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No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life

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In 1954 the Supreme Court unanimously agreed to eliminate the "separate but equal" doctrine in force for nearly 60 years. It took some time to implement but the die was cast. But neither immediate nor complete equality materialized. Instead delay and subterfuge seeped into many arenas. As Douglass S. Massey noted we entered a period of "discrimination with a smile."

The authors of this carefully researched book explore race and class at our elite colleges. This fact-filled book is elegantly written and very thought-provoking. Ten long chapters, 547 pages, over 200 tables, 3 appendixes and 39 pages of references provide readers a lucid picture and resources for further study.

Accepting America's ever increasing status as a multi-cultural society, the authors pose a key question. "Are America's elite colleges admitting and successfully educating a diverse student body?" To find the answer, they explored and studied "how race and social class impact each stage from application and admission, to enrollment and student life on campus."

No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal offers valuable insights into the intricate workings and nuances of America's elite higher education conglomerate. A world onto itself, it has held the key to success for America's privileged select few for over two hundred years. Have the walls of access begun to crack? Have students unimaginable a mere generation ago been accepted? Have they succeeded?

Clearly the answer is yes. But the game has been spotty and it is neither over nor hardly won. The rich experiences of the recent past chronicled in this book can provide insights into the reality we face and ideas that could blossom into productive change.

Although about the Ivy League and other elite schools, many a reader will recognize familiar similarities at their colleges. There is much to learn and much change to be implemented.

Being accepted to an elite college can be a joyous experience. Many apply but few, very few are admitted. Some examples: Princeton University received a record 18,942 applications for the Class of 2011 but only 1,838 students, a mere 9.7 percent, were admitted. Harvard's acceptance rate was similar, 9.0 percent were accepted down from 9.3 percent the previous year.

The authors highlighted examples "of inequality and how they manifest themselves by race and social class." Alumni children, White males and children of large donors have long had the inside track. Clearly the admittance of minorities via affirmative action frustrated some. Lawsuits ensued. In 2003 the Supreme Court decreed that race could be considered in acceptances because of the "educational benefits that can flow from a racially diverse student body."

Three issues linger in one's mind after reading this book. First, we are reminded of the "unique role that elite higher education plays in perpetuating intergenerational inequality in America." But in societies the world over, the children of socioeconomic privileged parents tend to be advantaged as well. Children who go to elite colleges have a better opportunity of succeeding. Thus, the desire of students from all backgrounds to enter them is manifest. If only the wealthy, the well-connected can attend many qualified students will be excluded and it perpetuates an inherited class structure in the country. Not a good outcome for a country struggling to be more democratic.

Secondly, and this is certainly not limited to elite schools, there is a marked tendency among minorities to separate themselves from the majority population. Instead of seeking ways of intermingling, they socialize and study with their own ethnic group. It is understandable. They feel more comfortable, but it undercuts the advantages of a diverse student population. Of course, elite Whites tend to cluster among themselves as well. Cross racial-social interactions should be a goal for all students and institutions.

Those two issues can be addressed by the colleges themselves. Policies and procedures can lead to desired goals if the will exists. But the third issue begins long before students arrive on campus and thus is more difficult to address, to correct. It is the enduring "racial gap in academic achievement."

It is enshrined in the pre-college years. Schooling, environment and societal realities produce different results. White and Asians usually have the highest test scores and the best high school grades; blacks and Hispanics lag.

"The racial gap in academic performance plays a much more central role in problems that loom large today than almost anyone realizes. It contributes significantly to most adult forms of social and economic inequality..."

Races may no longer be separate, but in society as a whole and on our campuses all are not yet equal. The authors, while acknowledging great progress, recommend "a declaration of war on the root causes".

This book is to be read but more importantly - studied.

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Dr. Mellander, a college president for 20 years, was most recently a graduate school dean at George Mason University.

I enjoyed reading this book. It taught me a lot about the role that race and class play in the admissions process of elite colleges in the USA. And like Mr. Blume, i was impressed with the methodological and conceptual thoroughness of the analysis.

However, on a number of issues, the authors seem to overstate the results of their analysis in order to arrive at a conclusion that is friendlier to a pro-Affirmative Action position that seems warranted. For example:

1) In Chapter 6, the authors attempt to evaluate the "mismatch hypothesis", a proposal by critics of AA such as Sander (2004) and Thomas Sowell, which argues that when, thanks to AA programs at elite colleges, African-Americans and Hispanics with low academic preparedness (e.g., low SAT scores, low GPA) are placed in competition against highly-prepared whites and Asians, they will be worse off than if they had attended a less-selective, hence less competitive college, where their class rank would be higher and where they would be more likely to graduate; against the "selectivity" hypothesis of Bowen & Bok (1998), which argues that when academically-underprepared minorities are admitted to elite colleges, whatever costs they may incur because of their AA-based admission are outweighed by the benefits, particularly the notion that they are more likely to graduate from a highly selective college.

