Copyright (C) 1999 by the American Educational Research Association.

Court challenges in Michigan, California, and Washington and a new ballot initiative in Florida are likely to draw more attention in the next few months to whether the nation will continue its long-term commitment to affirmative action. In an effort to bring objective, research-based evidence into the debate, a group of 200 legal scholars, lawyers, and social scientists released today a new report that strongly supports affirmative action and diversity programs on college campuses.

The report, "Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education" dispels the misconception that past racial inequities have been adequately addressed and urges the nation’s colleges and universities to support interventions that encourage diversity and counter the effects of racial discrimination. The report argues persuasively in favor of strategies that look beyond test scores in making admissions decisions and that consider race as an important factor for admission to college and graduate education.

"Based on the evidence, Americans are mistaken if they believe that only colorblindness will achieve true equality. We urge the courts of justice and public opinion and the nation’s campuses to open their eyes to the real, tangible, and sometimes positive effects of race on learning. We urge the nation to look at the hard facts and adopt a more inclusive and accurate definition of merit than is common today," says Kenji Hakuta, professor of education at Stanford University and co-chair of the Panel on Racial Dynamics in Colleges and Universities.

The report focuses on four key areas in which the dynamics of race influence higher education policy, practices, and opportunities.

Limitations of Standardized Tests –The public believes that assessments based on merit are fairly precise and scientific measures and any departure from this approach results in unfair discrimination against more deserving candidates. However, according the research, standardized tests are neither fair nor are they comprehensive measures of merit even though they have been used to limit minority participation in higher education.

"The factors that determine merit and capacity for success – a mixture of ability, talent, and motivation, are not measured by standardized tests," the report says. In reaching its conclusions, the report presents law school data indicating that as many as 88 percent of minority law school students who would have been denied opportunity to enter law school based on law school admissions test results were able to successfully pass the bar and enter the profession. Differential performance on standardized tests among racial and ethnic groups, the research says, is attributable to environmental and societal factors that do not reflect a student’s level of achievement nor his or her capacity to achieve.

Race and Views of Fairness – The dominant ideology in the United States is one that espouses a belief in widespread opportunity, individual responsibility for achievement, and an equitable application of justice. According to this dominant ideology, fairness requires treating people as individuals. However, research suggests that race influences social perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors in ways that place members of minority groups at a disadvantage. Studies conducted on unintentional racial biases, group identity processes, group competition, and group dominance motives demonstrate the need for affirmative action. The challenge for future research on diversity in higher education will be to establish how educational institutions can recognize individual merit, while also acknowledging the importance society places on group membership.

The Educational Benefits of Diversity – Racially diverse environments, when properly nurtured, can lead to quantitative gains as well as qualitative gains in educational outcomes for all students. Among other benefits, cross-racial interaction increases students’ acceptance of students from other cultures, their participation in community service activities and in other areas of civic participation, retention rates, overall satisfaction with college, intellectual and social self concepts, and their commitment to the goal of racial understanding. Given the proper institutional commitment, diversity can play a central role in fulfilling higher education's mission to prepare the future leaders of an increasingly diverse society.

Inequality in Access and Opportunity – According to the evidence, low-income and minority children in the United States have significantly less access to quality schooling. Children who live and attend schools in concentrated pockets of poverty are almost exclusively Black, Hispanic, and Native American and are served by schools that have fewer resources, less-prepared teachers, fewer college-preparation courses, and more crowded conditions. Minority students are disproportionately tracked in lower-level courses with limited content, producing a significantly negative effect on their opportunity to learn. Contrary to popular perception, interventions such as Head Start, the TRIO programs, and campus-based support programs for poor and minority students are neither massive nor ubiquitous. Therefore, it is unrealistic to rely on these programs alone to remedy the racial and ethnic inequities in educational access and opportunity that persist today.

The report urges that the nation continue to support much-needed interventions to address past and current effects of racial discrimination. It calls on university admissions officers to take into account the relative intellectual and civic contributions an applicant will make to the university and its broader community and to use broader definitions of merit and multiple ways to identifying talent. These broad indicators, the report says, "produces a more intellectually dynamic university environment than that produced by a reliance on numerical indicators."

Admissions and campus diversity policies should not only consider what the individual can bring to the community, but they should also "reflect the salience and negative consequences of race in our society," the report says. "Recognizing group membership as well as individual merit in the selection process will enhance perceptions of fairness and reduce ambiguity about the extent to which selection was deserved."

The report also calls on institutions of higher education to expand its commitment to diversity to include the composition of student, faculty, and administrative staff, a more inclusive curriculum, and a structured and continuing dialogue on race relations.

