Posted: July 19, 2010
7:49 pm Eastern
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=181357
A decade ago, activist Ron Unz conducted a study of the ethnic and religious composition of the student body at Harvard.
Blacks and Hispanics, Unz found, were then being admitted to his alma mater in numbers approaching their share of the population.
And who were the most underrepresented Americans at Harvard?
White Christians and ethnic Catholics. Though two-thirds of the U.S. population then, they had dropped to one-fourth of the student body.
Comes now a more scientific study from Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford to confirm that a deep bias against the white conservative and Christian young of America is pervasive at America's elite colleges and Ivy League schools.
The Espenshade-Radford study "draws from ... the National Study of College Experience ... gathered from eight highly competitive private colleges and universities (entering freshman SAT scores: 1360)," writes Princeton Professor Russell K. Nieli, who has summarized the findings:
Elite college admissions officers may prattle about "diversity," but what they mean is the African-American contingent on campus should be 5 percent to 7 percent, with Hispanics about as numerous.
However, "an estimated 40-50 of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants," who never suffered segregation or Jim Crow.
To achieve even these percentages, however, the discrimination against white and Asian applicants, because of the color of their skin and where their ancestors came from, is astonishing.
As Nieli puts it, "Being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white ... equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1,600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310-point SAT advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points."
"To have the same chance of gaining admission as a black student with a SAT score of 1100, a Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550."
Was this what the civil-rights revolution was all about – requiring kids whose parents came from Korea, Japan or Vietnam to get a perfect SAT score of 1600 to be given equal consideration with a Jamaican or Kenyan kid who got an 1150? Is this what it means to be an Ivy League progressive?
What are the historic and moral arguments for discriminating in favor of kids from Angola and Argentina over kids whose parents came from Poland and Vietnam?
There is yet another form of bigotry prevalent among our academic elite that is a throwback to the snobbery of the WASPs of yesterday. While Ivy League recruiters prefer working-class to middle-class black kids with the same test scores, the reverse is true with white kids.
White kids from poor families who score as well as white kids from wealthy families – think George W. Bush – not only get no break, they seem to be the most undesirable and unwanted of all students.
Though elite schools give points to applicants for extracurricular activities, especially for leadership roles and honors, writes Nieli, if you played a lead role in Future Farmers of America, the 4-H Clubs or junior ROTC, leave it off your resume or you may just be blackballed. "Excelling in these activities is 'associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds on admissions.'"
Writes Nieli, there seems an unwritten admissions rule at America's elite schools: "Poor Whites Need Not Apply."
For admissions officers at our top private and public schools, diversity is "a code word" for particular prejudices.
For these schools are not interested in a diversity that would include "born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower- and middle-class Catholics, working class 'white ethnics,' social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children or older students just starting into college and raising children."
"Students in these categories," writes Nieli, "are often very rare at the most competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League."
"Lower-class whites prove to be all-around losers" at the elite schools. They are rarely accepted. Lower-class Hispanics and blacks are eight to 10 times more likely to get in with the same scores.
That such bigotry is pervasive in 2010 at institutions that preen about how progressive they are is disgusting. That a GOP which purports to represents Middle America, whose young are bearing the brunt of this bigotry, has remained largely silent is shameful.
Many of these elite public and private colleges and universities benefit from U.S. tax dollars through student loans and direct grants. The future flow of those tax dollars should be made contingent on Harvard and Yale ending racial practices that went out at Little Rock Central High in 1957.
Grade Inflation: It's Not Just an Issue for the Ivy League
June 2004
An examination of grade inflation in the context of the larger issue of student engagement at colleges and universities.
A while back, Randy Cohen's regular column, "The Ethicist" in The New York Times Magazine, focused on the evidence that "grade inflation" is a big-time issue. A professor had asked whether he should raise grades because those he was giving were below the departmental average. And last week, students and professors at the University of Oregon debated whether grade inflation exists on that campus in an article for the student newspaper, The Daily Emerald. Even in the UK, theTelegraph questioned whether the university degree in England was "losing its meaning" because of grade inflation.
