Asian-American concerns about the disparity between white and Asian admissions were further reinforced in 1990 when the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Education announced that UCLA had given illegal preference to whites over Asians in admissions to its graduate mathematics department.

These issues are complex. In order to understand why some fields of study seem to have been particularly tough for capable Asian-American applicants, factors of applicant abilities, achievement, and demand for admission with the limited supply of places in graduate and professional programs need to be taken into account.

In 1990, 4 out of 100 U.S. graduate school applicants were Asian-American. Graduate faculties admit students and award teaching or research fellowships and assistantships on the basis of academic criteria, letters of recommendation, and promise of future scholarly and research productivity. Because most graduate students receive financial aid and support for their research, admission without some form of financial aid can be tantamount to rejection. Teaching assistantships are awarded to those who demonstrate the academic promise and communication skills needed to teach students in the classroom and laboratory. Asian-American graduate students were reported more likely to receive university financial aid, but less likely to receive government or national fellowships than their peers.

Applicants to graduate schools take a standardized test called the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), which has a quantitative (math) section and a verbal section. Validity studies have found quantitative scores to be the best predictor of performance in quantitative fields. Compared with white GRE test applicants, Asian Americans typically performed better in tests of developed mathematical abilities, less well in verbal tasks. Yet, quantitative scores have generally underestimated non-native Asian test applicants' true mathematical ability, because they had trouble with story problems due to limited reading comprehension. That is, their scores would have been even higher had they understood the questions in narrative problems.

With the exception of three fields (biological sciences, mathematical sciences, and engineering), Asian-American graduate-student enrollment has not exceeded population figures. Some graduate faculties, particularly in the humanities, have recruited low-income Asian Americans as members of underrepresented minority groups. In fields crowded with Asian nationals and Asian Americans, access can be exceptionally difficult. Those who seek graduate studies in the quantitative, scientific fields were more likely to encounter stiff competition from each other and from Asian nationals. By the mid-1990s, it was projected that the number of jobs in science and engineering would be declining in the United States, due to changes in the international political scene: the disintegration of the former Soviet Union decreased U.S. spending on defense, weapons, and related technology, reducing competition for related graduate studies overall. In 1989, about 4 percent of first professional degrees were awarded to Asian Americans. Asian American law school enrollment has increased steadily in the past two decades. In 1989, four out of 100 law school applicants were Asian. Asian-American applicants' typical LSAT scores were slightly lower than the white average and higher than other minority candidates, with differences among Asian-American ethnic groups. Filipino Americans, for cultural and historic reasons, have been more likely to pursue law than other Asian groups. Limited English proficiency deters recent immigrants from pursuing law as a career. For qualified Asian-American applicants with demonstrable communications skills, however, access to ABA-approved law schools has been no more difficult than for their peers. Some law schools, such as the University of California-Berkeley law school, Boalt Hall, have even targeted affirmative action programs to recruit disadvantaged Asian- and Pacific-American students.

Graduate schools of management have also experienced growing numbers of Asian American applicants. In 1990-91, five out of every 100 management school applicants were Asian-American. Their Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT) total score average was 499, compared to the white average of 512. As of the mid-1990s enrollment figures for Asian Americans in graduate management does not suggest barriers to access. Since communications skills are considered important to success in schools of management, limited verbal skills among newcomers remains a problem.

Access to medical school has become increasingly competitive, even for highly qualified Asian-American applicants, because medicine was the career of choice for growing numbers of able Asian Americans in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Admission to medical school is highly competitive. Decisions are based not only on academic records and test scores, but upon letters of recommendation and interviews that use a subjective assessment of personal qualities and prediction of clinical or research performance.

In addition, the field of medicine is undergoing fundamental changes caused by changes in the U.S. health care delivery system. Primary care physicians, rather than specialists will be increasingly in demand. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) changed the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) format to meet these developing needs, since these scores are used by most medical schools as one criterion for admissions.

The number of Asian-American medical school applicants doubled between 1985 and 1991. By 1990, 15 out of every 100 MCAT candidates were Asian-American, higher than the Asian-applicant ratio at other professional schools. Asian Americans scored higher than white MCAT applicants in four out of six areas: biology, chemistry, physics, and science problems. They typically scored lower than white and all other test applicants in reading and quantitative skills. Despite completing more than the prerequisite coursework and achieving higher-than-average GPAs and competitive MCAT scores, acceptance rate of Asian Americans remained low.