The report was written by: Shana Levin of Claremont McKenna College; Jeff Milem of the University of Maryland; William Trent of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana; and Linda Wightman of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

The American Educational Research Association and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University provided the funding for the project.

The report can be ordered from: Daria Witt-Sandis, Panel on Racial Dynamics in Colleges and Universities, Center for the Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity, Building 240, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, (650) 725-8411, and (650) 723-8528 (fax). The text of the executive summary is available in html format at: http://www.stanford.edu/~hakuta/racial_dynamics/conference.htm or http://www.aera.net/reports/dynamics.htm

Editors:
Mitchell Chang
Daria Witt-Sandis
James Jones
Kenji Hakuta

Committee Members:
James Jones, University of Delaware and American Psychological Association (Co-chair)
Kenji Hakuta, Stanford University (Co-chair)
Mitchell Chang, University of Massachusetts, Boston (Executive Director)
Walter Allen, University of California, Los Angeles
James Banks, University of Washington (ex officio)
Willis Hawley, University of Maryland
Shirley Brice Heath, Stanford University
Sylvia Hurtado, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Yolanda Moses, City College of New York
Daryl Smith, Claremont Graduate Center
Claude Steele, Stanford University
William Taylor, William Taylor Law Offices
Ewart Thomas, Stanford University
William Trent, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
Daria Witt-Sandis, Stanford University (Associate Director)

Contributing Authors:
Shana Levin, Claremont-McKenna College
Jeff Milem, University of Maryland
William Trent, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
Linda Wightman, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
 

Primary funding for this project was provided by the American Educational Research Association to Stanford University (Kenji Hakuta, Principal Investigator), with secondary funding by the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University.
 
 

Introduction

American higher education in recent years has become the locus of high profile debate about race-conscious social policy. This focus is fueled by the ever-increasing stakes associated with advanced degrees, a broad public recognition of demographic changes, and a general sense that these goods -- whether in public or private institutions -- need to be distributed in a fair and just manner. Not far below the surface of the policy debates lies a complex tangle of ideologies, histories, and guilt that often interferes with rational analysis of the issues. This book is a somewhat quixotic endeavor, in that it tests the hypothesis that empirical research on the subject can make an important contribution to this highly emotional arena of public policy. The authors are not naïve about the nature of public policy, but as responsible researchers, we are aware of our social obligation to state in as clear a manner as possible what we do know.

With these issues in mind, we embarked on our review of a broad array of the social science literature that addresses the intersection of race and higher education. We discovered in the course of the work that the cumulative knowledge of the social sciences is substantial and consistent. Scientists like to spend much of their time picking on each other’s theories and methodologies, something that they are trained do very well. But when one takes several steps back from these local skirmishes and examines the entirety of the work with the benefit of distance and synthesis, considerable agreement and consensus can be found.

The chapters of this volume address the three major prongs of the diversity debate: fairness, merit, and benefits of diversity.

Fairness. Affirmative action policies are often criticized as being unfair because they give advantages to individuals based on group membership. Fairness arguments are examined in this volume through both empirical and theoretical evidence of persisting inequalities in opportunity and access for different racial groups. In an effort to dispel the common notion that only colorblindness will achieve true equality, the chapters also look at the extent to which racism in various forms is still prevalent among individuals and institutions in the United States, and at how race-conscious policies address racial disparities more effectively than race-neutral ones.

Merit. In order to enhance our discussion of fairness, we explore the need for a broader definition of merit that moves beyond using only students’ test scores and grades as indicators of their capacity for academic success, to looking at broader qualities of leadership, perseverance, and citizenship. Limitations of current measures of merit are analyzed and explained, and a more inclusive definition of merit is presented.

Benefits. Another track in the diversity debate that has been less examined than issues of fairness is the benefits of diversity programs in higher education. This volume pulls together tangible, empirical evidence on the benefits that diversity (in all its multiple forms and dimensions) brings to the individual, the institution and the broader society.

Misconception #1: Past inequalities in access and opportunities that racial and ethnic minority groups have suffered have been sufficiently addressed and no longer require attention.

William Trent, in his chapter titled "Justice, Equality of Educational Opportunity, and Affirmative Action", places affirmative action policies in an historical context by examining past and current inequities in access and opportunities for different racial and ethnic groups. Using a social indicators approach and the metaphor of the education pipeline, the chapter examines this evidence in the areas of K-12 schooling, employment, and access to higher education. The evidence presented by Trent pointedly addresses the fact that race is and always has been one of the most important and salient markers of social distinctions. Therefore, to disregard race or to develop a colorblind approach to societal interpretation is to disregard reality. The social psychological theories of fairness put forth in a subsequent chapter (by Levin) build upon the documentation described in this chapter.

