Black Enough at Harvard

When I was in college, I noticed that for all the diversity (remember I'm from MN and diversity is relative), everyone was pretty much the same.

I found this fun article, Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones? in the New York Times about everyone's favorite topic, affirmative action. It's the same old song: too many immigrants, bougie kids, and the light skinneded, only now even the bougie kids are losing ground. Here's a cut:

There is also wide disagreement about what, if anything, should be done about the underrepresentation of African-American students whose families have been here for generations. Even Professor Gates, who can trace his ancestry back to slaves, and Professor Guinier, whose mother is white and whose father immigrated from Jamaica, emphasize different ideas.

"This is about the kids of recent arrivals beating out the black indigenous middle-class kids," said Professor Gates, who plans to assemble a study group on the subject. "We need to learn what the immigrants' kids have so we can bottle it and sell it, because many members of the African-American community, particularly among the chronically poor, have lost that sense of purpose and values which produced our generation."

In Professor Guinier's view, there are plenty of other blacks who could also succeed at elite colleges, but the institutions are not doing enough to find them. She said they were overly reliant on measures like SAT scores, which correlate strongly with family wealth and parental education.

"Colleges and universities are defaulting on their obligation to train and educate a representative group of future leaders," said Professor Guinier, a Harvard graduate herself who has been studying college admissions practices for more than a decade. "And they are excluding poor and working-class whites, not just descendants of slaves."

The root of the problem (outside of the 500 years of history thing) is that poor kids go to crap schools. And if you go to a crap school, you'll be lucky to get a high school diploma, never mind succeeding in an elite college or university. My brother attended an elite school with an "inner city kid" from Brooklyn, and smart as he was (he was damn fine, too), that kid just didn't have the skills. He's doing all right now, but he had to leave the institute without a degree. I can only imagine the disappointment. I've talked to others who were stars in their public school, but nearly tanked in college.

So until we beef up elementary and secondary education, there'll just be a diversity of sameness in the elite schools and a dumbing down of the other higher education institutions.