I wonder how much of this underrepresentation reflects the underrepresenation of poor students in general.
At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League – Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown – more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.
No other kid from my block in East Flatbush was so lucky. At their truly public schools (not charters, not magnets, but common schools available to every family in the neighborhood), they routinely faced atrocious conditions including gun violence, overcrowding, and a curriculum that emphasized obedience over innovation. As outsiders to the college-prep “feeder system,” which includes a small number of competitive high schools including Philips Academy and Trinity, the students who persevere despite these formidable demands and manage to graduate, are rarely seen as “high-achieving” by schools like Yale. From the perspective of prep schoolers who have no grasp of the challenges presented by economic scarcity, the Collegiate Honor Roll Lacrosse captain easily surpasses the Benjamin Banneker High B+ student who lives in a shelter and works at Target after school to help out her single mother and younger siblings. The fantasy that all young people are running the same race blinds many university trustees, administrators, and admissions committees to the reality that they undervalue students who always have to run uphill.
This sounds like an issue with the public elementary and secondary education systems more than anything else -- affirmative action can only do so much for those that qualify, but if eligibility does not increase in lock step with population then there are some basic problems that need to be addressed.
Perhaps college endowment funds[1] should invest in supporting elementary and secondary education systems rather than private equity.
How many freshmen are children of first-generation immigrants? The percentage likely pales in comparison to children of second-generation immigrants as climbing the financial ladder is (generally speaking) a basic requirement to raising children than can attend college as well as having the capability to fund their attendance.
The problem is it isn't primarily the schools, it's the whole environment. A poor student has no time to study because he's busy raising his little sister while his single mother is working two jobs. His neighbors at home try to sell him drugs or recruit him into a gang instead of suggesting that he join the lacrosse team with them.
We keep focusing programs on the very bottom as if the solution is to get literally everyone in the 1st percentile up to the 5th, while ignoring that the 5th percentile is still miserable. What we ought to be doing is fighting the impediments for people at the bottom to break into the middle.
Like, people sell drugs but not sandwiches because the amount of bureaucracy involved in operating a sandwich cart is higher than the margins on sandwiches. Meanwhile selling drugs is fully illegal but the margins are high enough to make up for it.
We've inflated the price of real estate so artificially high by constraining supply that a) people have trouble affording a place to live, but also b) people have trouble affording a place to work -- you can't open a shop if you can't pay the rent.
We keep all of the structural factors that cause their fathers to be in prison rather than in business and then find it shocking that the effects of losing parental income and involvement are more than nothing.
Honestly I don't mind that drug dealers get the book thrown at them, play stupid games/win stupid prizes, furthermore the equivocating and rationalizing around drug dealing having great margins is disingenuous at best and malicious at worst.
There's more to the situation than microeconomic theory and approaching it from a purely economic point of view is dangerous.
If we're going to be serious about why fathers are in prison then it stands to reason that we focus on keeping families together, the vast majority of women that enter single motherhood fall into poverty and welfare. Not only that but they never get out of it and they have to endure mental illness (eg: depression, obesity, addiction) which further complicates family life.
Telling these young women that they're better off alone, that they can find better relationship opportunities, and other pie-in-the-sky ideological claptrap is reckless and negligent. It is truer now more than ever that the traditional family unit is the best institution for ensuring a child's future is secure.
No I'm not saying women should endure abusive relationships but for heaven's sake we have to be honest about the fact that they're better off settling down early than "finding themselves" which we all know is primarily promiscuity, alcoholism, and drug abuse.
One of the big problems is that in the US school districts are highly local, so economically depressed neighborhoods have far fewer resources to educate children. The US really needs state-wide or metropolitan-wide public school systems that assign students by lottery (assuming that good schools are over-enrolled). This will do a lot to level the playing field, however it's far unlikely to happen for reasons of both class and race.
So that leaves universities to level the playing field. If the US ever gets the K12 education system overhauled maybe can argue against this interventionism from universities, but otherwise how do we start fixing today's problems today?
The presentation of these statistics is misleading and reads like a common case of "find some numbers to support this great narrative I want to write." Comparing total college-age population with final enrollment assumes that all groups apply to these universities in equal proportion, and that all races/cultures hold the same assumptions about the value of a university education for prosperity/success/happiness. The narrative seems to suggest that university is the primary means to wealth and advancement, thus if blacks and Hispanics are under-represented, they are necessarily disproportionately under-privileged.
If the goal is to evaluate possible university-driven under-representation, an honest statistic would be comparing application rates to acceptance rates per race. Or if the objective is measuring social mobility, examining the percentage of college-age persons attending technical schools, working as skilled labor, earning a certain percentage above the poverty line (or a reasonable percentage of median household income), or attending university, would reveal differing career choices while also showing which percentage of each race falls outside of a normal path to upward mobility.
