Crossing the Finish Line, the new book from former Princeton president William Bowen, former Macalaster College president Michael McPherson, and Matthew Chingos, is getting a lot of coverage today. (The Chronicle here, InsideHigherEd here, the Times here). I haven’t read it yet (no review copy, ahem), but it looks very interesting. The authors tracked 94,000 students who entered 21 flagship public universities in the fall of 1999. They found major differences in graduation rates among different student groups, with minority students less likely to finish on time. This is consistent with other research.
Bowen and McPherson have also come out swinging against the so-called “mismatch” theory of why affirmative action is supposed to be bad for minority students. The mismatch theory states that student are ill-served by attending a college that is more academically challenging than they would otherwise have attended, particularly if the students weren’t academically stellar to begin with. Crossing the Finish Line found the opposite to be true: black men who had less than a 3.0 grade point average in high school were more likely to graduate from the most selective flagship universities than from less selective institutions.
They also cites programs at institutions like the University of Maryland–Baltimore County where a combination of high academic expectations and high levels of academic support produce positive graduation outcomes for black students. Unfortunately, such programs are few and far between. Why? They cost money, of course, but lots of things that colleges do cost money. This is a matter of priorities. Why isn’t helping minority students earn degrees more important than, say, fielding a really good basketball team?
I think the answer has to do with the fact that while a lot of people support affirmative action, they don’t all support it for the same reason. Historically, affirmative action was a way to redress past and present racial disparities, to give minority students access to corridors of economic opportunity and power that often begin with selective institutions, and to compensate for the fact that even now, in 2009, minority students are more likely than white students to attend K-12 schools that receive inadequate funding, employ fewer high-quality teachers, and generally provide a lower quality of education.
But as affirmative action was challenged on legal grounds, the justification morphed from the best interests of minority students to the best interests of institutions and the general value of having a diverse student population. The idea was that being exposed to other students from various backgrounds is intrinsically important, even vital, to a college’s educational mission. Somehow, affirmative action became a matter of what’s good for white people.
And while creating a diverse student population requires institutions to put a fair amount of time and effort into enrolling minority students, it doesn’t actually require them to graduate minority students. If what you’re most worried about is making sure that you meet certain enrollment percentages and maintain a certain diverse student mix, it doesn’t make any difference if those students ever actually earn a degree. The tallies are made in the fall, not on the spring graduation stage. And so colleges haven’t spent enough time and resources helping minority students earn degrees.
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5/11/2012 | Kevin Carey talks to Salon about the government's role in rising student debt.
5/8/2012 | Kevin Carey discusses the problem of rising tuition and student loan interest rates with The Nation. 
5/4/2012 | Stephen Burd talks to Education Week about student loan debt and help from Congress.
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Frankly I do not understand how the reviewer of the book can quote a result he apparently likes (oppostion to the mismatch theory) and then devote the rest of the comment to that idea after stating that he did not read the book. Without reading the book, I would definitely shy away from endorsing a result in it because I have NO idea of the quality of the work that supports the result.
Controlling for a student’s GPA doesn’t exactly level the playing field since grading standards vary considerable between schools even when other test scores, like the SAT, are controlled.
Per the post, the authors looked at students with similar levels of high school academic achievement.
The alternate explanation of the data is that elite schools are attracting the few elite minority students and leaving the less capable students for the less selective colleges. Hence the disparity in drop-out effects. Not all minority students are affirmative action benefitting students. So, I’m not sure that the author’s points re afformative action are probative.
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