Affirmative Action Strategies -- 2

Yesterday's announcement (2/21/12) of the Supreme Court's agreement to hear a major affirmative action case brings this controversial initiative to the top of the nation's education policy agenda once again. See "Justices Take Up Race as a Factor in College Entry" (NY Times, 2/21/12), "U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Texas Affirmative Action Case" (Diverse Issues, 2/22), "Counting Justices" (Inside Higher Education, 2/22/12), and "Supreme Court Takes Up Challenge to Race-Conscious Admissions at U. of Texas", (Chronicle, 2/21/12).

Perfect Storm

It's possible that the Court's decisions will be narrowly focused, resulting in marginal expansions or restrictions of the use of affirmative action by the nation's colleges and universities. Unfortunately, the stated broader objectives of the plaintiffs in this case make it likely that the Court will be asked to hand down sweeping decisions that may substantially reduce or possibly eliminate the use of affirmative action altogether. If so, this would unleash yet another adverse wind in a perfect storm of rising disadvantages imposed on America's minorities in general, its blacks in particular:

• Rising economic inequality, wherein the rich have grown richer through deregulation, i.e., the nation's top one percent are accumulating grossly disproportionate shares of the nation's wealth and income
• Rising political inequality, wherein the Supreme Court has empowered the rich and super rich to make unlimited campaign contribution to Super Pacs
• Rising educational inequality, wherein the use of affirmative action is severely restricted or banned by the pending Supreme Court decisions

The irony of the source of these adverse winds demands notice: government policies -- legislative and judicial, enforced by the executive. Who would have believed back in 1981 that President Ronald Reagan's dictum would ever again have such powerful applicability to the plight of black Americans, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem" (First Inaugural Address). Fifty years after the federal government banned segregation and promoted equal opportunity in the 1960s, the policies of that same federal government now pose increasingly insurmountable obstacles to the achievement of Dr. King's dream.

HBCUs as Keepers of the Dream

Readers of previous notes on this blog can anticipate my assertion that HBCUs must play a leadership role in the effective use of whatever affirmative action opportunities remain after the Court's decision in the case before it now. As the keepers of the dream, HBCUs must not only ensure that the 10 percent of the nation's black students who attend HBCUs gain access to the benefits of well-designed higher education programs; they must expand their agendas to include oversight of the affirmative action programs offered by non-HBCUs in order to ensure that the other 90 percent of the nation's black students also have access to well-designed opportunities.

To be specific, HBCUs should collaborate to provide collective oversight of the major affirmative action initiatives run by public and private non-HBCUs, especially the non-HBCUs within their own states. We cannot continue to stand by and watch bright, ambitious young black students recruited into compensatory affirmative actions programs that are so poorly designed that the failure of these unsuspecting students is so predictable as to be preordained, failures that will then be blamed on the student victims themselves instead of on the incompetent and/or irresponsible designers of these defective programs.

Perhaps the most critical component of good design is sufficient funding to pay for the additional resources that will be needed for black students to overcome the deficiencies in their preparation. These students are likely to require special tutors and mentors, have access to developmental courses, take longer than usual to graduate, and need more financial aid to cover the costs of their longer enrollments. Nor should affirmative action be too ambitious. For some degree programs, black students whose GPAs and SAT scores are substantially lower than the GPAs and SAT scores of the non-black students may not pose a substantial disadvantage over the course of their four or five years of study. But for other programs, especially the harder degree programs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), such gaps will be insurmountable. For example, the notion of engineering programs admitting black students whose SAT scores are one standard deviation below the average scores for non-black students is a cruel absurdity.

HBCUs should conduct periodic assessments of the effectiveness of the affirmative action strategies implemented by non-HBCUs. Effective programs should be lauded; ineffective programs should be damned. If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, it is all the more terrible when wasted by poorly designed programs wherein such waste is inevitable. Innovations within the effective programs should be identified and disseminated; and the deficiencies of the ineffective programs should be highlighted and discouraged.

