Most HBCUs are nowhere near the elite (super-selective admissions) colleges in terms of being able to build their classes however they like from a surplus of applicants with top-end academic credentials.
Also, considering that non-black students tend to automatically reject the idea of attending an HBCU (even when an HBCU meets all of the student’s stated criteria for college selection, such as scholarship money), it is not surprising that HBCUs have difficulty getting non-black students to apply or enroll. This is unlike the elite (super-selective admissions) colleges where so many of every demographic group applies and wants to attend that they can pick and choose among them for whatever reasons they want (including marketing reasons).
There are reasons to go for something representative of the population, and there are reasons to go for “a critical mass that allows those in small minorities to not feel alone”, but neither are required for diversity, as it is defined by the dictionary.
It’s hard to know (unless you do know, from the H lawsuit or somewhere I haven’t seen yet?) how much poor students vs black students are tipped in admissions, individually (or combined for that matter though Harvard lawsuit docs showed a bigger tip if a student was both, as I recall?) .
If you look at raw numbers, there are more Pell-eligible than black students on most elite campuses. How many black vs poor applicants were turned away? That’s the data needed to state that AA is a bigger tip than SES.
If we know for a fact that it is, I think the college balance sheet would be part of the reason, as ucb points out. And since race IS a key part of the American experience, wanting several races and cultures on campus is a goal for those few colleges that have enough qualified applicants to “craft a class” .
@OHMomof2
As I pointed out in #4698, HBCUS are not remotely close to diverse under the dictionary definition of diversity. They are 3% Hispanic and 1% Asian. The other issue with the dictionary definition of diversity is that it turns diversity into a zero sum game. If only 14% of the population falls into a group, making some colleges more diverse(above 14%), means other colleges have to be less diverse(below 14%).
The Pell income limits suggest that about half of potential traditional college students could get Pell grants if they attend college. About a third of actual college students actually do get Pell grants (those from poor families are less likely to attend college).
For comparison, about 16% of recent public high school graduates are black, and 14% of all college students are black.
Those smaller %ages reflect an increase of 60% since 2000, so they are becoming MORE diverse.
Some are much more diverse than that.
But we move away from your earlier point. (“Yet no one ever worries about the lack of diversity at HBCUs”) Most HBCUs are not particularly selective so do not practice AA, they accept most students who apply, with a handful of exceptions. Increasingly, black students are pursuing the other options that are now available to them, and an apparently increasing number of students of other races are attending HBCUs.
But to compare PWIs and HBCUs makes no sense given their very different history and mission. One intentionally excluded non-whites, one was created to fill the need that exclusion created.
Why should race be a “KEY part of American experience”? “Blacks” from the Caribbean, Africa, or inner city Chicago have not much in common, just like Asians from China/Japan/Korea share little with those from India/Pakistan or Middle East. (God forbid, don’t tell me Japanese and Koreans are the same!) Race is such a horrid thing to be used for any grouping purposes and artificially “crafting a class” based on the so-called race is irresponsible and intellectually self-deceiving.
@makemesmart Unless you are black, it is your statement that race is meaningless that is irresponsible. I don’t know any black people who would agree with you that blacks have little in common.
This is not something we decide, it just IS, and has been since the founding of this country. Perhaps one day it won’t be. But we don’t get to wave a magic wand and wish it away.
@makemesmart@itsgettingreal17 is right that there is a bond in being black that all Black people share regardless of our origin. I identify as a Black man 1st and foremost. Where I disagree with AA supporters is using race in college admissions, because it tries use the historical bad treatment (and in some cases current bad treatment) of one group (African Americans) as a shield to discriminate against others (including a group who has also faced its far share of discrimination in America).
I know that I have never claimed that race is irrelevant in America, but it will NEVER be irrelevant as long as we continue to make race so relevant, especially in our institutions. Because if we can not see that helping those at the bottom of our society regardless of race attend colleges or develop skills and trades is a nobler cause, then we will continue this current cycle indefinitely (or until the courts decide otherwise).
No magic wand here, but there shouldn’t be more concerted efforts to keep socially constructed groupings that have zero scientific basis alive. Something that has existed for a long time does not make it legit.
Contrary to your understanding, I think race has been given too much meaning in today’s society. It is not meaningless, but it is segregating the society instead of uniting it . Many African Americans might have shared more generic similarities with European Americans because of the “forcefully shared” history. @ChangeTheGame I can’t agree more with what you have said here “helping those at the bottom of our society regardless of race”.
Even though many say that race should not be a key part of one’s experience, it actually is a key part of many people’s experience, whether they want it to be or not. (For most, affirmative action policies or lack thereof in colleges admission is a minimal to non contributor to this type of thing.)
The problem is that it isn’t simply “historical bad treatment” – the “bad treatment” tied to race continues to this day.
