Skipping Evidence in Favor of Conclusions

Tonight's Chronicle of Higher Education features a story of great policy relevance. Under the headline "Study Disputes Claims That Preferentially Admitted Students Catch Up," author Peter Schmidt describes the results of an unpublished paper by Duke researchers as calling "into question other studies that play down the academic difficulties initially experienced by the beneficiaries of race-conscious admissions." The paper, Schmidt says, has been marshaled by critics of affirmative action as they seek a Supreme Court ruling knocking the policy down.

My own reading of the paper is that drawing such conclusions from this work, and highlighting them with such an inflammatory headline ("preferentially admitted students"?) is grossly inappropriate. While the authors document (1) racial/ethnic variation in the relationship between initial academic preparation and later major-switching and (2) that major-switching accounts for the diminishing racial/ethnic gap in GPA during college, there is absolutely no evidence presented that the use of race in college admissions is the driving factor behind such switches.

But I can see where the reporter got such ideas. The authors frame the paper from page 1 in terms of the debate over racial preferences. There were other options, including framing it in terms of unpacking the significant fluctuation in students' choices of college majors over time (e.g. as documented by Jerry Jacobs in Revolving Doors), and the implications of that fluctuation for labor market outcomes. Or they could have thought in terms of the debates over student learning, and how this may help us understand racial differences in rates of learning, such as those laid out in Academically Adrift. Instead, the authors open with a discussion of how affirmative action is "promoting access" to the "less prepared,"suggesting that such admits would need to "catch up" over time. This is the language of affirmative action critics, not researchers who recognize that the literature on testing and admissions hardly indicates that students who are admitted through the use of some form of preference may not be less prepared at all, and thus have no reason to catch up.

The first finding presented in the paper is that even though they start "behind" white students at Duke (behind as proxied by their first semester GPA, which is hardly solely a function of intelligence or preparation), black and Hispanic students make steady gains in GPA over time. One could look at this and think many things-- for example, perhaps over time minority students learn the "system" and figure out how to reap its rewards. (For the record, even white students do this, and have for decades--read about the "grade point average perspective" in Howard Becker's classic Making the Grade.) Or maybe black students benefit disproportionately from mentoring and other attention on campus. There are many possible explanations, but the authors turn to two in particular--variance and course selection. And in the end, they hang their hats on major migration--black students catch up on their GPA by switching to easier majors, and this is because they are disproportionately weaker students. Controlling for switching explains almost all of the black/white convergence in grades, say the authors. And so, they write, "Attempts to increase representation [of minorities] at elite universities through the use of affirmative action may come at a cost of perpetuating under-representation of blacks in the natural sciences and engineering." There you have it: we oppose affirmative action because it hurts black people.

Ok, let's say it together: COME ON. There are no alternative explanations proffered by these very fine academics (one of whom trained at UW-Madison)? And seriously, issuing such a policy proclamation based on a study of one single, highly unusual private university?

It is easy to come up with many, and next to impossible for the authors to rule them out. So black students have lower first year GPAs than white students, and this explains why they'd be more likely to switch majors over time. This can be true even WITHOUT affirmative action. Only if we hold a very high bar that says "we will only admit students above this bar so that they will not change majors" would this be stopped. Moreover, have the authors considered the potential that Duke's affirmative action program is the problem-- not affirmative action itself? As Doug Massey and his colleagues have pointed out, programs of all kinds that admit students but fail to adequately support their success are bad programs-- period. That does not mean the admissions practice itself is bad-- it means the university is hypocritical. It wants the glory of claiming diversity without devoting sufficient resources and effort required to ensure that all who are admitted fully succeed.

These are but a few conjectures- and deciding on which is right is not my job. My point is straightforward: this paper begins and ends with a political agenda, and it's being used as such. There is no more reason to think the patterns observed are attributed to the use of race in Duke's admissions decisions than to discriminatory practices in the allocation of university resources to its students, or to inadequate teacher quality on the part of its professors in some majors. Who knows the reason? Certainly not these researchers.

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What the Nass Hearing is Really About

Tomorrow's hearing on equal opportunity practices at UW-Madison is but one such action being taken by organizations and individuals around the country seeking to erode access to higher education.

