I.e. you agree what white flight or fear of being a member of a minority group is a real thing.
So why would you argue against that helping keep historically black schools almost all black even after accounting for confounding factors? The most visible incidences of white self-segregation away from black people was in the recent past, when automatic full tuition to full ride scholarships were more common than they are now. Some of them were at historically black schools, but white (or any non-black) students seemed to be extremely hesitant to even consider the historically black schools, even if their financial limits requires a full tuition to full ride merit scholarship, and their stats happened to fit the scholarships at the historically black schools.
International undergraduate student is generally considered an anti-hook for college admissions, financial aid, and scholarships.
Also, at the elite-admissions colleges, some of the international students have “hook” characteristics like relation to a prominent foreign politician or donor (or the more ordinary level “hook” of legacy).
At places like MIT, Caltech, most of their students scored high on standardized tests not because of their test prep but because of the other academic selection criteria almost guarantee high scores. These tests, even the language portions if they’re native speakers, are just too trivial for them to really spend a lot of time on preparation.
As to the difference between MIT and Caltech, Caltech used to (and may still) value students’ ability in physics more than in math. Caltech’s academic culture used to dominated by its physics department. At one point, nearly half of its students majored in physics (this is no longer true today as CS is now its most popular major). Historically, it’s much less focused on math competitions like Putnam’s than MIT or Harvard.
Switching gears a bit to address comments by @ucbalumnus as to why strong non-black students avoid HBCUs.
Every once in a while I realize just how little I know about the Black experience in America. While I obviously knew why HBCUs were created, I didn’t realize how important they remain for Black advancement into the professional ranks. I assumed the primary reason that black students flocked to HBCUs today was for the social and cultural aspect. Thank you @ChangeTheGame for your continued perspective.
Having said that, I think there are valid reasons why strong students of any race may shy away from HBCUs. And that reason is there might not be enough academic peers to fully challenge the strong students. Let’s measure this using an ACT score cutoff of 30, which corresponds to approximately the top 7% of all test takers, and which is also a common reporting breakpoint. Now let me state ahead of time that for reasons other posters have mentioned, that standardized tests could be less predictive for black students than the population as a whole, especially given the success of HBCUs. But this example is still illustrative.
Let’s start with Morehouse College. According to CollegeData, 3% of enrolled freshman have an ACT of 30 or higher. But in any case, with 678 students enrolled each year, that works out to about 20 students each year that are in the top 7% of test-takers in the ACT. For highly talented students, that is a very small peer group. You might not have an academic peer in most of your classes, and you have to search for them outside of classes.
Next look at University of Georgia, which has about 6300 students each year, and where the average ACT is 29! If you have a 30+ on the ACT, 45% of the class is right there with you, which is about 2800 students. Regardless of any test biases, it is unquestioned that there are far more bright students at Georgia than at Morehouse College. Even if the score ranges were the same, the larger number of students would still make it easier to find your academic peers at Georgia, perhaps concentrated in the Honors program.
And of course, the University of Georgia is not the most selective state school in Georgia. That honor belongs to Georgia Tech, which has 83% of its students in the ACT range of 30-36.
@hebegebe I know Morehouse well (my alma mater) and the numbers you gave are probably pretty similar to what I saw at Morehouse besides my entering class was bigger (around 900 students). I was in that top 5% from a standardized testing standpoint and I thought I would be able to dominant with my natural intelligence, but it didn’t quite work out that way. The top 3% of my class were students who could have gone anywhere and succeed and they did so after Morehouse. What I found that was hard to quantify is that there were some students with average to below average test scores (20-23 range on the ACT) that turned out to be much smarter that those test scores, much smarter. I am not sure if it was because of inferior high schools, or whether they were late bloomers, but a couple of those kids came out of nowhere. One of my good friends with a middling standardized test score ended up getting a dual degree diploma from Morehouse/Georgia Tech and getting his masters at MIT. I have some idea why his test scores were below my own (kind of a late bloomer when it came to caring about school, but found motivation in being around African American men like himself) but I think some African American kids fall through the cracks that HBCUs can sometimes catch and mold into something unexpected. I see that Georgia Tech today is in the top 4 in the US for graduating black engineers (other schools in the top 5 are all HBCUs) and they get a large portion of the those black engineers (at least half back in my time) from Morehouse, Spelman, and Clark Atlanta University. You are correct that top students could be lonely, but I found my relatively high standardized scoring self having some academic issues (because it took me a while to develop a work ethic). My daughter has found a group of students that she considers to be peers in every way, but I do think it is easier for her since she had a scholarship cohort that has bonded together at one of the larger HBCUs with some of the highest standardized test scores. I tend not to have many concerns about the getting what is needed from an academic perspective from HBCUs, but the lack of resources in comparison to state and elite institutions (especially for students majoring in STEM subjects) has always been my one issue.
It sounds like the HBCUs are hidden gems (to most of the US population) in the way they take incoming students with less preparation coming in and prepare them for success.
I’d just point out that a 23 ACT composite is in the upper one-third of scorers; a 29 is top 8%.
HBCU’s may very well be taking some students who need extra support to compensate for educational weaknesses, but they are also serving very capable students who did well in high school. The majority of those students would not be candidates for elite admissions at the most competitive schools, but it’s probable that many of the students would qualify for admissions at their state public universities.
