Harvard scholars convene civil rights think tank - Cover Story

Black Issues in Higher Education, May 1, 1997 by Cheryl D. Fields

Cambridge, Mass. -- Recent court rulings against affirmative action have left some college admissions and financial aid officers asking, "If we can't consider race as part of the admissions process, then how can we make sure Blacks, Latinos and other underrepresented ethnic groups are not shut out of higher education?"

In response, more than one hundred scholars, lawyers, researchers, advocates, admissions and financial aid officers and students met at Harvard University to explore this question and identify ways to maintain access to higher education in an anti-affirmative action climate.

The conference was the third in a series convened by Harvard University's new Civil Rights Project. The project was begun by Christopher Edley Jr., a Harvard law school professor who served as President Bill Clinton's advisor on affirmative action, and Gary Orfield, a professor of education and social policy at Harvard.

"Gary and I decided last spring that we wanted to start, essentially, a civil rights think tank rooted in academia, with a base at Harvard, but with strong collaborative relationships with researchers in institutions around the country," Edley says. The co-founder's ambition is for the multi-disciplinary think tank to fund research and publish academic papers on civil rights issues as they relate to education, with the ultimate goal of influencing public policy.

"We do not want to be propagandists in the way that the Heritage Foundation is," Edley says. "On the other hand, we want to focus world-class research efforts on the most pressing civil rights issues and take aggressive steps to disseminate or market the results so that they help shape public debate." (For a review of Edley's new book on affirmative action, please see pg. 25.)

The April 11 conference, titled "Non-Racial Standards and Minority Opportunity," reviewed the effect that judicial decisions such as Hopwood, Fordice and Proposition 209, have had on admissions practices in states such as Texas, Mississippi and California. It also featured research presentations from scholars who have examined the alternatives to current affirmative action admissions practices, and featured an open discussion on the implications these court decisions and research might have on public policy, admissions practices and advocacy.

The Research

Researchers Thomas J. Kane, of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Jerome Karabel, a University of California at Berkeley sociologist, explored what might happen if colleges substituted class-based screening mechanisms for the race-based mechanisms, or relied largely on test scores in their admissions practices.

Based upon the findings of his research, Kane's conclusion is that as long as institutions maintain a reliance on high school grades and standardized test scores, class-based preferences would do little to cushion the impact of ending race-based practices. "Blacks and Hispanics are a minority among high-test-scoring youth," Kane says. His data show that this remains true even among students from families with annual household incomes below $20,000.

If racial considerations are eliminated from the admissions practices of the top 20 percent of the nation's colleges and universities, Kane's research suggests that the enrollment of Blacks and Latinos could be expected to drop by roughly 15 to 20 percent, while the enrollment of whites would increase by only about two percentage points.

The focus of Karabel's research, presented under the working title, "The Effects of Color-Blind Admissions: The Case of California and Implications for the Nation," is the effect that Resolution SP-1 has had on the admissions practices in the University of California (UC) system. Passed by the UC Regents in 1995, SP-1 prohibits the use of race, religion, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in admissions decisions.

Although SP-1 did not officially affect undergraduate admissions until January of this year, Karabel found that the action has already had a chilling effect on the applicant pool. White and Asian applicant rates for the 1996-97 class increased by roughly 10 and 11 percent respectively, while Black and Latino applicant rates declined by approximately 8 and 6 percent respectively.

SP-1 appears to have hurt the professional school applicant pool as well. At the medical school, applications by Blacks and Latinos declined by nearly 9 percent between 1995 and 1996. In 1997, the downward trend continued, resulting in an unprecedented two-year decline among these applicants.

Timothy Ready, assistant vice president for community and minority programs at the Association of American Medical Colleges, offered a more grim forecast. He predicts that if race-conscious admissions practices are abandoned by the nation's medical schools and rely solely on standardized test scores and grade point averages, the country could experience a 75 percent decrease in enrollment by people of color.

UC system law schools, which have a long history of relying heavily on LSAT scores and GPAs, showed no clear pattern of decline yet in Karabel's research. However, Karabel notes that of the 3,619 students nationwide who had LSAT scores of 165 or more and GPAs of 3.5 or better, only twenty-two were African American and twenty were Chicano.