Writes Adam Liptak in today's New York Times, "diversity is the last man standing, the sole remaining legal justification for racial preferences in deciding who can study at public universities." And diversity is under attack. According to Liptak, a case involving the University of Texas is likely to reach the Supreme Court sometime next year. That case will challenge the right of universities to focus any part of their admissions efforts on ensuring a racially diverse campus.

Why? Because some people, even well-educated ones, even Yale law professors whose work I regularly cite, fail to see its value. Says one, "The idea of racial and ethnic diversity altering the kind of conversation that goes on in the classroom is so overrated. Any experienced, conscientious teacher, regardless of race, could and would get on the table any of the arguments that ought to be there, including ideas normally associated with racism or other analogous experiences not personally experienced by the teacher."

Really? And how widespread is that sort of highly culturally competent teaching among today's professoriate?

Folks, Steve Nass may be an outsider in the Wisconsin Legislature, but he is far from alone in his opinions. Tomorrow's hearing has national implications. Please watch it with our students at the Memorial Union. Please discuss it with your friends. The educational opportunities of millions of children across this nation are at stake.

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Wisconsin's Economy Needs Affirmative Action

On this, Republicans and Democrats throughout Wisconsin can agree: the state's economy is in the tank. We need to find ways to create more jobs and grow our paychecks, and fast.

An overwhelming body of evidence shows that state and local economies are greatly enhanced by educating their workforces. Employers build and expand businesses where they can find educated talent and thriving communities where their employees can live. An under-educated population in a landscape with significant pockets of poverty does not make for a hospitable place to do business.

A college education pays off. Sure, more people are going to college, and that makes some people worry that the returns will diminish. But just look around: the unemployment rate of college graduates may be up slightly, but it's still half that of workers without college degrees. You have to like those odds. The chances that you will end up mired in poverty, dependent on government benefits, unable to send your own kids to college--these are greatly reduced if you complete at least a year of college.

This is common sense, and people know it. What they may not realize is that a college education pays off MORE for the people who are least likely to get it. Those kids who we might consider "long shots" when it comes to earning a college degree face the worst labor market prospects if they don't attend college-- so going to college gives them a huge boost. And they benefit even more if they not only attend college, but attend where with the resources and advantages improve their odds of finishing -- places like UW-Madison.

Data proves this: the best way for the people of Wisconsin to maximize the contribution of a college education to their economy is to ensure that the kids who are the "long shots" get to attend its most selective universities. Yes, those individual kids will benefit-- but even more importantly, we all will. The returns to helping them avoid poverty and become gainfully employed taxpayers accrue to the whole state.

This is why affirmative action works for Wisconsin. It helps extend educational opportunities to those who will reap the biggest benefits, which spill over to us all. Without some attention paid to a student's ability to benefit from college, selective colleges would admit only the "sure things"--students who will actually benefit the least. Sure not all of the "long shots" will succeed--but large numbers of them will, far more than those who would if they only attended non-selective colleges. And as for the rest of us, working hard and raising "sure thing" kids, we are not harmed by that extra attention to the "long shots" (the idea that we are being "penalized" is a statistical fallacy), and because benefits to a college education acrrue to communities, we are actually helped.

Affirmative action is in Wisconsin's best interest, and it's within our rights. It's time to stand up for a policy that efficiently uses a college education to grow our economy.

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Conservatives Claim Liberals Are Meanies

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Race Matters

There is a robust debate on campus over whether last Tuesday's event at the Doubletree constituted a "protest" (which most seem to agree is appropriate) or a "disruption" of a press conference (which most seem to agree is inappropriate). Even those who disagree with the depiction of students as "thugs" who were part of a "mob" still appear to be concerned that a disruption may have occurred.

What is noticeably absent from the responses is a candid admission that that race matters in how we understand and interpret the events. Let's be frank: a large group of mostly brown folks came into contact with a much smaller group of mostly white folks and it freaked out some of those the white folks.

I was there. First, I was in Clegg's press conference, waiting to be called on while he prioritized questions from the media. I initially observed the protest outside with my ears (it was possible to hear them) and via Twitter. Next, I was in the hallway outside the press conference, in the lobby, where I was being interviewed by media at the moment the young men race through the lobby to open the hotel doors to the protesters. I saw them go by, and I heard a loud sound, then the sound of singing as students streamed into the lobby. Literally, whatever "it" was happened right in front of me. I then watched as students sang and clapped, spoke and cried, and then finally moved into the room where the press conference was wrapping up (having gone on for 45 minutes). I watched as a white man leaving the room (Lee Hansen) put up his hands to press against a black woman as he tried to exit, and as she in turn pushed back. I heard most loudly cries of "peace" and "let them pass" and watched as no one was injured. I remained in the hotel lobby until the student press conference wrapped up, and people departed.