Among the major conclusions provided by Trent are the following:

• Low-income and minority children in the United States have significantly poorer access to quality schooling experiences. As history has demonstrated, aggressive anti-discrimination and desegregation policies alone cannot create equal opportunity for all racial and ethnic groups.

• Although there are many poor white and Asian students, children who live and attend schools in concentrated pockets of poverty are almost exclusively Black, Hispanic, and Native American. Schools that are populated by almost exclusively low-income children tend to have fewer resources, less-prepared teachers, fewer college-preparation courses, and other conditions that negatively affect student learning than do schools populated by students with a diversity of income levels.

• Recent studies have demonstrated that ability grouping and tracking practices result in the disproportionate (and often inappropriate) placement of racial and ethnic minority students in the lowest groups. These long-standing practices have had a significantly negative effect on these students’ opportunity to learn.

• Interventions at the national, state, and campus levels that address under-representation and success of minority groups in higher education have made some progress on improving access and retention of miority students, but much remains to be done. Contrary to popular perception, interventions such as Head Start, the TRIO programs, and campus-based support service programs for low-income and minority students, are neither massive nor ubiquitous. Therefore, it is unrealistic to rely on these programs alone to remedy the racial and ethnic inequalities in access and opportunity that persist in this country.

• Group membership characteristics continue to determine an individual’s experiences and access to opportunities in many ways that have important consequences for academic performance. Whites as a group have historically been afforded many privileges, ranging from explicit affirmative action to informal networks, through which many opportunities are gained. These often unacknowledged privileges, many of which persist today, have resulted in great disadvantages to many minority groups.

Misconception #2: Merit can be defined by test scores.

Linda Wightman, in her chapter titled "Standardized Testing and Equal Access: A Tutorial," looks at the history of standardized test use and the evolution of tests as the principal screening device in determining admission to higher education. Arguments against affirmative action and other race-conscious policies that are intended to diversify university campuses, are predicated on the common public notion that there are ways of measuring merit that are fairly precise and scientific, and that departure from using these tests inevitably results in unfair discrimination against someone who is more deserving. Wightman argues that the tests are far from being infallible and comprehensive measures of merit. While these tests are shown to be statistically sound, policies based on such a narrow definition of merit inevitably exclude students whose qualifications are not consonant with this definition. These policies also create a more homogeneous student body who will be unable to profit from the knowledge and perspectives that a diversity of experiences and backgrounds affords. The following points are the key pieces of evidence used to support this claim:

• The factors that determine merit and capacity for success—a mixture of ability, talent, and motivation—are not measured by standardized tests.

• The correlation of standardized test scores with first year college grades is at best modest.

• The misuse of test scores for purposes beyond which they have been validated have had a systematic adverse impact on minority applicants to higher education. The differences in the performance of black and white test takers are a magnitude of approximately one standard deviation in each of the admission testing programs. Much of this significant difference in performance can be attributed to environmental and societal factors that neither reflect an individual’s level of achievement nor his/her capacity to achieve if given the opportunity.

• Although flagrant item bias and insensitivity problems of individual test questions have mostly been eradicated in the past decade, differential predictive validity of tests exists among different racial and ethnic groups. Although the cause of this differential predictive validity is unknown, its well documented existence puts in question the utility of uniformly considering the test scores of all applicants.

Data from various studies suggest that basing admissions decisions entirely on test scores and grade point averages would substantially reduce the proportion of admitted applicants from select minority groups. More importantly, most minority students who would have been denied admission (if decisions were based solely on numerical indicators) succeeded when they were given an opportunity to participate.

The evidence presented in this chapter supports Justice Blackmun’s opinion in the 1979 Bakke case: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way…In order to treat persons equally, we must treat them differently" (Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke 1978, p. 2806-2808).

The following issues and evidence are discussed:

Despite the decline of blatant racism and most whites’ ostensible acceptance of racial equality and integration, there is a substantial body of evidence demonstrating that subtle and unconscious racial biases still persist with grave consequences for intergroup relations. Moreover, research consistently demonstrates that race influences social perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors in ways that disadvantage members of minority groups.

Evidence of institutional racism has been found in several different domains, including the criminal justice system, banking industry (e.g. housing loans), employment sector, educational system, and the media. Racial inequalities are not reducible to class inequalities; disparities in racial outcomes persist even when differences in socioeconomic standing are taken into account.

