The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that a new study by a black think tank criticizes all institutions of higher learning — but especially flagship state universities — for failing to enroll enough black men and failing to graduate enough who do enroll.
The report, “Black Male Students at Public Flagship Universities in the U.S.: Status, Trends, and Implications for Policy and Practice,” was written for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Dellums Commission. Led by former U.S. Rep. Ronald V. Dellums, a Democrat of California, the commission focuses on public policies affecting the health of young African-American men
….
In 2000, black men represented 7.9 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. population, but in 2004, they comprised just 2.8 percent of undergraduate student enrollments across the 50 flagship universities. Thirty of the universities enrolled fewer than 500 black male undergraduates that year. And at 21 of the institutions, more than one of every five black men on campus was an athlete, the report says.
The report concludes (I’m sure this will surprise no one) that the “underrepresentation” of black men is a serious public policy problem and that the institutions themselves are somehow responsible, as reflected in the title of the Chronicle’s article: “State Flagship Universities Do Poorly in Enrolling and Graduating Black Men, Report Says.”
The solution to this problem is, of course, more “affrimative action” specifically for black men and more money for them.
The findings “confirm that higher education is a public good that benefits far too few black men in America,” writes the report’s author, Shaun R. Harper, an assistant professor and research associate at Pennsylvania State University’s Center for the Study of Higher Education.
“Given all of the institutional rhetoric regarding access to equity, multiculturalism, and social justice,” Mr. Harper said in an interview on Thursday, “I just see next to no evidence of those espoused values being enacted on behalf of black male undergraduates.”
I’m not sure what “access to equity” means, since equity itself is a noun meaning, according to my dictionary, “the quality of being fair and impartial : equity of treatment.” But obviously to Prof. Harper and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, equity means something far different — proportional representation. (Even with this definition, however, I’m not sure that there is widespread “rhetoric regarding access to equity.”)
Since money and other resources are finite, any extra efforts aimed specifically at black men will inevitably come at the expense, in part, of black women, who are “overrepresented” among the black students. Insofar as racial preference policies were tweaked to admit more black men, the standards that are already lower for blacks than for whites or Asians would have to be lowered even further. Why would bumping some better qualified black women who want to attend college in favor of some less qualified black men who apparently don’t be good public policy? Should black men be given preferences ahead of Hispanic men as well, or only ahead of Hispanic women?
One of the standard explanations for the fact that blacks need preferential treatment in admissions is that, on the whole, the K-12 schools they attend are not as good as the schools attended by whites and Asians. But don’t black women go to the same schools as black men?
If more black women than black men want to go to college and more are qualified, I don’t think the explanation for the “underrepresentation” of black men is that the colleges “do poorly” by them. Insofar as this “underrepresentation” is a problem at all, the problem lies with black men, not with the institutions to which they don’t apply or whose admissions standards they don’t meet.
This is just too rich.
The reasons that the schools that black men attend are “not as good” are the disciplinary problems of black men and the negative attitude toward education so common among black men. Those same inner city schools seemed to be fine generations ago when they served largely white and Jewish communities.
And, since black men fail in such large numbers in high school, how do you get them into colleges? Simply enroll them although they are doomed to failure?