Texas, in replacing affirmative-action preferences in public-college admissions with a guarantee of acceptance for students in the top 10th of their high-school class, appears to have hurt the graduation prospects of lower-ranked minority students who ended up shut out of its most-selective higher-education institutions, according to the findings of a study recently published in the Economics of Education Review. The study by Kalena E. Cortes, an assistant professor of higher education at Syracuse University, found that the mid-1990s admissions-policy shift was followed by drop of 3.3 percentage points in the six-year college graduation rates of black and Hispanic students with high-school class rankings between the top 10 and 20 percent, and a 4.2 percentage-point decline in the graduation rates of such minority students with high-school class rankings lower than that. The study charted similar declines in the freshman-year retention rates of such students, leading Ms. Cortes to challenge the “mismatch hypothesis” argument that affirmative-action preferences harm minority students by placing them at colleges that they will have trouble getting through.
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4 Responses to Texas Admissions-Policy Shift Hurt Lower-Ranked Minority Students, Study Suggests
amcneece - August 9, 2010 at 4:31 pm
This article raises more questions than it answers. Is the drop in graduation rates of minority students a drop at all Texas universities? Are fewer minorities graduating because fewer are admitted? If minority students are being shut out of the “most selective” institutions and being diverted to the “less selective,” does that mean the the less selective have higher graduation standards, less financial assistance, or what? A little more analysis of this report would have been helpful.
22261984 - August 9, 2010 at 4:38 pm
Roger Clegg, Center for Equal Opportunity: There would seem to be a lot of variables that might account for this apparently small decline. More fundamentally, in adopting its Ten Percent Plan, Texas was not “replacing affirmative-action preferences”; it was just exchanging a system of overt preferences (that had been declared unconstitutional) for a more disguised one (that is, one that was facially neutral but still designed to achieve particular racial results rather than simply selecting the best qualified students). It will take more than this to undermine the commonsense appeal of the mismatch hypothesis: Students who attend schools where their academic qualifications are on par with the rest of the student body will in general do better than students who go to schools where they have lower academic qualifications than the rest of the student body.
walrus - August 9, 2010 at 9:14 pm
I guess the question is: Is it better to track kids from lower-ranked high schools into lower-ranked colleges in order to preserve their self-esteem and boost graduation rates, even if it guarantees low-quality graduates. Or is it better to give students from lower-ranked high schools the opportunity to attend the best schools where some may soar, even if it means more will not graduate? I think Ms. Cortes makes a mistake by trying to debunk the mismatch hypothesis rather than challenging the deployment of that “commonsense” hypothesis in the first place. It’s a bogus (or worse) argument wrapped in a phoney and patronizing rhetoric of concern. It is nothing but another way of saying, “they should stick with their own kind. It’s for their own good.” If college is all about students feeling comfortable with who they already are and then giving that identity a ranked credential after four to six years, then there is no place for an education worthy of the word.
rickinchina09 - August 10, 2010 at 1:23 pm
We also do no favors to students of color by lowering the bar in terms of National Merit scholarship and cut-off SAT scores for college admission. It should come as no surprise that a Black or Hispanic student with a lower GPA and lower SAT score will be more likely to struggle in the most demanding academic settings. Yet those on a relentless quest for diversity at all costs conveniently overlook this reality.