As Peter Schmidt reported in The Chronicle, new research to be presented at the American Educational Research Association next week finds that Americans “see minority students as having much greater advantages in seeking access to college than is actually the case.” The findings appear to suggest that the existence of affirmative action at highly selective institution generates a general (and factually incorrect) sense among whites that minority students are actually more likely to have access to college generally.
The findings come from a paper entitled, “The Blind Side: Americans’ Perceptions of Inequalities in College Access,” authored by Indiana University sociology professor Brian Powell and doctoral students Kristin M. Jordan and Oren Pizmony-Levy. The authors, using data from a 2007 survey by Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, find, as reported by Schmidt, that “nearly a fourth of respondents said qualified students who are racial and ethnic minorities have more opportunity to attend college than others. Just under a fifth said students from low-income families have an advantage over others, and about a tenth said qualified students from middle-class families are better off than others when it comes to college access.”
The actual data on college access suggest a different story. Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl have found that low-income students are underrepresented at four-year colleges even after controlling for ability. In Rewarding Strivers, published by The Century Foundation last year, the authors report that among those students testing in the highest quartile, 80% of the students from the wealthiest quarter of the population attend a four-year college, compared with 66% from the second wealthiest quartile, 51% from the third quartile, and 44% from the poorest quartile. Black students, too, are underrepresented at four-year institutions, although when one controls for class, Dalton Conley finds, “blacks are just as likely as whites to have completed college.”
African-American and Latino students do, unquestionably, have a better chance to being admitted to selective institutions under affirmative-action programs. As William Bowen and colleagues have found, being an underrepresented minority increases one’s chances of admissions to the highly selective institutions they studied by 28 percentage points. They found that students from low-income families, however, were essentially given no admissions preference.
The publicity about affirmative-action programs at highly selective institutions may create a false perception that minority students have greater access to college as a whole. The paper suggests that a “reverse-discrimination sentiment” exists among some Americans. “We believe that the debates regarding affirmative action have played a critical role in people’s views,” Powell suggested to Schmidt, though he made clear that the data were not sufficient to confirm this hypothesis. Earlier research, by Thomas Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, found a negative “spillover”effect of affirmative action policies on white attitudes toward blacks generally. The researchers found that the mere mention of affirmative action in a long list of questions made respondents more likely to express negative stereotypes about blacks than a matched group who were asked about affirmative action only at the end of the survey.
Concerns about “reverse discrimination” may only intensify in coming months if the U.S. Supreme Court takes up a challenge to racial preferences at the University of Texas at Austin. The case, Fisher v. Texas, is currently before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and could create a major problem for the Obama administration if it lands on the Supreme Court’s docket during the election. As a Washington Post poll recently found, working-class whites, who make up 40 percent of the electorate, are already highly skeptical of the Obama administration.
Thus far, Obama has sent mixed signals on the issue of affirmative action. On the one hand, the administration filed an amicus brief supporting the use of race at the University of Texas. On the other, Obama has said that he does not believe his own daughters deserve affirmative action and that low-income students of all races do. As the new Indiana University research suggests, it is probably unwise to dismiss affirmative action in selective college admissions as a narrow issue because segments of the public may read far more into the policy than it actually delivers for beneficiaries.