So unlike so many others, I am not relying on second-hand information. That sort of information is filtered and distorted not only by memory and a bad game of telephone but also by racial insecurities.

I admit it: there was a fraction of a second in that lobby, when I saw the people run by and I heard the loud sound, that I experienced fear. At first, I thought it was surprise. Then I realized that I had caught myself anticipating violence and momentarily panicking as I saw men of color move fast and loud. I recognized it, I checked it, and I questioned it. I was angry with myself--for so much has clearly changed internally since I moved from a predominantly black community (West Philadelphia) to a nearly entirely white one. This is what happens to a person when the community in which they live is overly homogenous. And it took me no more than 30 seconds to chastise myself for it, get over it, and then experience the protest as it really was: peaceful, bold, and uplifting.

I had experienced another moment of fear not 30 minutes earlier, when I watched Clegg address a young African-American woman, responding to her question about his report with a smug, paternalistic smile that to me conveyed absolutely no understanding of the powerful hand he had in intimidating her. I reacted to him, in that moment, as a white man with no sense of his own privilege. It was the whiteness of his skin combined with the Southern in his voice and his hyper-masculine demeanor that made my hands shake. I was afraid of his evidently barely-repressed disdain for this woman. The Jewish ancestry in me felt it to my toes. I'm not proud of that either.

I challenge all of us to ask ourselves if I am utterly alone in feeling this way. If we cannot all begin to admit that we are race conscious every day, we are sunk. Entire op-eds and letters to the editors about "events" that were as diverse as any that ever occur at UW-Madison but neglect the fact of RACE are untruthful. It's time for us all to come clean. What distinguishes us from the racists is our honesty, candor, and willingness to learn. Race matters. And that's why the Doubletree event was no "disruption" but rather a necessary protest against an antagonistic deliberate transgression of outsiders on a community.


Postscript: It seems some did not understand that in my original post I was critical of BOTH of my responses. I have added a single comment to the end of the next-to-last paragraph to clarify.

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What Do Comparisons of Test Scores Tell Us About Fairness in Admissions Practices?

Heard this before?

"The average test scores of minority students admitted to UW-Madison are lower than those of nonminority students admitted to UW-Madison. This is simply not fair, and is evidence of discrimination."

In other words, if minorities and nonminorities were treated equally in the admissions process, there would be no test score differences.

This claim is common and demonstrably incorrect.

Test scores in the general population are lower for minority students than for nonminority students. This means that even if UW-Madison were to rely solely on test scores for purposes of determining admission, and had the exact same cutoff point for admission (regardless of race), the average scores of minority students would be lower than those of nonminority students. In case that's unclear, try this. Say instead of a test requirement we imposed a weight requirement: you must be at least 200 pounds to be admitted. The proportion of football players admitted to UW-Madison would undoubtedly exceed the proportion of non-football players admitted. Same exact criteria, totally different chances of getting in, and totally different average weights of those admitted.

Among all of the factors you could use to assess whether two applicants are being treated equally, test scores are among the very worst, since they are more unevenly distributed than many others (e.g. minority/non-minority differences in average strength of letters of recommendation are likely much smaller than differences in average test scores).

It is for this reason that experts agree: "evidence of differences in [test] scores does not prove and almost certainly overstates the role of preferential treatment in admissions."

As we can all see, it is incredibly common to mis-interpret the significance of test score differences. Heck, the experts at the Center for Equal Opportunity do it all the time. But that doesn't make it right.

*******

Please, read more about this-- stop the spread of incorrect information.

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Guest Post: 10 Myths About Affirmative Action

The following is a guest post by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, doctoral candidate in Sociology at UW-Madison and member of the Teaching Assistants' Association. The post originally appeared in the Socialist Worker and is reprinted here at my request. Please refer to the original post for sources for all works cited. --Sara

Students of color in the incoming freshman class at the University of Wisconsin in Madison must have had a disorienting second week of the semester. On September 13, they were greeted by a small group of old suited white men at podiums, telling them they don't belong here--and over 850 angry students telling those men they're wrong.

