Busting myths about affirmative action

A comparative study of affirmative action programs finds that they do not significantly affect students' self-regard or academic performance, as some skeptics have suggested. In fact, as many other studies show, factors like socioeconomic background and academic preparation are the more revealing indicators of student success in college.

In the current issue of Social Problems, study authors Douglass Massey and Margarita Mooney of Princeton University took an interesting ap-proach in analyzing programs tailored to bring nonacademic considerations into the admissions program: They looked at students admitted on the basis of "legacy" (i.e., as children of alumni) and athletic ability, in addition to affirmative action students, to see if preferences affected the students' work habits and psyche.

The authors write, "In attaching the label ‘affirmative action' to legacy and athletic admissions, we are being deliberately provocative in order to underscore the fact that minorities are not the only social group to benefit from a ‘thumb on the scale' in academic admissions."

The authors' data hold some surprises. In many private and research institutions, the percentage of these other "affirmative action" program ap-plicants who are accepted is much higher than the percentage accepted to programs recruiting ethnic minorities. At the University of Virginia, for example, 32 percent of regular applicants were admitted, compared with 57 percent of alumni children. As a result, the freshman class of 2002 was 7 percent legacy compared with 3 percent African-American, even though the latter group makes up 20 percent of the state population. (The authors did not cite the ratio of African-Americans who applied and who were accepted.)

More to the point of the study, the authors take on two assertions: that affirmative action programs set up minority students for failure because they are underprepared for the colleges they attend and that they stigmatize minority students as intellectually inferior, which causes them to doubt their own abilities. Massey and Mooney also apply those assertions to the legacy students and athletes.

Among their findings:

For minority students, attending a school where the application of affirmative action criteria has produced a large SAT gap between minorities and other students lowers the odds of their leaving school, unlike with legacy students who are more likely to leave the school under the same cir-cumstances.

Further, the authors found no indication that minority students caved under the pressure to perform well to prove that they did not fit the stereo-type. The students' performance instead was affected by how many hours they studied (about 1.5 more a day than regular students) and socioeco-nomic factors.

The authors conclude: "Greater attention should probably be paid to improving the access of poor children of all races to high-quality schooling than to arguing about the relatively small effects of affirmative action on academic achievement."

The methodology and results of the study are written up in the journal Social Problems, Volume 54, Issue 1 (2007).


Looking out for Number One

For the 10th year in a row, the pay increases of higher education's top administrators have outpaced inflation. Their paychecks also have main-tained a tidy distance from those of other higher ed employees, according to data released in March by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.

For the 2006-07 year, median salaries of senior-level administrators increased 4 percent on average, up from 3.5 percent last year and 3.3 percent the year before. This category includes presidents, vice presidents, deans and so on. The increase was larger, on average, for administrators work-ing in public institutions (4 percent) than those in private schools, where the average increase was 3.9 percent.

For faculty, CUPA-HR's data show an average increase of 3.8 percent overall for this year. It was also higher at public institutions (3.9 percent) than at private (3.7 percent). This year's faculty increase compares with raises of 3.4 percent last year and 3.2 percent in 2004-05.

Mid-level administrators and professional staff fared better in 2006-07 than in years past. They got an average hike of 3.8 percent, up from 3.3 percent last year and 3 percent the year before. As with the other job classifications, the increase was better at public institutions than at private-4 percent versus 3.6 percent, respectively. This category of worker includes a wide range of titles from reference librarian, affirmative action spe-cialist, budget analyst and information technology specialists to head coach, staff attorney and major gift officer.

CUPA-HR gathered the data for its salary surveys from three separate, randomly sampled pools of institutions, balanced by institutional type and affiliation. The number of institutions surveyed for the senior administrators was 1,329; for faculty, it was 894; and for mid-level administrators, 1,036.

More information is available at http://www.cupahr.org/.


State support of higher ed is rebounding

Two years ago, state funding of public colleges and universities hit its lowest level in 25 years. Better news: Last year, state and local support per full-time equivalent (FTE) student in public institutions grew 5.1 percent faster than inflation and enrollment growth. The average national FTE allocation was $6,325. Nevertheless, in 2001, before the U.S. economy started to plummet, per-student support was up to $7,371 (in 2006 dol-lars).

The State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) association compiles funding data from every state, every year. Support per student de-creased between 2001 and 2005, the group's "State Higher Education Finance 2006" report explains, largely because enrollment and inflation grew much faster than increases in public funding. Until 2004, funding levels were flat. In 2005, funding went up 3.6 percent, but that increase lost relative value because of increases in enrollment and inflation. The net effect was an increase of 1.4 percent.

Thus, in 2006, the average tuition revenue per student grew more slowly than state and local increases for the first time since 2001. Overall, to offset the state funding declines, tuition revenue grew 17.1 percent from 2001 to 2006. Last year, state aid to students at public institutions rose from 5.6 percent to 5.7 percent; state aid to students at independent colleges dropped from 2.8 percent to 2.7 percent.

State funding growth over the past five years varied for many reasons. In Louisiana, funding grew by only 1.6 percent because the state had to adjust for large enrollment losses after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. After Louisiana, the states with the slowest enrollment growth were Iowa, Montana, Washington and Idaho. South Dakota, with an increase of 32.6 percent in its enrollment during the period, showed the most growth. Just behind it were New Jersey, North Carolina, Kansas, Nevada and Florida.

In terms of state education appropriations, Colorado showed the greatest decline at -37.9 percent, and New Mexico the greatest increase, 23 per-cent, over the five-year period. Also at the low end of the scale were New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Minnesota and Missouri. The SHEEO re-port can be found at http://www.sheeo.org/.