Education - Minorities And College

Preparation for College

Most groups of minority students, except for Asian-American students, are at a disadvantage when applying to college. In 2005 the average grade point average (GPA) of most minority groups who took the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) was lower than 3.30, the average GPA of all students who took the SAT. The average GPA of African-American students was 0.31 lower than the average GPA, the average of Puerto Rican students was 0.19 lower, the average of other Hispanic students was 0.14 lower, the average of Native American students was 0.08 lower, and the average of Mexican American students was 0.07 lower. While Native American and African-American students narrowed the gap between their average GPA and the overall average GPA from 1995 to 2005, the gap between the GPA of all Hispanic groups and the overall average GPA actually widened. (See Figure 3.3.)

Asian-American students' average GPA remained higher than the average GPA of all students and higher than the GPA of white students in 2005—Asian-American students' GPAs were 0.09 higher than the average, while white students' GPAs were 0.07 higher than the average. The gap between Asian-American and white students' average GPAs, however, actually narrowed between 1995 and 2005. (See Figure 3.3.)

TABLE 3.9 Students in grades 1-12 by type of school attended, by student and household characteristics, selected years, 1993–2003 [CONTINUED] "Table 25-1. Number and Percentage Distributions of Students in Grades 1-12 by Type of School Attended, by Student and Household Characteristics: Selected Years 1993–2003," in The Condition of Education 2004, National Center for Education Statistics, 2004, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2004/pdf/25_2004.pdf (accessed December 29, 2005)

In addition, the percentage of college-bound minority students who took challenging courses during their senior year to prepare for college was lower than the percentage of college-bound white students. Asian-American students proved the exception—65% of Asian-American college-bound seniors took physics, 62% took precalculus, and 44% took calculus. In contrast, among college-bound African-American seniors, only 41% took physics, 32% took precalculus, and 14% took calculus. Among college-bound Native Americans, only 44% took physics, 39% took precalculus, and 20% took calculus. Among college-bound Mexican Americans, 47% took physics, 47% took precalculus, and 19% took calculus. The percentages were similar for other Hispanic groups. (See Figure 3.4.) All these minority groups took these challenging courses at rates lower than that of white students, but African-American students took them at the lowest rate of all.

SAT and ACT Scores

Students wishing to enter most colleges and universities in the United States must take the SAT or the ACT Assessment (formerly the American College Test). These are standardized tests intended to measure verbal and mathematical ability to determine readiness for college-level work. Most students take the SAT. Performance on
[Image Not Available]
TABLE 3.10 Percentage distribution of students attending public charter schools, by entity granting school charter and race, 2000–01 Erica Frankenberg and Chungmei Lee, "Table 3. Percentage of Charter and Public School Students in Segregated Minority Schools, by Race/Ethnicity, 2000–01," in Charter Schools and Race: A Lost Opportunity for Integrated Education, Harvard University, The Civil Rights Project, July 2003, http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/deseg/Charter_Schools03.pdf (accessed December 29, 2005)the SAT is measured in two areas, each on a scale of 200 to 800. A written essay portion was added to the SAT in 2005.

Historically, minority students have not scored as well on the SAT as white students, but gains have been made since 1995. In 2005 the average score for the verbal portion of the SAT among whites was 532, compared with 511 for Asians and Pacific Islanders, 489 for Native Americans and Alaska Natives, and 433 for African-Americans. Among Hispanic subgroups, Mexican Americans averaged 453 on the verbal portion of the test, Puerto Ricans averaged 460, and the rest of the Hispanic subgroups combined for an average of 463. However, only Mexican Americans and other Hispanics failed to see gains from 1995 to 2005, while the gain for African-Americans was modest. (See Table 3.11.)

Mathematics scores were better in 2005 than they were in 1995 for all minority groups. In 2005 Asians and Pacific Islanders scored the highest by far on the math portion of the test, with an average score of 580. Whites scored an average of 536, Native Americans and Alaska Natives 493, Mexican Americans 463, Puerto Ricans 457, other Hispanics 469, and African-Americans 431. (See Table 3.11.)