The press conference held by the misnamed Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) and the debate with their uninspiring spokesperson Roger Clegg later that same day left me less than impressed with the argument that the university's affirmative action policies discriminate against white people.

But what did impress me mightily was the students who again and again stood up to share their stories, their anger that men like Clegg don't think they matter, and their determination to assert that they do. Inspired by those students, here is my defense of race-based affirmative action. Put aside that the richest country in world history treats education like a scarce commodity to be fought over. Race-based affirmative action is simply a matter of justice.

Here are ten myths that people like Clegg spin about affirmative action--and the facts that dispel those myths.

Myth Number 1: Students of color admitted under affirmative action aren't admitted on merit.

If there was one phrase Roger Clegg kept using at his debate that made the entire audience hiss, it was "lowered expectations." That's what Clegg says affirmative action means for minority students. But what he calls lowered expectations, I call recognition of a higher achievement.

According to the Black Commentator, "Wisconsin, and in particular the Milwaukee area, justly merit the invidious distinction of the Worst Place in the Nation to be Black." One reason? The staggering extent to which the criminal justice system in this state is directed at young Black men and their communities.

Sociologist Pamela Oliver has shown that Wisconsin's racial disparity in sentencing people convicted of new drug offenses dramatically dwarfs the disparity in every other state--including New York under its infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws.

In short, succeeding in high school under these conditions is a real achievement--one that frankly dwarfs managing to study SAT vocabulary in a well-funded suburban high school where students are expected to go to college.

And speaking of the SAT and other standardized tests, it's worth understanding some of the reasons for the racial discrepancies in test scores. As Adam Sanchez explained for SocialistWorker.org, since standardized tests are created to sort students, they only serve their function if some students consistently perform better than others.

This has two implications. First, test designers need questions that lots of students will get wrong, and the easiest way to do this is to use questions that draw less on classroom experiences that all children share than on home experiences that only some did. (The need for variation in scores is also why the exams are timed, even though this makes them much more artificial.)

Second, test designers need questions to agree on who the high-scoring students are--otherwise, everyone would score somewhere near the middle. This means that before new questions are added, they are vetted to make sure that they pick out the same students who already are scoring well on the tests. (In testing parlance, such questions are "reliable"--which doesn't mean they are "valid" at capturing real intellectual merit.)

These reasons help to explain why the best predictors of standardized test scores are parents' wealth and education.

Myth Number 2: White students are admitted to college solely on merit.

Underlying all the attacks on affirmative action is the idea that without it, college admissions are race-neutral and meritocratic. But as my fellow UW student Paul Pryse wrote after the last attack on affirmative action at UW:

As many as 15 percent of freshmen at America's top schools are white students who failed to meet their university's minimum standards for admission, according to Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education. These kids are "people with a long-standing relationship with the university," or in other words, the children of faculty, wealthy alumni and politicians.

According to Schmidt, these unqualified but privileged kids are nearly twice as common on top campuses as Black and Latino students who had benefited from affirmative action.

There's no such thing as a race-neutral college admissions policy in America. "Colorblind" just means the advantages and disadvantages are rendered invisible.

Myth Number 3: Affirmative action hurts students of color by putting them in environments for which they aren't prepared.

This might have been Clegg's single nastiest argument of the night--that because UW-Madison employs affirmative action, it admits students who are, in Clegg's words, "guaranteed to fail."

Students of color do have a harder road at college than most white students, but it isn't because they're unqualified--it's because discrimination and hostility don't stop at campus gates. Campus cultures have been improved by the victories of antiracist student movements over the past 50 years, but they are still alienating at best and vicious at worst for some students.

Only this past summer at UW, a fraternity hung a life-size black-clad Spiderman doll by its neck from the balcony of its house on fraternity row. If Black students find inhospitable a campus that mere months ago saw the echoes of lynching, only a racist would think that the answer is to keep them off that campus--for their own good.

Myth Number 4: Maybe affirmative action was important once, but those days are long past.

It's hard to imagine anyone making this argument seriously, but then again, Clegg--who, under student questioning, said he wasn't sure whether Black students on average attend less well-funded schools than white kids--didn't seem to be joking. Here are just a few relevant facts:

The median Black family has just 5 percent of the wealth of the median white family (with Hispanics much closer to Blacks than whites)--this is one of the most important ways that advantages and disadvantages are passed down over generations.