Redefining the issue of racial preference:
minority access to higher education.
K. Edward Renner.

"There ain't no such thing as bad luck. Just white folk." (Toni Morrison, Beloved)

The perception among some blacks that individual misfortune is not due to chance, circumstance, or familial "self-destructiveness," but rather a direct consequence of the actions of whites, is not a comfortable thought for most white people. This is especially true for those of us working within the presumed enlightenment of the university. My own discomfort was heightened recently by the discontinuity between my experiences and the statistical reports provided by the U.S. Department of Education in its annual Enrollment in Higher Education. According to these statistics, over the past two decades, annual gains had been made in the absolute number of blacks enrolled in higher education-news that had been regularly reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education with lead-in lines such as "Record numbers of minority students enrolled in higher education...." Yet when I returned to my alma mater seven years ago, I found a state university campus barely different from what I had known as an undergraduate over 40 years ago.

Yes, there were a few more black faces in terms of the absolute numbers, but then, too, there were many more white faces. The campus had more than doubled in size, but the change in the proportion of blacks to whites was hard to detect.

Of course, the explanation for the apparent discrepancy between the annual head count and my subjective experience was the use of absolute numbers. This statistic was not the correct one to use as the standard of progress. Proportionality is the essential issue, as I attempted to demonstrate in my article, "Illusion of Change," in the Fall 1993 Educational Record.

Nor, as the following statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Census show, has the situation changed since then (Current Population Reports, Series P-20, 1996):

* From 1965 to 1994, the number of white college students increased from 5.3 million to 12.2 million. This steady growth occurred even though the number of White high school graduates has been declining since 1984.

* From 1965 to 1994, the number of non-white college students increased from 400,000 to 2.8 million. But over this period, the number of Hispanics and blacks who graduated from high school also increased, due both to their greater numbers in the population and to a steady decline in their high school dropout rate.

* Over this period, the proportion of whites in the general population decreased from 88 percent to 83 percent. Among the traditional 18- to 24-year-old college student age group, the proportion of whites was even lower (80 percent), and continues to decline steadily.

The net result has been that two decades of affirmative action have not resulted in any relative gains for minorities. Only whites have made progress, increasing their access to higher education by increasing their participation rate over this period from 32 percent to 42 percent. (Participation rate is defined by the Census Bureau as the proportion of 18- to 24-year-old high school graduates who are enrolled in college.) Since the early 1970s, minorities have made only modest gains in their participation rate, compared with the progress of whites.

These figures give a peculiar twist to the criticism that affirmative action in higher education has involved a lowering of "standards" for minorities and that people of color are "supplanting" more qualified whites. Rather, if one uses outcome as the criterion, the opposite must be true: standards have been lowered and/or opportunities increased in some way for whites, but not for people of color.

What we need to acknowledge more publicly is that the greater numbers of minority students enrolled in colleges and universities are the simple result of larger numbers in the population. For a start, these annual statistics are now being reported more properly in terms of proportions, not just as absolute numbers. In response to the 1995 report by the U.S. Department of Education, Robert Atwell, then president of the American Council on Education, was quoted as saying, "The gap in participation levels between whites and minorities is a cause for continued concern" (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 1995). But that is not enough, especially in light of recent events.

THE NEW CHALLENGE

My original level of discomfort has deepened now that the informal backlash against affirmative action has received official sanction through legislative actions and the courts:

* the California Board of Regents decided to end affirmative action;

* the Texas appeals court decided against race-based admissions practices at the University of Texas law school;

* a chain reaction of legal and political challenges to minority programs was set off by the decisions in California and Texas; and

* the U.S. District Court of Northern Alabama enforced diversification of some Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) through recruitment of more white students.

These events are destructive, not only because they contribute to the passive misperception that blacks have gained an unfair advantage through affirmative action, rather than more or less holding their own, but also because they are based on an even more dangerous assertive distortion of the truth - that the ideal of "greater social justice" may be achieved through eliminating all "racial preferences," even one that does not, practically speaking, exist.

