleges and 28 percent of those in the Ivy League had GPA’s of A- or better, compared with 44 percent of those at state universities and 55 percent at historically black institutions. The obvious conclusion is that, without affirmative action, black and other minority students would go to less-prestigious colleges — where they would earn better grades and be more likely to pursue graduate degrees.

The book also notes that “a chief argument for diversifying the professoriate — to provide more role models for minority students — doesn’t hold up.”

In his study, Mr. Cole found that role models in general have relatively small influence on students’ interest in becoming professors. What’s more, he found, a role model’s race and gender made virtually no difference to students. “Apparently African-American male students are no more influenced to select academia as a career by having an African-American role model than by having a white role model,” says the book. “These data cast serious doubt on the validity of one of the arguments used to support racial preferences in the hiring of college and university faculty.”

The article suggests that the book addresses the question of whether minority students might avoid academic careers because they can make more money elsewhere.

One of the study’s most surprising findings is that high-achieving minority students are just as likely as high-achieving white students to be interested in the professoriate. About 10 percent of college seniors in the sample from each racial group identified “university professor” as the profession they were most likely to pursue.

But the researchers found that, for minority students, undergraduate grades got in the way of those aspirations. Only 19 percent of African-American students had GPA’s of A or A-, leaving just 65 black students with top grades in the sample of 1,518 who selected academe as their most likely career. Forty-three percent of white students, 40 percent of Asian students, and 27 percent of Hispanic students earned GPA’s of A or A-.

The book thus seems to claim that the lower grades deflect minority aspirations away from academic careers, but it’s not clear from the article whether the lower grades actually present a barrier to graduate school admission. That is, racial preferences in graduate school admission may well remove that apparent barrier.