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Related notes:

• Affirmative Action Strategies -- 1
• Fight or Flight
• From HBCUs to BCUs 

Black History -- A Personal Note

This being Black History Month, here's a personal addition to the record.

Bad Health and a Bad Fall
Last week, my good friend and mentor --  and a former Dean of Howard University who is now 80 years old and in very bad health because of repeated bouts of heart failure in the last four years -- fell down the stairs to his basement and smashed his skull on the concrete floor. Being a stubborn, rugged individual, he got up, went back upstairs, and tried to ignore the headache that began immediately. He didn't call call for help until two days later, by which time his headaches had become extremely painful.  So I rushed to his house and drove him down to the Emergency Room (ER) of Howard University Hospital.

The CT Scan showed blood on his brain, i.e., a "subdural hematoma" ... to be healed either by time or by surgery ... as in "brain surgery" ... as in the "rocket science" of surgery. After 48 hours of observation, it was determined that additional time would heal the injury; therefore my friend was discharged. Someone else drove him home. I was pleasantly surprised when he called to say how much better he was feeling.

So you can imagine my concern when he called me again two days later to ask me to meet him at the ER because he was being driven back to the ER. The blinding headaches had returned.
 
Brain Surgery
Having worked at Howard University for almost 40 years, I can sing the old school songs as loudly as any 40 year old, drunken alum at a frat reunion, but given a choice for brain surgery between Howard's Hospital and Johns Hopkins, my first choice would have been Hopkins in Baltimore … or Sibley Hospital here in DC, which recently became an affiliate of Hopkins. Howard has a strong reputation in urology and oncology, but I never heard anyone rave about its neurosurgeons ... until this fan letter that I am now posting on the this blog because some really good things aren't supposed to be secrets ... :-)

Surgery was scheduled for 8:30 p.m. By 7:30, the junior members of the surgical team and the anesthesiologist began to file into the surgery intensive care unit (SICU) to chat with my friend and explain the procedure. I was struck by the low key, but unmistakeable professionalism of their demeanor. Yes, this is a big game, but this is what we do. You understand? This ... is ... what ... we ... do.

At about 8:05, the surgeon arrived -- hereafter referred to as “Dr. Good Hands” ... which, as I learned the next day, is what some of the senior nursing staff call him. Dressed in a black leather jacket, Dr. Good Hands rolled into the SICU like a Rock Star, exuding confidence, checking with his team, with his patient, and with me -- shaking my hand with a powerful grip that instantly assured me that my friend’s skull and brain would be cut precisely where this doctor's Good Hands intended to cut, but no more and no less than was absolutely necessary.

Three hours later, my friend was wheeled from the operating room back into the SICU, where I watched him sleep peacefully for about half an hour, just to be sure that everything had gone as well as it seemed to have gone.
 
On the Road to Recovery
I'm posting this note a few days later and my friend's recovery is still on track. His headaches are gone and, as far as I can tell, his mind is as incisive as ever, perceiving all manner of verbal nuance as keenly as before. His recovery gives me great relief because he's such a good friend and because his recent health has been so incredibly bad. Did I mention that I've driven him to the ER more than 10 times in the last four years? Indeed, given my aged friend's incredibly bad health, if I were a religious man I would swear that his recovery from the fall and from the required brain surgery was a miracle. But I am not a religious man, so his recovery fills me with immense Black Pride for the world class surgical skill that made his recovery possible.

Thank you, Dr. Good Hands. 

Yes, we can. Yes, we can! Yes! We can!!!!! ... :-)

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Related notes:    

• Fight or Flight

Why are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part III

Declining Market Share

Relentless financial pressure from the continuing Great Recession ensures  continuation of the long-term decline in the percentage of black American students who attend HBCUs. Within a few years the HBCU share will drop below 10 percent. So I return, once again, to the question that I have addressed a few times before on this blog: "Why are HBCUs still needed?"

I begin this effort where my last left off, with the assertion that HBCUs have to let go of their historical justification. In a hyper-modern, fast moving economy, nobody cares about what any kind of institution has done in the past. So yes, one more time, let's all stand up and loudly cheer, "All hail the glorious contributions that HBCUs made to black higher education in times past!!!" OK? Now, back to reality. Looking forward, the existential challenge is brutally focused: "What can HBCUs do for all black American college students right now and in the foreseeable future?"