Minority College Attendance

Generally, minority enrollment in colleges and universities has grown ever since racial and ethnic enrollment statistics were first reported in 1976. Although these gains are encouraging, they must be viewed in the context of overall participation rates in higher education and degree completion rates.

In October 2003 six out of ten (60.3%) Asians and Pacific Islanders ages eighteen to twenty-four were enrolled in colleges and universities, the largest proportion of all race and ethnic groups, compared with four out of ten (41.6%) white, non-Hispanic people ages eighteen to twenty-four. Other minority groups had significantly
[Image Not Available]
[Image Not Available]
lower enrollment rates. Almost one-third (32.3%) of African-Americans, 23.5% of Hispanics, and 17.7% of Native Americans and Alaska Natives in that age group were enrolled in colleges and universities. (See Table 3.12.)

Earning Bachelor's Degrees

College participation rates are telling, but so, too, are college completion rates. A number of students begin college, only to drop out before receiving a bachelor's degree. In 2003, 50.2% of African-Americans between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine had completed some college, while only 17.2% had actually graduated with a four-year degree. Among Hispanics in this age group, 31.1% had completed some college, while only 10% had received a bachelor's degree. Among both these minority groups, about two out of three students who began college failed to complete it. Among Asian-Americans in this age group, 81.2% had completed some TABLE 3.12 Percentage of persons ages 18-24 enrolled in colleges or universities, by race/ethnicity, October 2003 Catherine Freeman and Mary Ann Fox, "Table 7.1b. Percentage of Persons Ages 18 to 24 Enrolled in Colleges or Universities, by Race/Ethnicity: October 2003," in Status and Trends in the Education of American Indians and Alaska Natives, National Center for Education Statistics, August 2005, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005108.pdf (accessed January 19, 2006)college, and 61.6% had received a four-year degree—the highest completion rate of any race or ethnic group. (See Figure 3.1.)

Affirmative Action

In the landmark 1978 affirmative action case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (438 US 265), the U.S. Supreme Court allowed race and ethnicity to be considered in college admissions in the interest of racial and ethnic diversity on U.S. college campuses. This led many schools to take special steps to boost the number of minorities that they admitted, a process commonly called affirmative action.

Over time, many people came to see affirmative action as a negative policy. Their reasons varied, but a common complaint was that affirmative action allowed some minority students to get into colleges even when their test scores and high school grades were below what those colleges would accept from white students. In June 1996 Pete Wilson, the governor of California, urged California voters to support the California Civil Rights Initiative (Proposition 209), a proposal to eliminate affirmative action in higher-education enrollment. In November 1996 California voters approved Proposition 209, which prohibited public universities from considering race and ethnicity when deciding on admissions. Sheila O'Rourke reports in "Strategies for Achieving Faculty Diversity at the University of California in a Post-Proposition 209 Legal Climate" (2002, http://www.oma.umn.edu/kof/pdf/209.pdf) that in 1997, the last year that the University of California (UC) considered race and ethnicity in its admissions process, 7,236 students from underrepresented minority groups (Native Americans, African-Americans, and Hispanics) were admitted, accounting for 17.9% of total admissions. In 1998, the first year of admissions after Proposition 209 went into effect, the proportion of underrepresented minorities dropped to 15.5%.

In March 1996, in the case Hopwood v. Texas (78 F.3d 932), often called Bakke II, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that the University of Texas (UT) School of Law was discriminating against white students by using race or ethnicity as a factor in admissions. Four white applicants charged that less-qualified African-American and Hispanic students had been accepted instead of them because of racial preference on the part of UT. The appeals court ruled that colleges could not give preferences to minority students, even for what it called "the wholesome practice of correcting perceived racial imbalance in the student body." In the opinion of the appeals court, "any consideration of race or ethnicity by the law school for the purpose of achieving a diverse student body is not a compelling interest under the Fourteenth Amendment." The Hopwood decision applied to all public universities in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In Texas, Attorney General Dan Morales applied the admissions ruling to include financial aid and scholarships.