My son graduated from a Cal State that has reported score ranges not much different than Morehouse. My son was a National Merit finalist and his own scores were well above 75th percentile for his alma mater. Because most HBCU’s are in the southeast there wouldn’t be much direct competition with California CSU’s, but I’m sure there are plenty of public state colleges that are the functional equivalent.
There are many, many students who have the intellectual capability to do well even at elite colleges, but do not necessarily test well, and who may hit their stride later than the high school years – so for example have weaker grades in high school simply due to not putting in their best effort at the time. And yes there are also public schools that fail their students, but it is painting things with a very broad brush to assume that all students who did not spend their high school years obsessing over grades & test scores are victims of failing schools.
With the HBCUs we are not talking about all students coming out of public schools, but rather specifically black students, as that is the mission of the institutions. To say that public schools are not failing them is to stick one’s head in the sand. And we are not talking about obsessing over grades and test scores, but rather the basics. Here is the “broad brush”:
If fully 83% of black children are not proficient in reading at an 8th grade level by the end of elementary school (90%+ of black male children), there is no way that they are going to get “caught up” in high school. Just the opposite, in fact.
This is generally not a funding issue, as education spending in real terms per student has more than tripled over the past 50 years, and inner city schools tend to have the very highest levels of funding anyway. Note that public schools are not doing a particularly good job with white children either.
@hebegebe I have seen/heard those numbers for the percentages of African Americans in certain professions that have attended a HBCU before, but they still shock me.
@calmom “The majority of those students would not be candidates for elite admissions at the most competitive schools, but it’s probable that many of the students would qualify for admissions at their state public universities”.
Just 1 caveat to that statement in relation to state flagships. This would possibly be an overstatement with state flagships, but it does becomes more likely going down the state public university food chain. HBCU’s have tiers just like PWIs do and for the top students from the tippy top HBCUs, that statement is probably true at most levels. But for the vast majority of HBCU’s (most have SAT averages below 1000 overall and some have averages below 900), they won’t have a lot of students who were able to get into their flagship. Georgia Tech and UGA acceptances would be a pipe dream for most, but schools like Kennesaw St, Georgia St. (graduates more African Americans each year than any school in America), and Georgia Southern would be options as an example.
@SatchelSF Those numbers are sobering. From my own point of view, the way to equaling other racial groups academic achievement begins with reading comprehension. Young African American males are an “endangered species” when it comes to academic achievement, even when compared to African American females. The article attempts to put the blame on schools, but African American households have to do a better job as well. That is not an easy job when so many African American households are broken.
Many of the HBCUs are public universities which are currently approximate functional equivalents of the CSUs in the sense of academic programs and the like. However, selectivity is often quite low, due to the tendency for non-black students to avoid them, resulting in a relatively small pool of interested students who will apply to them, many of whom are also interested in other colleges and universities.
But then, if HBCUs tend to have higher student success rates than the students’ entering academic credentials would ordinarily suggest (as mentioned in some recent previous posts), perhaps they should be of greater interest to everyone, including non-black students and other colleges and universities who may want to look into how to improve their own student success rates.
@ChangeTheGame - I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying. Broken homes are a huge problem, identified all the way back to the Moynihan Report as a public policy issue. The problem is that there is so much political capital to be earned through mutual cycles of blame and recrimination, that there is no room for an honest discussion and good faith attempt to fix it.
As you know, I love Sowell’s works for thinking about this. The Vision of the Anointed: Self Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy and his collection The Quest for Cosmic Justice are fantastic. Speaking of addressing inequalities in education at the primary level, he offered some interesting personal reflections here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkDMVdEci4Q&feature=youtu.be&t=412
From the above video: “It would have been an irresponsible self-indulgence for them to have pretended to make things fair. If there is anything worse than unfairness, it is make-believe fairness.” I love that.
Just as a random check, look at the per pupil funding in Boston area, and you can confirm that spending is generally more per pupil - sometimes substantially more - than in the wealthy near suburbs, although of course the educational outcomes are night and day: http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/statereport/ppx.aspx
@SatchelSF That is a great quote. The concept of “Make-believe fairness” pushed my daughter away from elite level PWIs. When she heard people downplaying her best friend’s acceptance to several Ivys because she got a “racial preference”, she saw that “fairness” came with a price, and it didn’t matter that her friend was highly qualified. I know some people believe that the benefit (attending an elite school and getting a world class education) outweighs the harm (perceived as “less” than other admitted students and having to proving over and over that you belong).
Especially in a forum dedicated to college admissions, college life, financial aid and so on. And one that specifically forbids political discussion that isn’t directly relevant to the main purpose of the forum, since it basically just gets people arguing about stuff that they can argue about in thousands of other places.
@OHMomof2 I am not seeing any arguments or debates over anything recently so I am confused. I just spoke about how race colored the spectrum of admissions at elite PWIs for a particular student (my child), but if you want to direct the conversation, you are more than welcome to drive. Talking about the affects of race on college admissions is to talk about things at the cross hairs of the 3 branches of government, but I have not once seen the buzzwords of politics (left, right and so on) talked about recently. I prefer talking to real people about real issues and I don’t see any bans on discussing the topics recently covered on this thread. But when that happens, I have faith in the CC police to handle it…