We have to be concerned about all black students, not just those enrolled in our own institutions; otherwise we doom ourselves to increasingly marginal positions as the market share of HBCUs continues its inexorable decline. Indeed, HBCUs should have no legitimate future in an integrated society that lived up to the historic commitment to equality won by the Civil Rights Revolution in the 1960s ... except for the sad facts of the actual record since the Revolution that makes their continuing existence an absolute necessity.

The Promise and Failure of Integration

I can remember asking myself back in the tumultuous 60s, how long it would take to close the most significant gaps between black and white America, and I can remember persuading myself that forty or fifty years, at most, would be sufficient. Why? Because I was absolutely certain that the biggest gaps in black and white achievement had the same root cause: segregation. Segregation systematically assigned the best opportunities to whites, and left us blacks with little or nothing. So I was certain that it would take no more than fifty years of integrated equal opportunity, two generations, to render obsolete the historic roles of the black colleges and universities, mostly located in the newly desegregated South.

I was certain that the beloved institutions that had educated so many prominent black Americans would no longer be needed because black Americans would find "better" opportunities for higher education at the better funded, integrated colleges and universities located throughout all of the nation's fifty states.  Once the inequities within the nation's broken system of higher education were repaired, I was absolutely certain that, given sufficient time, the system would automatically produce equal outcomes, especially with substantial boosts from initiatives that greatly expanded access to these better educational opportunities, such as President Johnson's Affirmative Action programs. Fifty years, two generations, was surely a sufficient amount of time.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. Our situation improved dramatically in the 70s and 80s. But somehow we got stuck in the 90s and society began to roll sideways. Gaps in the academic achievements of blacks and whites have become persistent and profoundly disturbing. To be sure, substantial progress was made, so the glass became half full ... but for too many black students throughout the land, the promise of the 60s is still a dream deferred because for them the glass is still half empty. So the vast majority of our black students now attend integrated colleges and universities, but their retention rates, graduation rates, and GPAs are also substantially lower than their non-black peers. And our best and brightest, our "Talented Tenth", are not pursuing degrees in STEM, finance, and other complex fields as intensively as the best and brightest non-black students, degrees that would launch them on careers that offered higher pay, higher prestige, and greater opportunities to use the black power of their higher status to help other black students follow their pioneering paths to success.

Twelve years into the New Millennium, I find no reason to continue to blindly trust that the "invisible hand" of the desegregated American system of higher education, correction, the desegregated systems of American education at all levels, will automatically develop more effective teaching methods that will enable black students to overcome their residual historic handicaps and thereby close these persistent gaps in academic achievement. And even when more effective methods are identified, I can no longer blindly trust that our current systems of education will automatically allocate the resources required to ensure that these more effective teaching methods will be disseminated throughout all systems down to all of the classrooms wherein black students are enrolled -- not even with substantial support from government programs or with the well intended and well funded assistance from the Gates, Lumina, and other enlightened philanthropies. To the contrary, the discouraging record of the last two decades compels me to anticipate that things are going to continue to drift sideways ... and possibly downwards. Many will benefit, but most will not.

Keepers of the Dream

Unless ... unless ... unless an extensive network of institutions makes it their collective mission to boldly assert a collaborative leadership role in the identification and dissemination of teaching methods that are more effective for all of the black students who are currently enrolled everywhere. Now let me think. Does our society have any institutions that are dedicated to providing black Americans with the best possible opportunities for higher education? Hmmmmmm ... :-)

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Related notes:

• Affirmative Action -- 1
• Affirmative Action -- 2
• The White Man's Trick Bag
• A Black Student Is a Black Student Is a Black Student
• Fight or Flight
• From HBCUs to BCUs
• Why are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part I
• Why are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part II
• Why are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part IV
• The HBCU Community as a National Laboratory
• HBCU Survival and Success

Affirmative Action Strategies -- 1

Not all affirmative action programs are the same, nor should they be. Unfortunately, when affirmative action programs are discussed in the media, in policy forums, and even in scholarly publications, the significant differences among these programs are often denied and/or glossed over. As a first step, I suggest that it's useful to distinguish between programs that are based on diversity strategies vs. those based on compensatory strategies.