In making this comparison, the authors conduct some very thorough regression analyses, and some interesting facts are surfaced. First, the analysis shows that both blacks and hispanics are each about 45% less likely to graduate within 6 years than are whites and asians (p.234, 238). Second, contra Bowen & Bok (1998), once numerous factors are controlled for, there is NO statistically-significant (p < .05) "selectivity" effect. That is, school selectivity is not significantly related to graduation rates. Also, their analysis of class rank effects shows that, as we might expect, black students tend to graduate with a class rank 17 percentile points lower than "otherwise equivalent" white students at the same school (p. 249).

These results are consistent with the "mismatch" hypothesis and contradict the "selectivity" hypothesis. They suggest that under-prepared students, like those admitted by AA, are far less likely to graduate from elite schools, and have significantly lower class rank, and that this is not counter-balanced by higher overall chances of graduating. And yet, on page 239 the authors conclude that "nevertheless, the totality of the evidence...suggests the advantages of school selectivity outweigh the costs ... Under no reasonable interpretation can our results be viewed as supporting the academic mismatch hypothesis" (pp. 237-238).

They also conclude that "Our judgment - based on the available evidence and commonsense considerations - is that, in most instances, the positive effects of school selectivity override the negative consequences of lower class rank" (p.259). They support this conclusion by citing research by other authors about the career-advancement and income and prestige advantages of graduating from an elite university. True, there's little doubt that it's better, from a career perspective, to graduate with a 3.3 GPA and a top-10% class rank from Harvard than to do the same from the University of Maryland. But, is it better to graduate with a 2.4 GPA and bottom-25% class rank from Harvard than the better GPA/rank from Maryland? That's the relevant real-world "mismatch hypothesis" comparison, and the authors have no evidence to counter it. It also stands to reason that any advantages to graduating from Harvard (and other super-elite colleges) only accrue if you actually graduate, and will tend to be greater if your class rank/GPA are higher, and yet their own data shows that blacks/hispanics graduate at a significantly lower rate and with lower class rank. This does support the "mismatch" view, which argues that it's better to actually graduate from, say, the U. of Alabama than to drop out of Harvard.

In summary, most of the evidence generated by the authors in Chapter 6 support the mismatch thesis, and yet the authors reject this in favor of a pro-AA conclusion.

2) The same problem is present in their discussion of the "educational benefits of diversity", the pro-AA claim that swayed the Supreme Court in 2003 to uphold the constitutionality of the use of racial preferences in college admissions. Going in to their analysis, the authors accept that there are such benefits, despite analyses in the literature that suggest that the evidence in favor of such benefits is weak and hardly compelling (e.g., Pidot, Stanford Law Review, 2006). The authors attempt to address this issue by focusing on one question in their data-set, which asks students "how much they have learned from students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds who attended the same college or university as yourself" (p. 308-309). The authors call this a measure of "learning from difference".

To me, there are obvious problems with using this question as an outcome variable. The first is that students may not be qualified to determine what they've learned, much less where they learned it. Usually, in say a classroom setting, that is determined by independent appraisal (e.g., a professor gives an exam to students and then grades it). Also, there is also an obvious possible political-bias to this question: students who read it will likely be able to tell that it is an assessment of diversity initiatives on campus, and their political values, either pro- or anti- AA, could very well influence their response.

Tellingly to me, while the authors recognize this political-bias possibility, they discuss it only as a possible influence on white-student attitudes (i.e., because whites may perceive AA to harm them, this may cause them to understate the amount they learned from difference - see footnote 14, page 310). However, this also would seem to work the other way as well (i.e., because blacks/hispanics may perceive AA to benefit them, they may tend to overstate the amount they actually learned from difference).

Their data show that whites tend to say they learned less from difference (26% say they learned a lot from it) than do blacks (36%) or hispanics (45%). Asians also tended to say they learned a lot from difference more than whites from difference (38% - all on page 310).

In their data analysis of this issue, the authors use 4 diversity-related factors as causes of learning from difference: socializing with members of other races, having an other-race roommate freshman year, having an other-race close friend, and dating someone from another race. The presentation of their results are again skewed in a pro-AA direction. For example, the authors present a prominent bar graph (p. 312) showing that those who engaged in all 4 diversity experiences were much more likely to say they learned a lot from difference, and draw the bold conclusion that "The take-away lesson is evident. When students seize opportunities to interact frequently with .. other-race peers.. and when this interaction occurs on more than a casual or superficial level, positive learning experiences can result. Our findings lend support therefore to claims that there are educational benefits to diversity" (p. 313).

However, their subsequent regression analysis, which is not reported prominently in table form, shows that only 2 of the 4 diversity experiences, dating and frequent socializing, had a significant impact on learning from difference. And of these, let's face it: Dating is likely to produce knowledge about difference that is substantially intimate in nature, and thus perhaps not as relevant to ordinary educational outcomes.

