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No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

By the end of the 1970s the U.S. civil rights revolution had reached full flower. The Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine enshrined in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and put a constitutional end to forced school segregation based on race. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 etched the Brown decision into law and ended legalized racial discrimination in government, employment, and public accommodation. A surge in black voter registration was prompted by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, aided in large measure by federal monitoring efforts built into the law. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, together with discriminatory practices in lending and insurance. These provisions were supplemented by additional safeguards during the 1970s. Chief among them was the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which prohibited "redlining"-the practice of denying mortgages based on the racial composition of the neighborhood. The sweeping changes that Brown ushered in took nearly twenty-five years to accomplish, but they effectively put an end to legalized discrimination based on race (Massey, 2007).

Civil and political equality did not guarantee immediate equality in other areas. The effect of the civil rights legislation was to push some discriminatory practices and attitudes underground, making them more subtle, less overt, and harder to detect-what Massey (2007: 110) has described as "discrimination with a smile." In addition, the historical legacy of racial discrimination cannot be eliminated overnight. Some blacks who attended segregated elementary schools prior to the 1954 Brown decision are still in the labor force. As a consequence, breaking down legal barriers separating black and white society has not translated either instantaneously or spontaneously into complete equality.

Deep racial divisions in social and economic outcomes remain. Whites and Asians typically exhibit the "best" outcomes, and blacks and Hispanics the poorest. More than 30 percent of white and nearly 50 percent of Asian adults over the age of twenty-five have earned at least a baccalaureate degree, as compared with 18 percent of blacks and just 12 percent of Hispanics. Two-thirds of whites and Asians report they are in excellent or very good health, in contrast to one-half of blacks and Hispanics. Median household income for whites and Asians is about two-thirds higher than that among black and Hispanic households. Moreover, median household wealth for whites exceeds that for blacks by a factor of ten to one (Wolff, 2007). Poverty and incarceration rates are significantly higher for blacks and Hispanics than for whites and Asians (Western, 2006). Racial patterns of residential segregation suggest that blacks are more spatially isolated from whites than either Asians or Hispanics are, although the degree of segregation of blacks from whites across metropolitan areas has been declining since at least 1980 (Iceland, Weinberg, and Steinmetz, 2002).

Questions Asked

Many solutions have been proposed for healing these divisions, but education-and especially higher education-has traditionally been believed by most Americans to be an effective strategy. In this book we address the role of elite higher education in confronting issues of inequality on U.S. college campuses. Specifically, our aim is to draw back the curtain on the selective college experience and take a close look at how race and social class are intimately intertwined with the admission process and with the academic and nonacademic sides of campus life. We ask three central questions. First, to what extent is American elite higher education involved in promoting social mobility? We know, for instance, that the economic return to a college degree is increasing and that the return to a selective college or university education is rising even faster. Therefore, mobility chances in the population are deeply affected by exactly who is profiting from the kind of education selective colleges offer.

One view is that selective institutions are in the best position to create opportunity for students from traditionally marginalized groups because these schools have wide latitude in choosing whom to recruit, admit, enroll, and graduate. Elite institutions, it is argued, have sufficient numbers of well-qualified applicants as well as the endowments to accomplish the three objectives of greatest concern to admission officers: (1) meeting bottom-line financial targets, (2) enrolling a freshman class capable of doing the academic work, and (3) crafting a first-year class with ample amounts of diversity along racial and other dimensions (Duffy and Goldberg, 1998). Opportunity in higher education has been expanding for racial minorities. In the Ivy League, for instance, black enrollment increased from an estimated 2.3 percent of all students in 1967 (Karen, 1991a) to 5.7 percent by 2006 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2007d). Corresponding proportions of black students at four-year, private institutions rose from 8.2 to 13.4 percent between 1976 and 2005 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2006).

An alternative view is that selective colleges and universities are under great pressure from financial aid officers, trustees, and alumni to enroll the kinds of students who will make minimal demands on their institutions' financial aid budgets and help ensure their alma maters' longevity through continued monetary contributions long after they graduate. In this view, students who are most likely to be admitted, enroll, and graduate are those whose families occupy the more privileged positions in society. By sending their offspring to a selective college or university, parents are hoping to ensure the future success-material and otherwise-of their children. Selective schools are believed by parents to be "reproduction insurance companies" that issue diplomas critical to the future life chances of their children (Stevens, 2007: 255). If this scenario best characterizes the behavior of elite institutions, sociologists would say these colleges are playing a pivotal role in the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Parents who are well-off in their own generation produce children who are as, or even more, successful when they become adults.