Diversity Strategies
When a college or a university employs a diversity strategy, it seeks to recruit students from groups that are underrepresented in its current student body; but it does so by recruiting members of these underrepresented groups whose  academic aptitudes and preparation are comparable to the students currently enrolled.

• For example, in its earliest decades Harvard University was a regional institution that recruited most of its students from Massachusetts and its neighboring states in New England. Over time, Harvard diversified geographically by recruiting students from other states in other regions of the country and eventually from other regions of the world. As its curriculum diversified, it recruited students with aptitudes for the new disciplines. And though it began as an all-male institution, by the end of the twentieth century it had diversified by gender to the point where its female students outnumbered its male students.
  
• Of course when Harvard diversified with regards to blacks and other minorities, its goal, again, was to recruit minority students who were academically indistinguishable from its majority students (except during an unfortunate, but brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s). So the reader will not be surprised to learn that the U.S. Department of Education's College Navigator Website reports that the six year graduation rates for the cohort of Harvard freshmen who enrolled in 2004 were as follows = (White, 97%) (Black, 97%) ... In other words, Harvard's 600 black undergraduates were academically equal to the other 9,400 undergraduates when they entered, so they graduated at the same rates  as the others. Note that the graduation rates for other minorities were also similar: (Native American, 100%); (Hispanic, 97%); and (Asian American, 100%).

Achieving diversity that subsequently yields equal performance requires higher recruitment costs up front, costs that are affordable by affluent, highly selective private institutions like Harvard. However, such cost differentials would be difficult to justify at public institutions where there would be understandable pressures to invest those additional funds in more scholarships, enhanced science labs and other facilities, and more competitive salaries for faculty.
 
Compensatory Strategies
But even if the governors and the trustees of public institutions could be persuaded to invest the extra funds required by diversity strategies, they would encounter insurmountable barriers that are the inescapable consequences of centuries of previous mistreatment of the nation's minorities: there aren't enough academically equal minority students to go around. How could it be otherwise? As President Johnson declared in his historic speech that introduced the compensatory strategy that is most commonly associated with the term "affirmative action" today:

"In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope ... But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates." 
            President Lyndon B. Johnson,  Commencement Address at Howard  University, 1965

In other words, a diversity strategy can only be employed by a fraction of the nation's colleges and universities. If the nation is to provide opportunities for higher education to all minority students who have the intellectual aptitude to benefit from such opportunities, most of its colleges and universities will have to employ "compensatory" strategies, i.e., strategies that recruit students who have comparable intellectual aptitudes but have deficiencies in their prior academic preparation. 

Our colleges and universities must recruit these students with a firm commitment to provide them with sufficient compensatory resources after admission that will enable them to overcome their initial deficiencies, resources such as developmental courses, tutors, mentors, and study groups. Access to these additional resources will enable the minority students to master the missing fundamentals as quickly as possible, move into the mainstream, and graduate with qualifications that are comparable to the qualifications of non-minority students with respect to the pursuit of graduate studies or entry into the work force. Note that compensatory resources are not required by the academically equal students recruited by diversity strategies. In other words, diversity programs incur additional costs in their recruiting processes; whereas compensatory programs incur additional costs after their minority students are admitted.

• Some minority students will only be marginally less prepared than their non-minority peers; hence they will have minimal need for compensatory resources. Such lightly compensatory cases could be regarded as modified  diversity plays.
  
• But other minority students will have substantially less preparation than non-minority freshmen; hence they will require substantially greater compensatory support and should be expected to take substantially longer to complete their studies if they are to become as qualified as non-minority students for graduate studies or entry into the work force. Of course, their substantially longer enrollments will also require substantially greater financial aid to cover the additional tuition, books, fees, food, housing, and other living expenses during the additional time required for them to complete their studies.

