If there's one thing I've consistently stated here on N2P, it's that affirmative action at the college level is not only unfair, but ineffective. When AA policies are in place for college admissions, failing public high schools are off the hook for allowing students to pass through 12 years of schooling without gaining the skills needed for college.
Now, Jay Greene and Greg Forster say the same thing, only at length, and much more elegantly:
Think of the K-12 educational system as a pipeline: Students enter the pipe in preschool and, if all goes well, flow all the way through and out the other end into college. But some students "leak" out of the pipeline by dropping out of school or failing to acquire college-ready skills. And when it comes to minority students, the pipe is currently so leaky that only a trickle of those students flow into college. Expanding affirmative action policies and financial assistance is like opening the spigot at the end of the pipe wider: It's beside the point if the pipe is leaking badly. We can beef up affirmative action all we like and it won't increase the flow of minority students into college, because the K-12 system just doesn't produce enough college-ready high school graduates.
For students to be able to attend virtually any four-year college, they need to graduate from high school, have a set of required courses on their high school transcripts and demonstrate basic literacy. The shocking reality is that fewer than one in five minority students has passed these three hurdles and is thus "college ready."
According to Green and Forster's numbers (taken from the US Census), there were approximately 218,000 minority students in 2000 who (a) graduated from high school, (b) passed a literacy exam, and (c) took college preparatory courses. But in that same year, 244,000 minority students were admitted to four-year colleges. The numbers refute the claim (made by affirmative action supporters) that AA remains a necessity for some hypothetical large body of qualified-yet-overlooked minority candidates. If anything, the numbers suggest that all qualified minority students, and some who are not qualified, are admitted to college (my guess is there are plenty of "non-minority" admittees who are underprepared as well).
The only strategy that can meaningfully improve minority representation in higher education is to improve the quality of the K-12 education system so that it produces more college-ready minority students. We might disagree about how the K-12 system can best be improved, but we should stop wasting our energies on heated debates over affirmative action and focus them on the source of the problem. Unless we fix the leaks in the K-12 education pipeline, no higher education policy can possibly improve minority opportunities to attend college.
Posted by kswygert at January 12, 2004 09:16 PM