The role played by selective institutions in creating opportunity or, alternatively, reinforcing existing inequalities takes on added significance today. Beginning with the Great Depression of the 1930s and continuing to the early 1970s, incomes in the United States were being distributed more equally. But this situation has reversed, and the past three decades have been marked by rising income inequality. The income distribution today is as unequal as it has been since the early decades of the twentieth century (Piketty and Saez, 2003). The United States is now the most unequal nation in the developed world (Massey, 2007: 27). If there were no income inequality at all and each family had the same resources, it would matter little whether selective colleges and universities were creating opportunity. Put differently, if the mechanism that distributes social rewards is such that these rewards are widely dispersed, then somewhat less significance attaches to the question of mobility chances. But today, when income is highly concentrated at the top of the income distribution, it matters a great deal who in society has the opportunity to receive these rewards. Americans seem quite willing to tolerate a substantial amount of inequality in power, prestige, and other resources provided the chances of securing these rewards are equally distributed across all individuals (Grusky, 2001: 23).

A second set of questions revolves around the use of affirmative action by selective institutions. Most adults, whether or not they have children in college, have heard about affirmative action in higher education. And most of these adults associate affirmative action with admission preferences for members of underrepresented minority groups. But what exactly does "affirmative action" mean? What is the rationale, legal or otherwise, for race-based preferences? How critical is its use in the creation of racially diverse campuses that are so highly prized by college officials and students alike? How extensively is it practiced? Who are the beneficiaries? How much do they benefit? What role do racial preferences play in creating opportunity and upward mobility chances for students to whom the doors of selective colleges and universities might otherwise be shut? Does race-based affirmative action actually harm its intended beneficiaries? This could happen if underrepresented minority students are boosted into more competitive academic environments than their academic achievements warrant, and where they are surrounded by exceptionally talented white and Asian students.

If race-based affirmative action is the primary tool selective institutions rely on to create racial and economic diversity on their campuses, what will happen if the "protective mantle of affirmative action" is withdrawn? What impact would the elimination of affirmative action have on the racial makeup of undergraduate student bodies at selective schools? For example, following the passage of Proposition 209 by California voters in 1996, public institutions of higher education were prohibited from considering an applicant's race, ethnicity, or sex in admission. As a consequence, the percentage of underrepresented minority students (African American, Chicano/Latino, and American Indian) in the entering freshman class at UCLA declined from 24.4 in the fall of 1997 to 17.5 in the fall of 1998 (Cardenas, 1998). The number of black students in the first-year class in the fall of 2006 stood at just 100 out of an entering freshman class of about 4,800. This was less than half the number of black students who enrolled in 1997 and the lowest figure in thirty years (Office of Analysis and Information Management, 2007).

Is the UCLA example an isolated instance, or might we expect similar impacts elsewhere if affirmative action were eliminated? Should we believe that other forms of affirmative action that might be more acceptable to a general public-for example, class-based affirmative action-could effectively substitute for racial preferences? Race-based preferences experienced a narrow escape in 2003 when the U.S. Supreme Court approved by the smallest of margins a continuation of race-based affirmative action under tightly drawn conditions (Grutter v. Bollinger, 2003) at the University of Michigan Law School. But can we confidently expect that racial affirmative action will be legally permissible forever? Voters in Washington State, Michigan, and Nebraska have prohibited racial affirmative action, other states are considering similar bans, and affirmative action was set aside by gubernatorial action in Florida. There was a possibility that, following the November 2008 elections, more than 30 percent of Americans would live in states where racial preferences in public higher education had been outlawed (Schmidt, 2007d). Conservative appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court since Grutter may also suggest that race-based preferences have a limited life expectancy. What are states going to do to maintain racial diversity if they lose the policy tool of affirmative action? What long-term solutions exist to the gradual asphyxiation of racial preferences?

