A new book aimed at discovering why there are so few black and Hispanic professors points the finger at undergraduate affirmative action policies that steer minority students to schools where they don't achieve high grades. According to the book, Increasing Faculty Diversity, the reason there are so few minority Ph.D.s is that most minority undergraduates don't do well enough in college to get into graduate school, a consequence of affirmative action policies that often direct them into elite institutions where they are ill-prepared to earn high marks. Of minority students in the study who scored over 1300 on the SAT, only 12 percent attending elite liberal arts colleges wound up with GPA's in the "A" range, compared with 44 percent of high-scoring minority students who attended state universities. The findings of this five-year study may influence the Supreme Court's deliberations over affirmative action this spring.
"The Unintended Consequences of Affirmative Action," by Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 2003 (subscription required)
"That flailing feeling," by John Leo, US News and World Report, February 10, 2003
Increasing Faculty Diversity: The Occupational Choices of High-Achieving Minority Students, by Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber, will be published by Harvard University Press next month. (Its ISBN is 0674009452)