TABLE 2

NUMBERS OF BLACK AND WHITE COLLEGE STUDENTS ATTENDING
DIFFERENT TYPES OF INSTITUTIONS

Type of Institution                Black Students    White Students

Historically Black Colleges and
Universities (95)                      224,104            40,025

Flagship (373)                         237,806         2,964,238

Urban (514)                            476,557           952,025

Other (2,430)                          446,494         6,467,120

Total                                1,384,961        10,423,408

Flagship and Other                         49%               90%

HBCU and Urban                             51%               10%

Source: U.S. Department of Education. The raw data were reproduced
in the April 28, 1995 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

DE FACTO SEGREGATION

Each year, the U.S. Department of Education collects information on the total enrollment and the percentage of students by race for all 3,412 of the colleges and universities in the United States. (Community colleges are included in this database but are not uniquely identified.) The raw data for the statistical analysis that follows were published as a fact file in the Chronicle of Higher Education (April 28, 1995). The results of the analysis tell the complete national story of a 30-year failure to end segregation in higher education.

There are 95 HBCUs among the 3,412 institutions included in the annual enrollment survey, according to the list provided by The Southern Education Foundation. This handful of institutions accounts for 224,104 black students, 16 percent of all of the black students enrolled in higher education.

The remaining 3,317 institutions enroll a total of 1.16 million black students, out of a total student population of just over 14 million. Thus, while blacks compose 12.1 percent of the U.S. population, and 15 percent of the 18- to 24-year-old age group, they make up only 8 percent of the student population at "non-black" institutions, and 9.85 percent of all students when HBCUs are included.

For this article, I combined those institutions classified by the Carnegie Foundation as Research Universities, Doctoral Universities, and Baccalaureate (Liberal Arts) Colleges I into a category of 377 selective "flagship institutions." Four of the 95 HBCUs fall into this category (4 percent) in comparison with 373 (11 percent) of the 3,317 remaining institutions. A larger proportion of black institutions, and the black students they serve, are in less-selective Carnegie Classifications.

The 373 non-black flagship institutions-which include all of the large state universities with graduate programs - have on the average 6 percent black student enrollments. Thus, selective flagship institutions accommodate a token proportion of black students. In terms of absolute numbers, these selective institutions account for a relatively small number of black students (237,806) - about the same number as the 95 HBCUs, which they outnumber by a factor of four.

The majority (923,052) of black students are enrolled in the remaining 2,944 non-black institutions. But even among these "regular" institutions, there is disproportionate representation. Over half of these institutions have fewer than 5 percent black students, while a small group of 514 accounts for 52 percent of the remaining black students (476,557). Four out of every five white students attend a college or university that has fewer than 10 percent blacks.

Over half of all white students (5.3 million) attend a college or university that has fewer than 10 percent blacks and is located in a city with a population of under 100,000. A small number (39) of urban colleges and universities in cities of one million or greater carry a disproportionate amount of responsibility for providing blacks with higher education. Excluding HBCUs, these urban colleges and universities - only 1 percent of all institutions - account for 7 percent of the black students enrolled in college. Black students there outnumber white students by a 2-to-1 ratio. As city size increases, the average proportion of white students declines, from 82 percent in cities of under 100,000 people to 58 percent in cities of over one million, while the proportion of black students is the exact opposite, increasing from 7 percent to 16 percent, respectively. These differences are statistically significant.

The most likely interpretation of these circumstances is that the 39 urban institutions opened their doors to black students out of economic necessity. Black and other minority students are living literally at their doorsteps, while the local white students are heading for the educational suburbs in record proportions as well as numbers. Census Bureau figures show that since modest gains in the 1960s, blacks have been consistently three times more likely than whites to be below the poverty line.

Simply put, the institutions that enroll 10 percent of all whites enroll 51 percent of all blacks. It is probably fair to suggest that these figures represent a de facto segregation of higher education. Apart from the HBCUs, a few urban centers, and a handful of small second-tier institutions, the rest of the higher education is standing on the sidelines. Most institutions clearly have not achieved the goals of affirmative action.

The recent registration wars to maintain tuition revenues through inflated enrollments and the resulting "dumbing down" of higher education have most likely benefited less qualified white students who could afford to pay; they most certainly are not due to affirmative action run wild.