Maybe I am cynical, but I think white over-representation has more to do with economic disparity, which results in cultural disparity between rungs of the economic ladder, such that upper-middle class society (within which whites are over-represented) overvalues university as the de facto path to prosperity and success. But even among whites, there are still a lot of first-generation university students. This is not driven by race, but by socioeconomics - parents who worked blue collar jobs without an education, earned their way into middle/upper-middle class circles, which then inculcated either their children, them, or both with the expectation of university attendance. Measuring those realities, their causes and effects, is where real solutions to these disparities will be sought.
> Comparing total college-age population with final enrollment assumes that all groups apply to these universities in equal proportion, and that all races/cultures hold the same assumptions about the value of a university education for prosperity/success/happiness.
No, it doesn't. It simply measures underrepresentation. Variations on those axes aren't assumed away, because while those may explain some or all of the underrepresentation (at least, intermediate mechanisms, if not root causes), they do not negate it's existence.
> Maybe I am cynical, but I think white over-representation has more to do with economic disparity, which results in cultural disparity between rungs of the economic ladder
In terms of race issues, that's exactly the polar opposite of cynicism, and well into pollyannaism.
Sorry, I think in editing I deleted my intermediate sentence. You are right, it measures under-representation, but the narrative and assumption is that under-representation in university is problematic, worrisome, an issue. I think that assumption is false, and assuming that under-representation is an issue that can be fixed, or should be fixed, relies on assuming that there is some cause that does not originate with the individual. If individuals simply do not choose to attend university, then that is not a problem that should be forcefully fixed. If instead individuals from each race equally desire and apply to university, and still under-representation exists, then measuring it is useful. But in that case measuring application to acceptance is more accurate.
> but the narrative and assumption is that under-representation in university is problematic, worrisome, an issue
Sure, but even if the mechanisms you suggest are assumed away (they aren't) are part of the mechanism of underrepresentation, it would still be all those things. In fact, I would see increasing racial divergence in either the perceived value of college or the rate of application independent of the perceived value of college and extremely worrying signs.
But, really, before people accept the value of explaining the trend toward increasing black/hispanic underrepresentation, they need to understand that the exists; in case you haven't noticed, there is a very powerful (if entirely non-factual) narrative exact opposite is the case, driven by an increasingly powerful political faction, including the leadership of the executive branch of the US government.
Why was this flagged? With an ongoing engineering skills gap and an increasing nativist political climate around the world, inequalities in American education will make or break the tech economy in this country. If we avert our eyes from the systemic problems here, there might not be a stream of H1B candidates eager to implement your 'disruptive' ideas. We need to ensure quality education is accessible to every demographic here.
No doubt this is because of the ever increasing cost of going to college in the USA. This favors kids with parents that can pay for some part it, and black and hispanic households tend to have less money than other etnic groups.
This won't fix the problems of certain groups being excluded though. We have free public schools in the U.S. and these are still some of the most segrarated insitutions, the overwhelming majority of children go to school where their ethnic group or race is the majority.
Amazing to see what a steep drop of whites each of those charts show, in many cases their share more than halving in as little as 35 years. And despite such a dramatic decrease, it still doesn't keep pace with the demographic changes.
> The share of black freshmen at elite schools is virtually unchanged since 1980. Black students are just 6 percent of freshmen but 15 percent of college-age Americans
Leading to an "underrepresentedness" figure of -9 (or -10 on the graph in the article, which is probably due to rounding).
But that's a stupid way of calculating underrepresentedness. E.g. if a group has 8 % of the population but none go to university they would be underrepresented by -8, less than blacks but clearly 8->0 is a much larger diparity than 15->6.
I think raw numbers can be helpful, but for comparison in that context, percent underrepresented is probably a better number. So black students are 60% underrepresented. In the second case, it would be 100% underrepresented.
Could any share of this be due to fringe far-left groups targeting minorities for their "fuck everything about the system and STEM education is bad" recruitment campaigns?
I'm not aware of such efforts, beyond twititer snark, and I'm pretty far left. But assuming it exists: No, the vast majority of Blacks and Latinos are part of the political mainstream.
At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League – Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown – more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-c...
No other kid from my block in East Flatbush was so lucky. At their truly public schools (not charters, not magnets, but common schools available to every family in the neighborhood), they routinely faced atrocious conditions including gun violence, overcrowding, and a curriculum that emphasized obedience over innovation. As outsiders to the college-prep “feeder system,” which includes a small number of competitive high schools including Philips Academy and Trinity, the students who persevere despite these formidable demands and manage to graduate, are rarely seen as “high-achieving” by schools like Yale. From the perspective of prep schoolers who have no grasp of the challenges presented by economic scarcity, the Collegiate Honor Roll Lacrosse captain easily surpasses the Benjamin Banneker High B+ student who lives in a shelter and works at Target after school to help out her single mother and younger siblings. The fantasy that all young people are running the same race blinds many university trustees, administrators, and admissions committees to the reality that they undervalue students who always have to run uphill.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/why-iv...