Several posts below I posted a long discussion of a new report arguing that the sky would fall if affirmative action were eliminated in college admissions.
A quick Googling would confirm that that study has received a good deal of press attention, most of which offers fawning praise and collegial hand-wringing, but an attentive reader sends word of a particularly egregious example, an article by Kelly Heyboer for the Newhouse News Service. (Actually, upon re-reading, it may be merely typical of the others, but I’ll still use it to launch my comment.)
So, without further ado (ado?):
Surprisingly, the study found eliminating affirmative action would do little to help white students get into top colleges. Their acceptance rate would increase just half a percentage point to 24 percent if race was not a factor in college admissions, according to the study
I won’t even pause to comment on the use of a sentence adverb, “Surprisingly,” except to ask, surprising to whom? Certainly no one familiar with this issue, as one might reasonably expect a journalist for a major news service to be, should be surprised by this finding. Nor, of course, does Heyboer bore us by revealing exactly how many applicants are .5% of all applicants. Is it a small number? A large number? A very large number? Does it matter?
But the biggest dog in this article, as in so many others like it, is the one that didn’t bark. Consider this rather straightforward-sounding summary of one of the key findings of the report:
The study found the acceptance rate for blacks would fall from nearly 34 percent to 12 percent if admissions were colorblind. The acceptance rate for Hispanics would drop from nearly 27 percent to 13 percent.
Now put that together with the required mantra, which follows several paragraphs later:
College officials, including those at [the University of Michigan], argue race is just one of many factors that top schools consider when deciding which students to admit. A person’s skin color is never the sole reason he or she is sent an acceptance letter, they say.
Now do what the reporter did not do: stop and think. According to this study, approximately two-thirds of the black and a little over half of the Hispanic applicants who are now accepted as college freshmen would not be admitted if affirmative action were dropped. Leave aside the obvious point that they could be admitted instead to less selective institutions. That is, in fact, a big point, but much more interesting is this: colleges claim that race is “but one of many factors” they consider in admissions, but take away that “one factor,” leaving all other factors in place and in play, and, as the lede of this article reports, “the number of black and Hispanic students at elite schools would plummet.”
If race is only “one of many factors,” how can that be? You’ll never find out how by reading the press coverage of this report.
Hey, John, what’ve you got against sentence adverbs? I like sentence adverbs.
I love this from the article:
Critics say the ban has hurt Latino and black students and helped Asian-American students trying to get into the University of California.
That’s right, “critics” said that the ban “helped” Asian-American students. Stupid racists, helping people of color.
Last year, Asian-Americans made up nearly 33 percent of the University of California’s fall freshman class and threatened to surpass white students, who made up 37 percent.
That’s right, they “threatened to surpass” white students. The Yellow Peril in action. Sheesh.
The critics certainly seem to like *threatening* whites with the Asian menace. Divide and conquer: both groups benefit from removing the ban so play the more powerful that benefits less (at least percentage-wise) off the weaker group that benefits more.
In fairness to the reporter on the “one of many factors” bit, I don’t think they’re really allowed to be analytical in their stories.
I used to get angry that news reports wouldn’t note things like that, but then I realized more people than I thought are critical enough to catch it on their own.
Michelle:
Hey, John, what’ve you got against sentence adverbs? I like sentence adverbs.
Briefly, some are O.K. Hopefully, you won’t let the one or two good apples in the sentence adverb barrel blind you to the fact that most are rotten. Significantly (and maybe primarily), they make the 17 or 18 of us who care about this issue wince when we hear or read them.
After reading the article, it does nothing to prove harm to minorities. So, blacks and hispanics who would not have been admitted to Princeton can still go to Rutgers, Temple, Suny-Buffalo, etc. I do not see the harm, Especially because under the present system, white and asian kids with higher SAT’s, higher GPA, and stronger transcripts have to setlle for such schools every day.
In fact it is just the opposite superdestroyer. It is the AA system that does harm to their favored minorities by forcing them to compete against better students at the elite universities. If it were conservatives that were demanding that lower achieving Blacks be forced to compete with higher achieving Whites and Asians, the Left would accuse them of being racist.
Richard,
I would totally agree with you if not for the face of massive grade inflation at the Ivy league quality universities and the increased number of “Studies” majors where minorities can be sheltered from the competativeness of their fellow students.
I would agree that many smart minorities are hurt when they end up at Princeton and get a degree in African-American Studies when they could have gone to Rutgers and received a degree in Engineering, Biology, etc.
John,
Briefly, some [sentence adverbs] are O.K. Hopefully, you won’t let the one or two good apples in the sentence adverb barrel blind you to the fact that most are rotten. Significantly (and maybe primarily), they make the 17 or 18 of us who care about this issue wince when we hear or read them.
Very cute.
Seriously (heh!), what’s the objection? The thing that raises my hackles is an adjective used where there ought to be a sentence adverb, as in “Unfortunate, the bus was ten minutes late.” (Poor unfortunate bus!) That particular construction seems to be dying out, but it used to be quite common. And it always irritated me, and does still when I do occasionally come across it.
But properly-used sentence adverbs? I suppose they can be over-used, and they’re rather too much of a convenience, so can be a prop to sloppy writing, like many other grammatical tools. Still, I don’t see how anyone could find them positively wince-inducing. (But then I’m the sort of person who doesn’t in the least mind starting a sentence with a conjunction, yet will drag a sentence into contortions to avoid splitting an infinitive. People wince at different things, and the causes are mysterious.)
I would agree that many smart minorities are hurt when they end up at Princeton and get a degree in African-American Studies when they could have gone to Rutgers and received a degree in Engineering, Biology, etc.
We don’t have degrees in African-American Studies at Princeton. It’s a “program,” not a department, which means you can’t get a degree in it. You can get a certificate, but your degree must be in a traditional department like History, Sociology, Anthropology, Politics, etc. (Cornel West, for instance, is a Religion professor at Princeton, not an AAS professor.)
Of course, your underlying point is correct: all degrees are not created equal. If someone were trying to stigmatize blacks and other minorities, they couldn’t do it better than creating academic ghettos — word used intentionally — for “black studies” and the like. In the old days, they had separate schools for blacks and whites; blacks rightly protested. So then they crated separate tracks within formerly white schools for blacks. Separate admissions policies, separate college officials, separate dorms, separate departments.