Not all compensatory programs are the same, nor should they be. On the one hand some institutions have higher standards across the board than other institutions; and the courses in some fields of study are "harder" than the courses in other fields within the same institutions. In other words minority students will need more compensatory resources if they are admitted to more selective institutions; and they will need more compensatory resources if they major in more difficult programs , e.g., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). 

When Compensation Fails
I submit that inadequate design is the root cause of the perceived failure of many compensatory affirmative action programs, i.e.,  the so-called "mismatch problem."  It's not just a matter of money. Even if compensatory programs could be run for free, there are practical limits to the size of the gaps in prior academic preparation that compensatory initiatives can overcome. For example, when I read about engineering programs in selective universities that admit black students whose SATs are more than one standard deviation below the SATs of the non-black freshmen in these programs, I have to shake my head in anger and wonder as to why these institutions are posing such insurmountable challenges to their black freshmen.

STEM programs, but especially the programs in engineering, provide the biggest challenges to institutions implementing compensatory affirmative action strategies. Their sequences of prerequisite and co-requisite courses are more tightly prescribed than in most other undergraduate programs. Hence failure to master the content of the early sections of some courses will lead to failure in later sections of the co-requisite courses; and failure to master pre-requisites denies admission to the later courses in a sequence. And, yes, these programs are more difficult, i.e., their work loads are generally heavier than in most other programs.

Therefore minority students who have substantially deficient preparations on entry will either require substantially greater natural aptitude for more difficult subjects or access to more intensive compensatory resources ... or they will find it necessary to transfer out of engineering into "easier" programs or drop out of school. The good intentions of the designers of such compensatory programs are only a first step. The proof is in the performance. High rates of transfers or high rates of failures should wave bright red flags. Rather than blaming the victims -- the minority students who transferred out or flunked out -- these institutions should be demanding that the designers of their compensatory programs revisit their flawed designs.

A second explanation is more insidious: racism. More than three years into the President Obama's Administration, it will hardly be news to anyone reading this note that racism survived his election in 2008. When it comes to more difficult fields like STEM, the labs and IT resources of HBCUs may not be as extensive as those found at some of the wealthier non-HBCUs, but racism is never a factor in HBCUs. Their abundant supply of black role models and black mentors ensures that black students are never made to feel that they can't master difficult subjects just because they are black.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for non-HBCUs. Therefore higher-than-expected transfers or drop-outs from STEM and other difficult majors should also raise bright red flags that at least some of the students who transferred or dropped out did so because of their perceptions of racism within those departments, departments wherein black instructors and black mentors are usually few and far between. Perhaps the cruelest irony emerges when poorly designed compensatory strategies are applied to the most difficult undergraduate majors, e.g., engineering, that demand the strongest academic aptitudes. The mismatched enrollment of black students whose aptitudes are beneath this threshold may reinforce stereotypical notions about the "inherent inferiority" of all black students among the program's non-black students and among the program's non-black faculty. These fallacious notions may then be applied to the best and brightest black students, students whose intellectual capabilities are every bit as high as those of their non-black peers.

Note: The distinction between "diversity" and "compensatory" strategies was first proposed by Maya A. Beasley, PhD, in her senior honors thesis at Harvard University in 1997 in the Department of Sociology under the supervision of Professor William Julius Wilson. Her recent publication, Opting Out, Losing the Potential of America's Young Black Elite (University of Chicago Press, 2011), provides an extensive examination of the influence of perceived prejudice on the decisions by some of the nation's brightest black undergraduates to transfer out of STEM and other complex disciplines.

Author's Note: The immediate stimulus for this essay was the following report that was posted on one of Duke University's Websites, "What Happens After Enrollment? An Analysis of the Time Path of Racial Differences in GPA and Major Choice"

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Related notes:

• Affirmative Action Strategies -- 2
• Fight or Flight (revised)
• Earnings Lost by Opting Out of STEM
• The Paralysis of Racism
• Crossing the Finish Line at HBCUs