Another is segregated schools. A majority of Black students in Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York attend schools that are over 90 percent Black and Latino, and most white students attend schools that are overwhelmingly white. Here in Wisconsin, the Milwaukee school district, with 77 percent Black and Hispanic students, spends $3,081 less per student than the nearby Maple Dale-Indian Hill district, where 80 percent of students are white. The average Black or Latino K-12 student in the country attends a school in which most students are poor.

Meanwhile, one of the most-ballyhooed areas of progress--the narrowing gap in high school graduation rates between Black and white students--has been shown by sociologists Stephanie Ewert and Becky Pettitt to be a statistical lie: once you include prisoners, the progress disappears. The biggest change is that now the Black students who don't graduate high school are locked up.

Myth Number 5: Affirmative action policies in colleges distract attention from disparities earlier in the pipeline.

This one--which Clegg also threw out at the debate in Madison--is just bizarre. Have you ever heard any proponent of affirmative action say, "Well, I would support equal access to quality K-12 schools, but I'm too busy defending affirmative action at colleges?"

Affirmative action at every level helps future generations at every level. Many students of all races are being taught by teachers who may have benefited from affirmative action programs--and who had their sense of education's power and importance shaped by the struggle for affirmative action and civil rights at their colleges.

On the other hand, we might ask those making this argument about their commitment to reforming "the pipeline." I was next in line to question Clegg when the debate unceremoniously ended, with a long line of students still waiting to speak. My question was simple: Since he and his organization apparently want schooling to be colorblind, what have they done to combat residential segregation, by far the biggest contributor to different schooling for different races?

Myth Number 6: Eliminating affirmative action would be fairer to Asian students.

This might be the CEO's most important left cover for their position--the idea that UW-Madison is discriminating not only against white students, but Asian students as well.

As Chinese-American student government leader and Student Labor Action Coalition member Beth Huang pointed out at a pro-affirmative action rally on campus here in Madison, this argument lumps together very diverse populations into the category "Asian." In particular, Wisconsin has a large Hmong population--settled in the Midwest as refugees after the CIA had recruited them into its "Secret War" in Laos--who are largely segregated and impoverished, and should be beneficiaries of affirmative action.

However, it's also true that some "holistic admissions policies" used at universities--such as privileging certain kinds of extracurricular experiences--can function to limit the number of Chinese and Chinese-American students on campus. The main beneficiaries are not other students of color, who remain underrepresented on campuses, but wealthy white students.

Proponents of affirmative action should fight efforts to divide populations that historically have faced discrimination in the United States.

Myth Number 7: White students are only harmed by affirmative action policies.

As it happens, the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action programs in general--by far--have been white women. But this article is about race-based affirmative action, and my case is that these race-based programs are essential for white students--for the sake of their own education.

As we waited in line to question Clegg last week, the student in front of me told me that she had multiple white students in her classes tell her they'd never met a Black person before. Can it really be in these students' interest to have African American students kept out of college, so the country's Black population remains an abstraction to them?

As left-wing education expert Jonathan Kozol points out, research shows that "the strongest opposition to integrated schooling among white people is among those who have never experienced it." Kozol cites studies showing that "60 percent of young people of all races feel not only that they will receive a better education in an integrated setting, but that the federal government should make sure that it happens."

Myth Number 8: Anything that smacks of "quotas" is rigid and suspect.

Quotas became a dirty word in the 1990s, when Democratic President Bill Clinton led the effort to get rid of them--in the name of "mending, not ending" affirmative action. A series of Supreme Court decisions then sharply limited the ways that colleges are allowed to use race in admissions.

But what a quota really means is that there is accountability to stated diversity goals. Here at UW-Madison, the university's 10-year diversity initiative, Plan 2008, fell far short of its goals--which the college's Academic Planning Analysis division attributed to a lack of increased financial aid. Today, the university is less than 4 percent Hispanic, less than 3 percent Black, less than 2 percent Southeast Asian and less than 1 percent Native American. And a third of these students never graduate.

In the same 10 years, the university recruited faculty of color, but failed to increase its rates of granting tenure to them. Faculty of color often face a dilemma in which they are expected to mentor many students of color and serve on every diversity committee, but are not really rewarded for this work in the tenure system.

A system that enforced more accountability to its stated diversity aims would force departments and the university administration to address this kind of discrepancy. Without this accountability, it is far too easy to never question the basic operating and funding structures of the university, while bemoaning the lack of progress on diversity.