A third issue we address relates to campus life itself. Sometimes lost between a preoccupation with admission practices on the one hand and graduation rates on the other is a concern for students themselves-who they are, what they learn both inside and outside the classroom, and generally what happens to them while they are in college. We know one thing for certain. Every selective college and university values diversity in all its many forms and has taken deliberate steps to enroll a diverse freshman class. Unlike the broader adult society, diverse racial groups of students are in close contact on campus. Students from different backgrounds sleep in the same dorms; they eat in the same dining halls; they mainly wear the same clothing styles and carry the same backpacks; and they go to class together. College officials have seen to it that racial groups are no longer separate. But does this mean they are equal? There are different ways to anticipate an answer.

There are good reasons to expect that the kinds of student bodies that emerge from highly competitive admission processes at selective institutions are ones in which the outlines of social and economic inequality, so evident in U.S. society, have largely been expunged or at least masked. First, the academic bar for admission is set very high. Only those relatively few students who are judged capable of handling the academic workload are accepted. Second, elite schools tend to want the very best students in all senses of that concept. Students, in other words, are chosen from the upper tail of whatever distribution they belong to (Klitgaard, 1985). Third, all elite institutions have endowments that put them in the top ranks of the college wealth distribution. This institutional munificence is not only a source of generous financial aid. It also subsidizes field trips and other learning initiatives, emergency spending accounts, and other little-noticed interventions that help smooth over latent social class differences. Fourth, students cheer for the same teams, wear the same robes and receive the same diplomas at graduation (Stevens, 2007), and are united in their proud claim to be a "son" or "daughter" of "Ivy U." Students may arrive on campus with some of the rougher edges of inequality still visible. But the socializing experiences they encounter during their college careers are likely to have a homogenizing influence that smoothes out many of the remaining contours of inequality.

On the other hand, a different perspective suggests that, despite the prevalence of these unifying forces, campus life is better characterized as a microcosm of the wider society. If so, the privilege or disadvantage associated with race and social class might not be so easily erased. One area of concern, reinforced by the durability of racial stereotypes, focuses on campus patterns of student interaction across racial and ethnic group boundaries. Admission officers might be doing an excellent job of building a diverse freshman class, only to have smaller and relatively homogeneous subgroups of students break off into their own "silos" once school begins. Moreover, it appears as though the majority of race, ethnic, and gender studies courses are populated disproportionately by members of the groups being studied. If these outcomes are a common occurrence, what do they suggest about the presumed educational and other benefits of attending a diverse campus? The existence at some colleges of "theme dorms" oriented to particular racial or ethnic groups, stories about "all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria," and unfortunate racial incidents serve to highlight issues of self-segregation among undergraduate students.

Students from lower-income groups who attend elite institutions may also have a hard time fitting in. Despite the growing generosity of financial aid packages that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and others among the nation's wealthiest institutions can afford to offer, most needy students are still expected to contribute a modest portion of their support through work-study jobs on campus (Tilghman, 2007). If these positions are highly visible to other students (for example, working at the front desk in the library or helping in the kitchen), they are ostensible reminders of social class distinctions. Other obvious markers include spending large amounts of time in the computer lab because one lacks a personal laptop, declining invitations to eat off campus because free meals are available in the campus dining hall, and not knowing where the Hamptons are (Schweitzer, 2006). Speaking about Yale University, one student who participates in a support group for low-income students called Class Matters said, "I mean I am glad to be part of this club, this very elite, very private club. I just wish someone had given me some clue about what it was beforehand" (Schweitzer, 2006).

If indeed college life reflects the inequality embedded in broader U.S. society, what does it mean? What are its implications, for example, for academic performance in the classroom? Does it suggest that minority students might be having a difficult time holding their own against more affluent and perhaps better-prepared white students? What about paying for college and the burden of college loans and accumulated debt? Who bears this debt? How does it constrain post-graduation options? What about satisfaction with college when students look back? How do graduates of selective colleges and universities evaluate their overall undergraduate experience? Are they satisfied with their academic experience? Do they rate positively their social experiences on campus? We might expect to see differences by race and by social class in average group levels of satisfaction. If we do, what are the implications? Finally, what do prospective students and parents who are contemplating sending their children to elite colleges need to know about these institutions ahead of time?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal by Thomas J. Espenshade Alexandria Walton Radford Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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