How Many II?

In this post last May (which I encourage you to look at now) I discussed what I described as “an angry, anguished essay” in the Los Angeles Times by Franklin Gilliam Jr. complaining about the disgracefully low numbers of blacks admitted to UCLA.

Mr. Gilliam has just come across my post and commented on it, but since the post is now archived and no one will see his comment I am including it here:

Hey All —

I’ve just found your site and find it invigorating. I thought I might add a couple of thoughts to my LA Times piece of last spring:

1. The main point of the piece was to evoke discussion. My concern is that the issue is just not on anyone’s agenda.

2. I’m not sure what the right numbers are but I know they are headed in the wrong direction. Rather than engaging in conventional and non-productive partisan bickering I would propose people of good faith focus on potential solutions. One place to start is with the admissions criteria.

3. I’m not advocating a dimunition of advocacy for AA women (I have a daughter and I want her to have a fair shot too); I am calling attention to a particular problem.

4. A failure to address this problem – whatever the soultions may be – will be a detriment to all of us.

The problem, it seems to me, is not that the problem is not on anyone’s agenda. On the contrary, it is on many agendas. The problem is the solutions are unacceptable to different groups — racial preferences, i.e., holding black applicants to lower standards than others; abandoning racial preferences and judging all applicants to the same standard; lowering standards for all and choosing applicants by lottery; or some combination.

It’s still not clear what Mr. Gilliam’s preferences are. Any comments?

Say What? (7)

  1. KRM November 30, 2004 at 11:18 am | | Reply

    From his point #3, it appears that his position may be largely the classic ‘ubi est mea’ thing. He wants the thumb placed on the scale when the merits of his (or his family members’)applications are considered. Honest, maybe, but it is not a persuasive argument for AA in general.

  2. meep November 30, 2004 at 11:36 am | | Reply

    My thought: what is the goal?

    If the goal is to have more blacks with college degrees, I don’t see that making it too easy to get into college will necessarily promote that goal. I always found it a disgrace that many of those on athletic scholarships never got college degrees. Granted, some were basketballers who left school to go pro, but come on — these guys were probably not on the road to a bachelor’s degree. That’s not why they got the scholarships, and that’s not why they went to college.

    So, what to do? How about get the underrepresented groups prepared for college? In your original post, you noted that Asians make up a disproportionate amount of admissions, compared to California’s ethnic makeup. I would guess that it’s because they’ve been more than adequately prepared for college — not because of any racial discrimination favoring Asians.

    I went to a college in the south where lax admissions standards were applied more to people from rural areas than necessarily by race. Guess what? Many of these people didn’t make it past the first year. But the admin didn’t really care – they just needed their admissions numbers to look good. There were geographical quotas to be filled. (As well as the quota of “first in family to go to college”). These kids didn’t know what hit them when they went to their first college classes. They had done fine in their local high schools, but were totally unprepared for the level of work of college classes. Many of these kids could have done better if they had gone to community colleges for at least a couple years, as a stepping stone on the way to a 4-year university. In my own extended family, quite a few people went that route – some stopping at the associate degree level, and some seeing that they were prepared for the next level.

    So what can the higher education community do? They don’t have much control over the K-12 system, but they do have control over entry into their own system. If there are reasonable standards to get into different levels of colleges, and these are enforced across the board, there’s the incentive to high schools to make sure their students are at that level.

    The California universities could partner up with various junior/community colleges to help craft prep curricula which could let students learn how to succeed in a college environment at a lower level before being slapped up against much higher stakes. I believe some universities in this country already do this, and I think this is a fine way to target particular disadvantaged groups.

  3. TIm November 30, 2004 at 12:11 pm | | Reply

    “I’m not sure what the right numbers are but I know they are headed in the wrong direction”

    There are no right numbers. The right number is a count of individual students that are admitted without any thought of racial preferences. The remaining students will be where they belong.

  4. ThePrecinctChair November 30, 2004 at 4:04 pm | | Reply

    “wrong direction”? What, pray tell, is the right direction? I would assume that it is the direction of free choice on the part of the educational consumer, rather than an artificially achieved and maintained racial balance.

    Is an ever ascending “minority” enrollment the desired result — resulting in an eventual student enrollment that mirrors Spelman or Howard? Or will there be a point at which there are “too many” of “those people” enrolled at the university, with the presumptive need to cap the number of minority enrollees?

    Just some thoughts.

  5. John from OK December 1, 2004 at 7:30 pm | | Reply

    The “right” direction at UCLA is, was, and always will be a win over USC. And all my friends who are OU fans agree, at least for one day.

  6. keto December 3, 2004 at 4:12 pm | | Reply

    meep, that solution makes too much sense to be implemented.

    What are the right numbers? It depends on who you ask. To many, that number is zero.

  7. frank gilliam December 8, 2004 at 7:45 pm | | Reply

    Polemics aside, my preferences are and have been for the past 25 years for the best and the brightest to attend the best Amerian universities. And yes, I believe that campus diversity is good for pedagogy, good for intellectual growth, and good for one’s social development. The problem I have is that many talented AA students are not admitted to UCLA but are admitted to Cornell, Duke, Ohio State, and other good schools. Now I hardly believe that these schools are in the business of lowering standards (and, by the by, it appears that more than a few who post to this sight believe they are the exclusive arbiters of what those standards ought to be). Moreover, I have been teaching at top American universities for over two decades and my experience has been that the minority students who come tour campuses are just as smart and just as clever as any of the others on campus.

    On a more personal note, I am in the process of enrolling my daughter in private middle schools here in LA. She has been at a private elementary and has been taking exam prep courses. Gee whiz, no big surprise, she scored well on the exams and is likely to go to one of the elite schools that, after having visited several of them, make it clear that the advantages for the affluent are so overwhelming that the playing field is on full tilt. My point has to do with the structural inequities that haunt many minority kids in this country. Fixing this is a slow and painful process. And as with the point of my oped, not many people seem to be too concerned about it.

    By the way, I have been conducting focus groups across the country on just these questions as part of a large national research project and the empirical truth of the matter is that not only are these issues not on people’s minds, when they are pointed out folks try like hell to dodge them.

    As far as admissions go, I have seen kids with extremely high scores come to college and not be able to think their way out of a paper bag. Moreover, at the graduate level, we have increasingly raised our criteria for GRE scores and the students have become worse and worse. The proof in the pudding is that they are not nearly as competitive as our old students have been on the job market. Maybe some of the folks who read this site should check out Claude Steel’es work on intelligence testing. Just a thought.

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