I've interviewed a number of students on this issue. Here's what I found: Matt Mindrum of Indiana University says he studied a total of eight hours for his four semester exams, while Parvin Sathe of New York University says he studied for 20 hours. Marc Hubbard of Colgate reports putting in about 60 hours, but another Colgate student, Bonnie Vanzler, says she studied for just 12. All four made the Dean's List at their respective institutions.
These days it seems as if nearly everyone in college is receiving A's, making the Dean's List, or graduating with honors. What's more interesting is that college students in general are spending fewer hours studying, while taking more remedial courses and fewer courses in mathematics, history, English, and foreign languages. Students everywhere report that they average only 10-15 hours of academic work outside of class per week and are able to attain "B" or better grade-point averages.
In a study for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, former Harvard Dean Henry Rosovosky found that in 1950 about 15 percent of Harvard students got a B+ or better. Today, it's nearly 70 percent. Last year 50 percent of the grades at Harvard were either A or A-, up from 22 percent in 1966, and 91 percent of seniors graduated with honors. Eighty percent of the grades at the University of Illinois are A's and B's, and 50 percent of Columbia students are on the Dean's List.
If today's college students were smarter or better prepared, that would explain the higher grades, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Over the last 30 years, SAT scores of entering students have declined, and fully one-third of entering freshmen are enrolled in at least one remedial reading, writing or mathematics course, the highest enrollment being in math. According to Lynn Steen, a mathematics professor at St. Olaf College, 80 percent of all student work in college math is remedial.
If they're not smarter or better prepared, perhaps they're working harder? This doesn't seem to be the case either. The assumption behind most college courses is that students will spend two hours studying for every hour they spend in class, but that is rarely the case. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) reveals that not even 15 percent of students come close to this ideal.
George Kuh at Indiana University Bloomington, who directs the NSSE, says that students get higher grades for less effort because of an unspoken agreement between professors and their students: "If you don't hassle me, I won't ask too much of you." Kuh is sympathetic to the plight of many college instructors, who often are responsible for teaching hundreds of students. "College teachers have too many students and not enough time, so it's easier to give good or at least pretty good grades rather than have to explain to an angry student how a grade was arrived at."
Someone ought to tell students how unimportant good grades are once they leave the campus. Grade-obsessed students probably assume that high grades lead to better jobs and more money, things they care about. In 1993, 57 percent of students said that the chief benefit of a college education is increased earning power, and that number has been going up. Thirty-seven percent of students say they would drop out of college if they didn't think they were helping their job chances.
What is correlated with success is what is called "engagement," genuine involvement in courses and campus activities. Engagement leads to what's called "deep learning," or learning for understanding. That's very different from just memorizing stuff for the exam and then forgetting it. As Russ Edgerton of the Pew Forum on Undergraduate Learning notes, "What counts most is what students DO in college, not who they are, or where they go to college, or what their grades are."
Colleges shouldn't be let off the hook either. They should be focused on the "value added" of the student experience. In today's society, the need to educate for understanding—not just grades—has never been more important. It's just as critical in community college as in the Ivy League. What should students be learning, and what kinds of learning matter most? What kinds of teaching and student engagement promote "deep learning"? Can that learning be measured? What is the evidence? As basic as it sounds, few institutions in America can answer these questions with any certainty, even though learning is ostensibly the core purpose of higher education.
Some in higher education are trying to get a handle on what really happens in the classroom. The aforementioned National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) looks at the classroom activity which we know enables significant learning, while the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) directly measures student learning and the "value added" of each campus. Both are challenging ranking systems like those in U.S. News and World Report as measures of college quality.
There is also the issue of educational purpose—whether or not students and faculty have common goals. In October 2002, a report, "Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College," asserted that every student, not just those attending elite institutions, should receive a liberal education, not liberal in a political sense but "liberating," i.e., opening the mind.
In short, rooting out grade inflation by publicly shaming easy graders would be a band-aid, and nothing more. The larger issue is the intellectual life of a campus. It appears that there is still much work to be done to reclaim the priority of undergraduate teaching and learning on our nation's campuses.
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John Merrow, who reports on education for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Frontline for PBS, is a scholar-in-residence at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. A version of this piece appeared in the March/April 2004 edition of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine and a February 2003 issue of USA Today.
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