Baron Davis, a point guard on the Golden States Warriors, is a former basketball star at UCLA who is worried about the decline in the number of black students at his alma mater and with former UCLA football player Brendon Ayanbadejo has started a new organization to do something about it, according to this article by J.A. Adande in the Los Angeles Times. What they propose to do — “funding inner-city programs and involving UCLA’s extensive alumni network in awareness and mentorship programs” — seems fine. Some of their ideas, however, are air balls that miss the rim so far they endanger fans in the bleechers.
Note, for example, how either Ayanbadejo or Davis (can’t tell from the way the article is written) responded to data compiled by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports that showed that “only half of the 65 schools in the [NCAA] tournament graduate more than half of their African American basketball players.”
I have less of a problem with that than I have with African American students not getting to elite colleges in the first place. It’s much more important to ensure equality of opportunity more than equality of outcome….
Just getting exposed to the minds and the resources at a place such as UCLA is an advantage, even if a player leaves early to go to the NBA (as Davis did after his sophomore year) or a student drops out. College isn’t just about getting a diploma. It’s about learning. It’s about forming lifelong connections.
My first thought is that this is a rather, er, unconventional view of the tension between equality of opportunity and equality of results, but then it occurred to me that those who favor racial preferences in college admissions have been implicitly acting on this theory for a generation. How else to explain the fact that they were and have remained blissfully untroubled by the high rates at which those preferentially admitted students fail to graduate while they froth apoplectically at the prospect of eliminating preferential admissions?
This is Adande’s second piece on the size of the black student population at UCLA in recent weeks. Based on the following sentence in this column, I imagine his previous column decrying Prop 209 generated some feedback:
“It’s the postgraduate pipeline that really makes the difference between UCLA and most other schools in the UC system, which is why the argument that African American students can simply enroll in other schools doesn’t hold up.”
I surmise that this statement meant that he may have had people responding to his last piece that since Prop 209 the black graduation rate has actually increased system-wide. But after seeing John’s comments on the most recent column, I realize that to Adande, education and graduation of secondary importance.
college degrees have consistently declined in value since the 80s with the effect that, nowadays, graduating from a top school (even with average grades) is much, much more beneficial to the graduate than graduating from a no-name school with good grades. this is adande’s point.