This decision negatively affected the number of underrepresented minority students at the UT School of Law. According to Lydia Lum in "Minority Rolls Cut by Hopwood" (Houston Chronicle, September 1997, http://www.chron.com/cgi-bin/auth/story/content/chronicle/metropolitan/97/09/16/hopwood.2-0.html), in 1997, following the decision affecting the law school, out of five hundred incoming students, only four African-American students and twenty-six Mexican Americans were enrolled, down from thirty-one African-Americans and forty-two Mexican Americans the previous year. At the undergraduate levels, public universities throughout Texas also saw a drop in minority applications. Texas A&M University registered nearly 15% fewer Hispanics and 23% fewer African-Americans.

PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES RESPOND

In 1998 the UT system became the first public university to grant automatic admission to first-time freshmen based on class rank. Under Texas Education Code 51.803, students who graduate in the top 10% of their class from an accredited Texas high school are guaranteed admission to UT. Because some high schools have large minority populations, state officials hoped that more minority students would be admitted to state universities. After initial declines in minority enrollment, UT announced in early 2003 that Hispanic enrollment had returned to the pre-Hopwood level and that African-American enrollment was nearing its 1996 level.

In March 1999 UC regents approved a similar admission policy called Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC). Under the ELC, students graduating in the top 4% of their class in California high schools are eligible for admission to one of UC's undergraduate campuses. The ELC was implemented starting with freshmen applicants in the fall of 2001.

Supreme Court Affirms Racial Preferences

In June 2003 the Supreme Court made two separate rulings on the admission practices at the University of Michigan's undergraduate college and its law school. The undergraduate college used a point system in an effort to achieve diversity in the student body, awarding twenty points on a scale of 150 to African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. The Court rejected this system, maintaining that it was too broad and too much like a quota, ruling that it violated the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. By contrast, the University of Michigan law school weighed race and ethnicity along with a number of other admissions factors. The Court deemed this approach legal in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), because it furthered "a compelling interest in obtaining education benefits that flow from a diverse student body." As a result, the Court upheld the concept of race-conscious admissions, but the nuanced approach to admissions that the Court found acceptable left the door open for further lawsuits. While smaller schools can devote more time and attention to individual applicants, larger institutions still face the problem of how to use race and ethnicity as a factor in screening many applications without assigning a numerical value to it.

Tribal Colleges

Special postsecondary institutions, collectively known as tribal colleges, were established to prepare Native American and Alaska Native students with the skills most needed on reservations, while at the same time preserving their culture. Usually situated in areas where the students cannot otherwise pursue education beyond high school, these colleges all offer associate's degrees. In addition, some offer bachelor's and master's degrees.

Tribal colleges offer courses ranging from teaching and nursing to secretarial skills and computer science that meet the needs of specific communities. Besides tribal languages, traditional subjects are a part of the curricula. According to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium in Tribal Colleges: An Introduction (February 1999, http://www.ihep.com/Pubs/PDF/Intro.pdf), an example is a traditional tribal literature class offered by Bay Mills Community College in Brimley, Michigan, "only in the winter term because the stories are supposed to be told when snow is on the ground."

Freeman and Fox report that in the fall of 2002, 15,837 students were enrolled in tribal colleges—82.2% of them were Native American or Alaska Native. Eight percent of all Native American or Alaska Native college students were enrolled in tribally controlled colleges. Rising enrollment figures suggest that these schools do meet the unique needs of Native American students. Enrollment in tribally controlled colleges increased at a faster rate between 1997 and 2002 (32%) than did Native American and Alaska Native enrollment in college generally (16%).

Black Colleges and Universities

More than one hundred institutions known as historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) exist in the United States. The state with the largest number of HBCUs (fourteen) is Alabama. North Carolina and Georgia are home to eleven institutions each, while another nine are located in Texas. The NCES reports in Fall Enrollment in Degree-Granting Historically Black Colleges and Universities, by Type and Control of Institution and Race/Ethnicity of Student: Various Years, 1976–2001 (April 2004, http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/AnnualReports/reports.asp?type=historically&pagetype=text) that in 2001, the last year for which data are available, 248,295 minority students, 238,638 of them African-American, were enrolled in these institutions.