SOCIAL JUSTICE AS AN OUTCOME

With the decision by the Supreme Court in the summer of 1996 not to review the decision by the Texas court prohibiting the use of racial preferences, the official pressure for affirmative action is over. This retreat from the actual attainment of "social" justice has been carefully wrapped in the judicial robes of "technical" justice to disguise confounding the means with the end.

This kind of error has a long history in the evolution of human rights. Not so many years ago, juries were drawn from male property owners, with a highly selective result in terms of race, gender, and class. This was argued at the time to be both right and fair; only later did we decide that it was not right (just), even though it was "fair" (applied uniformly).

More recently, voter registration lists have been used to ensure that juries for blacks and whites are both uniformly selected and just, even though blacks still may be differentially underrepresented on voter registration lists. This focus on technical justice, as uniformly applying a procedure, can be quite subtle, even appearing as the real thing. After all, is it not a black person's choice (some are now arguing that it is a familial self-destructive choice) not to be registered? Yet, in a community where I used to live, the mobile "outreach" voter registration van went only to the white areas of the city until its schedule of locations was challenged, and then the use of the van was discontinued as being too costly and ineffective. This has always seemed to me to be a form of discrimination through actions taken by white people, rather than a failure to act by black people.

The current debate on affirmative action appears to be based on the same logic. It begins with a political belief in "non-preference" - as a technical procedure, not as an outcome as the higher-order criterion of what is right. If this agenda is successful, it will establish the moral superiority of technical over social justice. The central thesis of Lani Guinier's and Derrick Bell's writings on critical race theory is that the legal process, through confusing the means for justice (procedures) with the ends (consequences), has become a principal contributor to the very problems for which it was intended to be the recourse.

Social justice is an ideal; whether it has been achieved can be evaluated only with respect to actual outcomes. When there is a shortfall from an ideal, it must be addressed through laws and legal precedents that will achieve those ends through acceptable means. The law itself, however, is the tool, and the end result is the criterion for judging whether social justice was achieved.

What the white establishment is doing in redefining the legal standard for racial fairness as procedural uniformity, in the name of greater justice, is in practice harmful to blacks and self-serving for whites. This ignores the necessity of treating social justice as an outcome by confounding social and legal concepts.

SOCIAL AND LEGAL CONCEPTS

At face value, it's an embarrassing picture. Now that the conceptual focus of equity has been shifted legally from a social outcome to a passive legal procedure, both racial preferences and selective associations based on race are being prohibited as wrong. Under the new definition, white advantage is restored through a distortion that in practice protects and extends places for selective association by whites while limiting the counterparts for blacks, such as minority housing.

As an illustration, in response to court-ordered actions in Georgia and North Carolina requiring HBCUs to admit more white students, the online colloquy topic of Academe Today asked the question, "Should black colleges be required to offer special scholarships or take other dramatic steps to attract white students?" Even raising this question requires the mental twist of selective blindness. It requires a failure to see (define) non-urban, non-historically black institutions as "white" institutions. To insist, then, that whites be accommodated in "black places," where blacks are defined as wrongly (selectively) associating with each other, is deemed as uniform fairness, since technically there are no longer separate "white places" for selective association by whites.

Practically speaking, however, there are many white places. Until whites themselves take steps to end the de facto segregation of higher education, for which they are responsible, it is unequal and oppressive to use the power of the legal process to enforce the desegregation of black places while striking down the reverse. This practice is similar to prohibiting both a rich man and a poor man from sleeping under a bridge at night: it only cuts one way.

The choice by whites not to attend HBCUs is not technically defined as a form of selective association of whites in white places. In contrast, the enrollment of 224,104 black students at black institutions is defined as an improper form of selective association. Yet surely more blacks have been excluded from white institutions than whites from black institutions; and a higher proportion of whites have self-selected white places than blacks have self-selected black places, often without any other real alternative.

REDEFINITIONS

It should not come as a surprise to anyone that under the surface the picture is getting ugly. The recent national poll conducted by the Yankelovich Partners for the New Yorker found that three out of every five blacks think their conditions are worsening and that the American dream is impossible to achieve. These beliefs are shared by blacks across all levels of social class.