I used to be a criminal defense attorney – and there was a very stark and extreme difference in the ways that the criminal justice system treated black vs. white defenders under virtually identical circumstances. And it started early on – within the juvenile system, a white kid who was charged with an offense such as shoplifting, alcohol possession, or truancy would be treated much more leniently. I hated seeing it and at the same time, it was so endemic and persistent within the system that as a lawyer, I had to factor that into the advice I was giving clients as to potential outcome, such as whether or not to accept a plea deal. And this was in a “liberal / progressive” part of the country.
Other researchers have documented the differential impact of public school discipline policies on black vs. white students, starting as early as preschool. So to pretend that the treatment doesn’t persist in a way that directly impacts children as they grow up and attend local schools simply isn’t in accord with reality.
It is not right and not the way it should be – but it is the way things really ARE now.
And I think there are many different reasons for this, but I do also think that a lot of it comes from implicit or unconscious biases and acceptance of cultural stereotypes. And I also think that those stereotypes can be mitigated through efforts to increase diversity at colleges, and also to increase the overall numbers of African Americans with higher educational attainment. I also don’t think the goal of mitigating the stereotype would be met if a college admitted only lower SES blacks – on the contrary, if most of the black students on a college campus were poor, inner-city kids, that would just reinforce the ghetto stereotype.
Money talks (and walks) in American justice system, I don’t need to be a public defender to know that, though my understanding all comes second-handedly, from books and news.
Your last statement just proved that AA at elite colleges won’t solve the problems facing the majority blacks, esp poor blacks, when the schools most of them attending are poorly run and they grow up in a environment that is not inducive to education, so that most of them would not even graduate from high school. There of course will be one or two Ta-Nehisi Coates or Ben Carson.
Giving URMs “preferential treatment” at college level, and “craft a class” with racial diversity, we only succeeded at creating an illusion that our society has solved racial inequality in higher education while totally ignored the problems blacks are facing today: lagging behind in academic performances at all grade levels.
I was a strong supporter of AA in college before, but I am no longer a supporter, because AA in elite colleges does not improve primary and secondary education, does not create better job and career prospects for most poorly educated black youths.
America today is as segregated as in the fifties, the segregation is done by income and housing prices. Poor whites suffer as much as poor blacks in getting good/decent education, except poor white kids don’t have the constant threats of being killed while wearing hoodies/speeding/playing a toy gun.
Maybe, poor white kids get taught common sense, like not modifying your toy gun so that it looks identical to a real gun, then taking what appears to be a real gun to a public park in an urban area, and pointing it at strangers.
Maybe, but more likely a poor white kid who grew up without much common sense, who played real guns and pointing at strangers survived childhood, only to be taken away by opioid overdose.
Actually, your comments pretty much prove me right about “cultural stereotypes” – I didn’t say anything about guns or hoodies in my post – I referred to kids caught shoplifting, underage possession of alcohol, & truancy. I could expand that to include trespassing and possession of illicit drugs such as marijuana. And it definitely wasn’t a money or a class thing either. Plenty of middle-class kids from intact families with employed families get into that sort of trouble during the teen years.
I believe that whites and blacks, in the aggregate, can be treated differently according to their race. But that doesn’t justify affirmative action for me.
It doesn’t explain, for example, why Asians are discriminated against across the board relative to whites in college admissions (but this is easy to understand given knowledge of the history of American universities and political forces in the US).
If affirmative action is designed to counteract the disparity of treatment, including that by, say, law enforcement—wouldn’t the same logic make even more sense to make the law itself more lenient for black offenders than whites? But this is never offered as a solution, because even though it could make some progress in equalizing the justice system, it offends our sensibilities of fairness. We’ve become too comfortable with the idea of affirmative action that we can sit idly by while class after class of students gets systematically discriminated against based on their skin color.
Proponents of affirmative action usually deflect and say that logic’s all wrong, it’s really about increasing diversity. But that has a whole other set of issues and inconsistencies that make me think it’s really about discriminating against Asians.
I wish that I believed that future teachers, lawyers and judges in college knowing a black student or having a black friend changes the school discipline narrative/criminal justice system, because that would really be a simplistic answer. I already believe most of these future professionals have some diversity in their friend circles, but I believe they see those friends as an outliers. While your plan at is best a way to lower criminal sentences (like I said, I don’t believe that because it would already be happening), I believe that my own ideas would help lower African Americans ever getting charged with a crime.
When that racial diversity is achieved through means that is viewed as discrimination by a part of the population, it taints that racial diversity and creates an us versus them narrative that divides parts of our society even as it tries to unite it.
Your statement is a stereotype. I grew up in a low income area, but I was never “ghetto”. Being poor and Black and being ghetto are not synonymous. No one has mentioned admitting only lower SES Black students, but giving an admissions boost to all low SES students and using criteria other than our racial identity in college admissions.