Myth Number 9: If we had class-based affirmative action, we wouldn't need race-based affirmative action.

Racial and economic disadvantages in education are deeply intertwined, but that doesn't mean the racial disadvantages can be reduced to class.

Because of residential segregation, even when a Black and a white family have the same household income, it's very likely that the Black family's children go to far worse schools. The "war on drugs" has led to an all-out assault on Black communities in particular. And in the current era--to quote sociologist Matt Desmond, commenting on his study of evictions in Milwaukee--"eviction is for Black women what incarceration is for Black men." It should be obvious that these processes have a tremendous effect on children.

Moreover, the most important dimensions of class--wealth, not income--are the hardest to account for in college admissions, especially when it comes to ensuring racial justice.

One reason wealth is harder to measure is that many government programs are designed to make sure the poor--as opposed to the rich--don't get benefits they don't qualify for. One result is that it is generally easy to verify whether someone is officially living in poverty, but not always whether another family has been living paycheck to paycheck, while still another with the same income has valuable assets.

Myth Number 10: We have to choose between class-based and race-based affirmative action.

Have you ever noticed that the only time Republicans seem to care about how poor kids will get to college is when they can use this concern as their battering ram against racial justice?

There is every reason to support affirmative action based on both race and class. And although I began by setting aside the way education is being made a scarce commodity, there's every reason to fight that, too.

Beneath the attack on affirmative action is the idea that not everyone is entitled to a good education. But the money is there for quality, integrated schools--in the military budget; in the bailouts going to the banks; in the taxes never paid by corporations and the extremely wealthy. Any social organization that requires children to spend their childhoods competing to see whether they'll be among the lucky few to attend the right schools isn't rational.

So at the same time that we fight for justice in college admissions--and justice means affirmative action--we should fight for more educational opportunity for all students. The rallying chant of this defense of education should be: "Black, Latino, Arab, Asian and white, rich or poor--education is a right!"

Or maybe it will be the cry that we came back to last week, over and over again: "Power to the people!"

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Securing Wisconsin's Future

When my son was a baby, we used to visit storytime at the public library together. He loved it, crawling around the floor, mouthing the toys, nibbling on books. And I enjoyed it as well, particularly because of the social time I spent with other moms.

While this was a period in which I was on unpaid maternity leave from UW-Madison, and thus not actively teaching, when moms asked what I “did” I’d hesitantly reveal I was a professor. I got a lot of “oh wows” and “what’s that like?” and then after they learned about my field of expertise (higher education) I’d field many questions about how they were supposed to ever manage to get their kids into college. Their babies weren’t even yet one year old, but I was happy to answer. At the same time, I often felt an odd kind of guilt-—I was acutely aware that this wasn’t something I really had to worry about. My son was college-bound from the time he was conceived. Some of those other kids and their moms were going to have to really work at it.

Maternal education is one of the strongest predictors of children’s outcomes. If your mom finished a bachelor’s degree rather than only a high school diploma you are more than twice as likely to earn one yourself. This is partly but not entirely because moms with college degrees are much more likely to have good jobs and enjoy full employment, and thus are more able to afford college. But there are other reasons as well. College-educated parents (and this includes dads, who are incredibly important but less-often the primary caregiver) engage with their differently from the beginning. They obtain higher-quality prenatal care, are more likely able to spend time with their newborns given their more flexible and higher-paid employment, and they are fortunate enough to have the time to invest much more of their energy in endowing their kids with large vocabularies and enrichment activities that result in measurable advantages in test scores, even as early as kindergarten.

Most if not all children have kind and loving parents who take care of them, keep them safe, play with them, etc. But the kinds of things highly educated parents can buy and do with their children seem to provide a boost that’s very hard to match. (Schools, so far, don't seem up to the herculean task.)

Since colleges and universities have raised tuition far more often than governments have increased financial aid, a college education remains a difficult, expensive thing to procure in this country. Attendance is increasingly predicated on the level of education and wealth in your family—yes, that relationship is stronger now than ever. In this country, in statistical terms, people from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds have less of everything required for college—less wealth with which to buy homes near the best schools or purchase for test prep and tuition, less educational background to utilize when sifting through potential colleges, completing applications, and filling out FAFSAs, less job security on which to rely when it comes to taking time off for college visits. The list goes on. Those facts alone mean that the chances of obtaining a bachelor’s degree are far, far less for Black, Latino, Native, and Southeast Asian children than for other children, especially if their parents don’t have college degrees—and very often, they don’t. The chance that a black student will attend college increases from 46% if his parents only attended high school to 84% if his parents graduated from college. But only 10.7% of blacks in Wisconsin hold bachelor’s degrees. Thus the cycle is long and vicious.