Blacks are probably correct in these perceptions, yet white academics are surprised and alarmed over the O.J. verdict and the rhetoric and influence of Louis Farrakhan who, in the same Yankelovich survey, was rated favorably by 52 percent of black respondents.

In The New Agenda for Higher Education, I address a wide range of challenges facing higher education, including those of race and culture. Of course, we have an urgent need to find solutions to this and other social problems; but in the search for these solutions, it is important to keep clearly in focus the distinction made by critical race theory between technical and social justice. Doing something "technical" is not necessarily a solution. The starting point of any deliberate action is always determined by how issues are defined. It is the definition that elicits the necessary political support for action and also identifies the range of possibilities. It must be the ideal that dictates the tool and the principle that determines the action, not the reverse.

A new agenda for higher education must begin with our beliefs (our definitions) if higher education is to meet the challenges of race and culture. How can white academics explain the fact that 30 years of affirmative action have not resulted in any gains for blacks relative to whites in higher education, while over the same period the gap in high school graduation has been virtually erased? This can be done in no other way except by acknowledging that how equality has been defined and approached has actually perpetuated discrimination (the outcomes of segregation and restricted access). How can our legal system reconcile the fact that it is whites, not blacks, who are responsible for the racial isolation in higher education with decisions to limit selective associations and educational opportunities for blacks while increasing them for whites? This situation can only be changed by acknowledging the failure of current legal doctrines.

White people, as a starter, could join black people in acknowledging the validity of the belief: "There ain't no such thing as bad luck. Just white folk." From that premise, actual progress could be made toward significant redefinitions, and Louis Farrakhan would be left without an audience. If "white folk" will assume responsibility for the actual outcomes of segregation and restricted access to higher education, there are many legal discretionary actions they can take that will be no more complicated, by analogy, than it would have been to actually send the voter registration bus into black neighborhoods. These efforts also would take no more energy than whites were willing to expend recently to enact state and federal legislation establishing tax exempt prepaid tuition plans - a measure that has enhanced white participation rates. These potential actions include the following:

* Fund HBCUs to flagship standards, at the expense of flagship institutions, if necessary, assuming fixed limited resources.

* Elevate the 514 urban and second-tier institutions that serve 34 percent of all blacks to flagship standards, at the expense of flagship institutions, if necessary, assuming fixed limited resources.

* Stop ordering "black" institutions to find white students, and shift the legal responsibility to the "white" institutions. Have white students stop segregating themselves into white educational suburbs. Start ordering "white" institutions to reconsider their choices and to find more black students, preferably through the very same mechanisms of "special scholarships and dramatic steps" that black colleges have been asked to implement for white students.

* Redirect the considerable amount of money spent on equity programs to support equity outcomes in the form of privately administered black and other minority scholarships, not to support institutions that use their funds to compete for the best minority students rather than to increase access. Use the scholarships, similar to prepaid tuition. to provide black and other minority high school graduates with postsecondary educational vouchers that the students can use wherever they want. These vouchers should be linked to successful academic progress and should apply to all levels of postsecondary and graduate education, through the doctorate. Let institutions use their own resources to compete with each other for these students through lower fees and better recruitment and retention services.

By redefining (seeing) both segregation and restricted access relative to whites as primarily due to choices made by whites through the financial advantages and arrangements available to them, we see that the solution is largely social and economic, not legal. If the handful of institutions that serve blacks were upgraded, then it would not be advantageous for whites to use their financial resources to segregate themselves to the educational suburbs. If blacks and other minority students had financial resources to participate in higher education (with the added incentive the vouchers would carry for academic achievement), colleges and universities could maintain their enrollment levels and tuition revenues without lowering standards and without grade inflating, two means used for extending access and retention rates to whites. These alternative financial arrangements need not cost more than what we now spend, but the savings in social costs and social justice would be far greater.

This article is based on The New Agenda for Higher Education (Temeron Books, Suite 210, 1220 Kensington Rd., NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N 3P5, Canada). K. Edward Renner is a private consultant in the area of institutional change and higher education. He may be reached at K. E. Renner & Associates. 14487 Catalina Circle, Seminole, FL, 33776, erenner@helios.acomp.usf.edu.