Some Disparaging Words About “Parity”

One of the more significant intellectual shifts of recent history concerns the related conceptions of fairness and equality. Formerly, those principles were thought to require non-discriminatory equal opportunity. Now, however, at least in the most influential segments of our society (higher education, the media, large corporations), they have come to require — actually, to mean — racial and gender proportionality.

This new notion of fairness and equality has become so pervasive as to be unnoticed, taken for granted, assumed to need no justification. We have seen this new development most clearly, and most often, in the sphere of “diversity,” which has replaced the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of race with the necessity to discriminate on the basis of race .

The acceptance of these notions is not limited to “diversity,” however, as can be seen in a new report on minority enrollment just publiched by the American Council on Education. The number of minority students has more than doubled since 1980,

[b]ut “there is significant progress yet to be made” in achieving educational parity among all races, according to William B. Harvey, the author of the report and the director of the council’s office of minorities in higher education.

Even if discrimination had been completely eliminated, according to this view, there would be no sleep for the weary until “educational parity,” i.e., proportional representation, is achieved.

Almost as an aside, it may also be worth noting the flexible definition of “minority” that holds sway in higher education these days:

The report says that in 2000, 4.3 million African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, and American Indian students attended college, up from just under 2 million in 1980.

Where progress is being proclaimed, Asians count as a minority. But when David Ward, president of ACE, says “We recognize that we still have a big mountain to climb,” he’s no longer thinking of Asians as a minority.

Interestingly, the “disparity” has been growing, not shrinking.

In 1980, there was relatively little difference among the proportions of white, African-American, and Hispanic students attending college; 31.8 percent of white high-school graduates age 18 to 24 were enrolled in college, compared with 29.8 percent of Hispanics and 27.6 percent of African-Americans. By 2000, the proportion of white students attending college had grown to 44.2 percent, but the growth in African-American and Hispanic students’ participation rates lagged behind, Mr. Harvey said, at 39.4 percent and 36.5 percent, respectively.

In other words, what Mr. Harvey and the ACE find significant here is not so much the growth in minority college attendance but that the rate of increase “lagged behind” whites and (as we see several paragraphs later) Asians, of whom there were “more than three times as many students attending college in 2000 as did so in 1980.”

Why such negativity at what is basically good news? Because what is now of foremost importance is parity; what is most to be detested is disparity.

Nor is this overweening concern limited to race and ethnicity.

The report also revealed what it called a “striking” difference in the growth rates for college enrollment among Hispanic men and women. Since 1980, the number of female Hispanic high-school graduates attending college has increased by more than 10 percent, while male Hispanic high-school graduates are attending college in only slightly higher numbers than they did 20 years earlier, representing an increase of just under 3 percent.

The gender gap for African-American students is the greatest among the three major minority groups, according to the report. African-American women outnumbered their male counterparts nearly two to one in 2000.

If I may, I would like to interrupt all this handwringing, mappping of future mountains to climb, etc., over these “gaps” and “disparities” with a simple question: what exactly is wrong with “disparities” that are not the result of discrimination?

Disparities that are caused by discrimination are offensive, and should be elimintated. But exactly why are disparities that are not caused by discrimination a problem, especially a problem that we should spend time, effort, and money to cure? Is it really in the national interest to divert scholarship money from, say, a poor Asian-American kid who wants to be a chemist or engineer in order to lure a Hispanic or black kid into those fields? Should we raise the bar for black and Hispanic women in admissions and lower it, i.e., provide “preferences, for black and Hispanic males? What would NOW think of that?

What if, heaven forbid, some of the “disparities” are actually the result of informed choice? Don’t we have enough real problems — poverty, bad schools, ill-trained teachers, etc., etc. — without all this attention to problems that strike me as very problematical?