The "equity" crowd swings and misses again.
Colleges are not discriminating against blacks and Hispanics in student recruitment.
“College recruitment tool could reinforce bias.” That’s the headline of a story in the Washington Post (paper edition).
The “college recruitment tool” is the mailings (electronic and paper) colleges send to select high school students. The “bias” is alleged to be against blacks and Hispanics.
The word “reinforce” is misleading. If there’s bias in college admissions — and there is — it’s in favor of blacks and Hispanics. At top colleges, Yale for example, blacks with grades and college board scores below the median of their applicants stand as good a chance of admission as whites in the top 20 percent and Asian-Americans in the top 10 percent.
By discriminating against whites and Asians in this fashion, colleges try to manipulate the process to achieve the bottom line minority representation they want. Ideally, in the case of blacks and Hispanics that’s representation in freshmen classes that approaches their representation among all high school students. Even if that ideal isn’t achieved, colleges still get far greater representation of these minorities than they would if all applicants were judged without regard to race or national origin.
It would seem, then, that blacks, Hispanics, and the “equity” crowd have no legitimate beef with the college admissions process.
But even if a college’s bottom line isn’t adverse to blacks and Hispanics, discrimination against them in any of the steps leading up to the final decision is undesirable. And in theory, discriminatory recruitment could shrink the pool of well- qualified minority applicants, thus forcing colleges who insist on a particular bottom line to prefer blacks and Hispanics with credentials less stellar than would be the case with more robust recruitment.
In fact, though, the Post’s article fails to describe discrimination in the recruitment process. And, relatedly, it’s clear from the article that the recruiting practices it does describe are not causing colleges to lose out on well-qualified minority applicants to any appreciable degree.
What the Post and its sources (“equity” researchers) are complaining about is the way colleges select the students to whom they send recruitment materials. The process usually begins when students take the SAT, ACT or Advanced Placement tests. The College Board gives these students the opportunity to provide it with their contact information. Using this information, the College Board, ACT, and other vendors then create lists that colleges purchase.
The colleges use the lists to connect with high school students through email and brochures. Colleges can ask for lists that are filtered — for example, based on the scores students achieved on tests.
The Post’s sources point to research showing that black and Hispanic students who receive the emails and brochures are much more likely to apply to a four-year college than their peers who don’t.
Of course they are.
The students who get the advertising are ones who (1) took the SAT, ACT, and/or Advanced Placement tests, (2) gave the College Board their contact information, and in light of the filtering many colleges ask for, (3) are relatively high achievers.
In other words, they are students with a demonstrated interest in, and aptitude for, college. Surely, it’s not surprising that they apply to college more often than students who don’t demonstrate interest or aptitude.
The Post focuses on one filter colleges can request when they purchase lists from the College Board. They can ask for students from neighborhoods and high schools where a high percentage have attended college in the recent past. Students who pass through this filter will tend, disproportionately, to be white or Asian, rather than black or Hispanic.
But it’s not discriminatory to recruit in particularly fertile areas. A basketball coach doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race if he spends his time scouting and recruiting at inner-city high schools with teams that are almost entirely black, but largely ignores schools in affluent suburbs with mostly white players.
Just as coaches might reasonably decide to use their limited time to scout and recruit where the best high school basketball players are, colleges might reasonably opt to use their limited recruiting budgets on areas where the students most interested in going to college are.
However, the Post’s article presents no evidence that colleges actually are using neighborhood-based filters to eliminate from their recruitment efforts students living in poor neighborhoods where many blacks and Hispanics reside. In fact, the article supplies evidence that they aren’t. It quotes a researcher who admits that many colleges use the search list device specifically to reach underrepresented students.
Of course they do. We know from their admissions policies that nearly all colleges want blacks and Hispanics to be well represented in the student body. Why would they use a recruitment tool in a way that’s bound to exclude many blacks and Hispanics without regard to their credentials?
The researchers on whose work the Post relies complain that the recruitment process focuses on test-takers. Not necessarily. High school students can get on the College Board’s lists without taking a test.
However, it makes sense for colleges to want to recruit students who take AP exams, the SAT, etc., and who do well on them. If they seek to identify such students through lists they purchase, that’s not race discrimination. It doesn’t even harm blacks and Hispanics as groups because at the end of the process, when the admissions decisions are made, members of these groups are admitted with much lower scores and grades than those of whites and Asians.
Colleges just can’t win with these equity researchers:
Even when colleges use search filters to further equity goals. . .the filters can undermine the effort. The study, for instance, analyzed student list purchases targeting women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) based on a combination of high AP and SAT scores. Those filters yielded lists that largely consisted of affluent, White and Asian students, and disproportionately excluded students of color attending predominantly non-White high schools, according to the study.
The horror! Colleges are recruiting STEM-oriented students who take AP math and science courses, and score well on AP exams and the SAT.
Here’s what the situation comes down to: Colleges are using recruiting devices to maximize the extent to which well-qualified students apply. These devices are neutral on their face and reasonably tailored to fulfill their purpose.
Many are also making special outreach to blacks and Hispanics. But if these students don’t get recruited to the same degree as whites and Asians it’s because (1) they tend not to take AP courses , (2) they tend not to take the relevant tests, (3) they tend not to perform as well as white and Asians on the tests, and/or (4) they tend not to disclose their contact information. It’s within the power of the black and Hispanic student populations to change each of these behaviors.
But colleges aren’t waiting around for these populations to do so. Instead, they are bending over backwards — bending so far as to engage in racial discrimination against whites and Asians — to make sure blacks and Hispanics are well represented among those they admit.
As usual, the equity crowd is waging war against perfectly reasonable standards. As usual, it has no legitimate beef.