Possibly the worst aspect of this "learning from difference" discussion is that it doesn't confront the fact that *where* something is learned (i.e., from "difference" or "similarity") isn't nearly as important as *what* is learned. The author's own analysis has already shown that, as measured by GPA, chances of graduating, and class rank, blacks and hispanics learn considerably less while at elite universities than whites, despite saying they learned considerably more from difference than whites. And Asians are in between - like whites, they graduate with higher GPAs, etc. but like blacks/hispanics say they learned a lot from difference. These contradictory findings suggest little relationship between "where" and "what", and thus it's not clear how important "learning from difference" is in the scheme of college learning, even if we can take the student's self-appraisal at face value.

And finally, if the benefits of "learning from difference" are alleged to be primarily social, not strictly academic, then it is curious that in the regression analysis findings(p.322), blacks report being 38% LESS satisfied with their campus social experiences than whites- the opposite of what we'd expect given that blacks say they learned more from difference than whites.

Finally, the authors demonstrate some pretty amazing naivety about the relationship between academic preparedness (as measured by things like SAT scores and high school GPA) and the presence of under-represented minorities on elite campuses. In a very interesting analysis, the authors conduct simulations that determine the impact on black/hispanic enrollment under different hypothetical conditions, such as eliminating race-based AA, enhancing class-based AA, etc. One such simulation involves comparing the current situation (blacks/hispanics suffer an achievement gap and colleges have race-based AA) with a simulated scenario in which race-based AA is eliminated, but there is no achievement gap (e.g., on average, blacks/hispanics have the same SAT scores, etc. coming out of high school as whites and asians). The results show virtually no difference in demographic profiles: whites are approximately 74% of students in both, blacks are about 8% in both, hispanics around 5% in both, and Asians about 13% in both. This outcome seemed obvious to me, but the authors are astounded by it, saying "the remarkable and totally unexpected conclusion one draws from the comparison is that there is essentially no difference whatsoever in the shares of black/hispanic students under the two conditions" (p. 375).

Why this would be surprising, much less totally unexpected, escapes me: race-based AA is designed to boost blacks and hispanics up so that they are enrolled at rates that would exist "as if" they were as well-qualified as whites. But to the authors, who apparently thought a big gap would remain, this outcome is nothing short of astounding!

Don't get me wrong - this book is fascinating and i'd hazard to say that i learned a lot about race and class, particularly race, i admissions to elite colleges. I recommend reading it. But, don't let the author's pro-AA bias blind you when reading their conclusions. Trust their analysis, not their summaries of it.

1) How is American elite higher education involved in promoting social equity? 2) What role does affirmative action play in admissions, and do we still need it? 3) What are students' experiences, academic and otherwise, once they arrive on the campuses of America's selective colleges and universities? Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford skillfully answer these questions, which are at the heart of American higher education, in "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal."

In terms of its scope, analysis, and implications for policy, I think Espenshade and Radford's "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal" stands to rival Bowen and Bok's classic "The Shape of the River." I found great value in "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal" from three perspectives:

As a graduate student, I appreciate the methodological rigor with which Espenshade and Radford explore their research questions. The authors' use of nationally representative student data is comprehensive and compelling. Espenshade and Radford also painstakingly cite a range of scholarly work that adds great credibility to their analysis.

As an admission professional, I find "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal" to be thought-provoking and intellectually accessible. The questions examined in this book are the questions with which we grapple on a daily basis.

As an American interested in equity and social justice, this book is both sobering and hopeful. We, as a nation, have a long way to go before we can claim any sort of racial equity in access to higher education. Yet with the eloquent arguments presented in "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal," I find hope in the awareness and energy that is growing around these issues.

The book's best chapter, in my opinion, is Chapter 10 - the authors ask "Where do we go from here?" and do not hold back in offering both practical and provocative recommendations. I find Chapter 10 to be a refreshing departure from the scholars who analyze educational inequity and conclude their research with the ubiquitous remarks that "much work remains to be done." I hope college deans and state policymakers around the country take seriously Espenshade and Radford's recommendations for addressing inequity in American higher education.

"No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal" should be required reading in the United States for every admissions professional, graduate student, and citizen interested in issues surrounding higher education and equity. I bought "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal" because it was driving me crazy to not pencil notes in the margins of the library's copy I was reading - as a frugal graduate student, I consider a purchase like that to be the highest recommendation I can offer!

As a parent of teenagers and someone who has remain involved with my alma mater, this book confirmed much of what I have learned on my own over the years. The advantage to this book is that it shows you the detailed data from which the authors draw their conclusions. And a word of warning - if you're not one for footnotes, this book will probably give you a headache. There are some pearls of advice hidden in the text, but for the most part you will need to read between the lines if you are looking for a "how-to" book.
The race and class implications are interesting. It is clear that race and class are not irrelevant, but the effects do not necessarily parallel what is happening in the larger society. This book would be particularly worthwhile for high school counsellors.