Given the current racial status hierarchy and the persistent inequalities in educational access and opportunity that exist (as documented in Trent’s chapter), "colorblindness" will perpetuate the racial status quo. The negative effects on minorities of subtle and unconscious racial biases are difficult to eradicate by mere anti-discrimination policies. Therefore, race-conscious policies such as affirmative action are needed to bring about true equal opportunity.

Misconception #4: Diversity programs benefit only students of color.

The chapter by Jeff Milem, "The Educational Benefits of Diversity: Evidence from Multiple Sectors" addresses the question put forth by Justice Powell in the Bakke decision, that a race-conscious policy is justified if it serves a "compelling goal" by examining a broad literature on diversity. The more traditional view of the role of the university is to enable participants to preserve, transmit and discover knowledge. If this knowledge is considered to be static and absolute, then diversity among the students to whom it is transmitted is unimportant. However, if the goal of transmitting this knowledge is perceived to be the creation of new knowledge, then diversity takes on new significance. In determining their diversity policies, both universities and the communities into which they send their students, must grapple with the following questions: To what extent can students receive a meaningful education that prepares them to participate in an increasingly diverse society if the student body and faculty are not diverse? To what extent will universities be able to address the issues that are central to diverse societies if they do not have adequate representation of that diversity?

This chapter illustrates how research from a variety of disciplines and perspectives that document the value of diversity in institutions of higher education can be used to enhance educational policy and practice. The framework for the discussion centers on looking at the benefits of diversity at the levels of the individual, the institution, and society. The following points summarize some of the benefits that a diverse student body brings to the entire university community and to the community beyond the university walls:

• Cross-racial interaction increases students’ acceptance of people from other cultures, their participation in community service activities and in other areas of civic participation, retention rates, overall satisfaction with college, intellectual and social self concepts, and their commitment to the goal of racial understanding.

• Literature on the effects of school desegregation in grades K-12 shows that participation in integrated school settings at a young age has a lasting impact that leads to later desegregation in college, social settings and careers. Among white adults who attended desegregated schools, desegregation has been found to reduce racial stereotyping and diminish fears of hostile interactions in interracial settings. Conversely, segregated schooling has been found to perpetuate itself among both whites and blacks in college and the work environment.

• Research done on diversity in the employment sector shows that effective management of diversity (gender, race, and age) enhances organizational performance by 1) attracting and attaining the best available talent, 2) strengthening marketing efforts, 3) bolstering creativity and innovation, 4) improving problem solving capacity, and 5) enhancing organizational flexibility. This evidence also indicates that diverse work teams promote creativity and innovation because of the great variation that exists in attitudes, beliefs, and cognitive functioning among people of different races, genders and ages.

• The greater representation of women and people of color in the faculty ranks has been shown to directly and indirectly shape the organizational climates of the institutions in which these faculty members are working. Women faculty and faculty of color are more likely to use student-centered approaches and active learning methods in the classroom, to include the perspectives of racial and ethnic minorities in the curriculum, and to be more actively engaged in conducting research on issues of race and gender. Student-oriented university climates, more than almost any other environmental variable, have been found to produce more positive student outcomes.

There is extensive evidence that points to the fact that minority physicians of all subspecialties are significantly more likely than non-minority physicians to practice in under-served areas and to treat Medicaid patients. The increase in the number of minority physicians that occurred with the advent of affirmative action programs in medical schools has, therefore, substantially improved minority populations’ access to health care.

Conclusions

The review of the research leads to the following compelling conclusions:

• there is clear evidence of continuing inequities in educational opportunity along racial categories;

• test-based definitions of merit are incomplete;

• race is a major social psychological factor that structures American consciousness and social behaviors; and

• racially diversified environments, when properly utilized, lead to quantitative gains as well as qualitative gains (otherwise unattainable in homogeneous environments) in educational outcomes for all parties.

• Interventions that specifically address past and current effects of racial discrimination are still needed to achieve equality of opportunity for all.

• University admissions must operate under an inclusive definition of merit that takes into account the relative intellectual and civic contributions an applicant will make to the university and the broader community, and that accurately addresses the detrimental effects of social and environmental factors on the test performance of racial and ethnic groups who continue to be targets of discrimination.

• In order to be truly equitable and effective, admissions and campus diversity policies should not only consider the individual, but also reflect the salience and negative consequences of race in American society. For example, recognizing group membership as well as individual merit in the selection process will enhance perceptions of fairness and reduce ambiguity about the extent to which selection was deserved.

Colleges and universities that seek to realize the benefits of diversity for all members of the university community and of the broader society must maximize and integrate all dimensions of diversity, including student, faculty, and administrative composition, a more inclusive curriculum, and structured and continuing dialogue across racial and ethnic lines.