Many opponents of affirmative action want to ignore these facts. They want to pretend that it’s possible to compare black and white student with similar test scores, and test for “fairness” based on who is admitted. Sure, admitting a black student with a test score that is lower than that of a “comparable” white student seems unfair, but only if you insist on pretending that life begins when students file admissions applications. It is clearly eminently fair when you realize the incredible odds that most minority students had to beat in order to arrive at that same point of application, compared to the odds that most white students faced. The odds a person beat can provide important context that captures the unmeasured attributes of individuals. Admissions officers seek to admit the students most likely to benefit from and succeed in their universities. Perseverance, stamina, a family’s investment in a student’s success—all of these things are difficult to document and demonstrate in admissions files, but they enhance a student’s chances of success. Picking “winners” requires trying to include those unmeasurable factors when making decisions. Race is a proxy, and for now, the best one we’ve got.

Of course not all minority students would agree that they faced down long odds to get to the point of applying to college. Some are the children of doctors and lawyers who own their own homes and always expected their kids to get a college degree. Some blacks, like some whites, were born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple. But overwhelmingly, this is not the case. In contrast, it is far, far more common for white students to have not faced down long odds to get to the same point. This is because, as Mitchell Stevens has written, “the organizational systems that deliver students to the point of selective college entrance remain structured in ways that systematically favor white and Asian American applicants over black and Latino ones.” And that matters. Stevens reports, “as copious scholarship makes clear, black and Latino students remain considerably less likely to become candidates for admission at the nation’s most prestigious schools than their presence in the general population would have us expect.”

The goal of affirmation action is to create an opportunity for deserving kids who haven’t had the opportunities they deserve. If we refused to use a proxy like race for “deserving but often denied opportunities” we would have to collect extensive personal information that nearly everyone would object to providing. Applications would quadruple in length, and admit rates would drop because there would be even more incomplete applications. If we instead decided not to bother using either a proxy or such intense data collection to facilitate the provision of such opportunities, the average value of the college degree would likely decline, a larger fraction of Wisconsin's population would remain mired in poverty, and there would be no hope of ever not needing programs like affirmative action.

So yes, it is tempting to think that starting college is the beginning point of life—-the point at which all can be fairly determined by a single test score. But college applicants are not born; they are raised. As Stevens says they are “delivered to the point of application by social systems that send children from different groups to this particular destination at different rates.” Pretending that the road to college is race-neutral is to close one’s eyes to the realities of daily existence in the United States. Acknowledging the role that race plays in structuring opportunity, and attempting to reduce the influence of race on those opportunities is not racism—and no, it is not reverse discrimination. Racism is assuming and acting like the color of one’s skin is inherently inferior, rather than acknowledge the problem lies in the way society treats the color of one’s skin. Those who seek to level the playing field do so by explicitly acknowledging that the trouble isn’t that someone is brown, it’s that brown people are treated terribly in this country. It’s far harder to admit that and seek to do something about it, than to deny reality and cry racism.

Those seeking to end affirmative action at UW-Madison need to remember these facts. There is an enormous payoff to a state’s investment in educating its minority students at its finest schools. Research demonstrates that admitting black students to more selective schools improves their chances of finishing college—not the opposite—and furthermore, these students generate bigger individual and social returns from their college degrees than do students whose college attendance is far more expected and much easier to obtain.

Furthermore, supporting affirmative action does not equate with supporting the denial of opportunities for white students. Far from it. This is a case where the benefits for minorities are large, and the costs for individual white students are very, very small. College opportunities abound for majority students, who attend college at very high rates and appear to succeed in completing degrees almost no matter where they attend. Denial from one college nearly always results in admission at another. Data from Wisconsin show that not attending one’s top choice college and instead attending another appears to have little to no impact on whether a student enjoys in and excels at college. In contrast, the great threat to ending affirmative action is that minority students will attain far fewer college degrees. And that would undoubtedly threaten the economic security of our state. None of our families can afford that risk.

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