http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30affirmative-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


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The New Affirmative Action

 Tierney Gearon for The New York Times

Two decades ago, Frances Harris would have been a shoo-in for a place
in U.C.L.A.'s class of 2011. But the political landscape changed, and
with it her chances for admission.

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By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: September 30, 2007
In another time, it wouldn't have been too hard to guess where Frances
Harris would have ended up going to college. She has managed to do
very well in very difficult circumstances, and she is
African-American. Her high school, in the Oak Park neighborhood of
Sacramento, was shut down as an irremediable failure the spring before
her freshman year, then reopened months later as a charter school.
Midway through high school, her father developed heart problems and
became an irritable fixture around the home. She also discovered that
he was not actually her biological father. That was a man named Leroy
who, when her mother took Harris to see him, simply said his name was
George and waited for her to leave. In Harris's senior year, her
mother lost her job at a nursing home and the family filed for
bankruptcy.

Harris somehow stayed focused on teenage life. She earned an A-minus
average and she distinguished herself as a debater. Her basketball
teammates sometimes teased her for using big words, but they also
elected her co-captain. As she led me on a tour of her school and her
neighborhood one day this summer, she introduced me around with an
assured ease that most adults can't manage, even if her sentences are
peppered with "like," "you know" and "Oh, my God." Her bedroom in the
bungalow she shares with her parents is a masterpiece of teenage
energy, the walls covered with her prom-queen tiara, her
purple-and-white basketball jersey (No. 3) and photos of her friends.
"The hardest part of high school," she says, "was to be smart and cool
at the same time." She decided her dream college was the University of
California, Los Angeles.

Ten or 20 years ago, Frances Harris almost certainly would have been
admitted. Her excellent grades might not have even been necessary,
because Berkeley and U.C.L.A. — the jewels in the U.C. system —
accepted almost all of the African-Americans who met the basic
application requirements. To an admissions officer, Harris would have
seemed like gold: diversity and achievement, wrapped up in a single
kid.

But in the early 1990s, the elite campuses began to pull back from
their aggressive affirmative-action policies, and in 1996, California
voters passed the California Civil Rights Initiative, also known as
Proposition 209. After that, race could no longer be a factor in
government hiring or public-university admissions. The number of black
students at both Berkeley and U.C.L.A. plummeted, and at U.C.L.A. the
declines continued throughout the next decade. The reasons weren't
entirely clear, but they seemed to include some combination of the
admissions office taking Proposition 209 to heart and black students
falling further behind in the academic arms race. (Harris, for
instance, scored a 22 on the ACT test — slightly above the national
average and well below the U.C.L.A. average.) The changes on
U.C.L.A.'s campus were hard to miss. In 1997, the freshman class
included 221 black students; last fall it had only 100. In the region
with easily the largest black population west of the Mississippi
River, the top public university had a freshman class in which barely
1 in 50 students was black.

A U.C.L.A. graduate named Peter Taylor, a 49-year-old managing
director at Lehman Brothers in Los Angeles, remembers picking up The
Los Angeles Times outside his house on a Saturday morning in June of
last year and reading that piece of news. Taylor, who is black, is a
third-generation native of the city and one of U.C.L.A.'s most active
alumni. Within days of reading about the latest decline in the number
of black students, he began a campaign to reverse it. At a reception
to honor U.C.L.A.'s new acting chancellor, a law professor named Norm
Abrams, he greeted Abrams with a big smile and said, "Well, Norm,
you're stepping right into it, and you've got to deal with it." Abrams
soon named Taylor to lead a task force of students, faculty, alumni
and outsiders from places like the Urban League and the First A.M.E.
Church. It spent the next year trying to get more black students to
apply, more black applicants to be admitted and more black admits to
enroll. In essence, Taylor's group was trying to figure out how to
bring a student like Frances Harris to U.C.L.A. without breaking the
law — or at least without getting caught. What they have achieved may
well show us the future of affirmative action.

Peter Taylor's office on the 25th floor of the MGM Building in Century
City looks out over the Fox movie lot and a golf course; in the
distance downtown Los Angeles rises. Taylor has lived in an artsy
neighborhood of Los Angeles called Silver Lake since he was a child.
In the aftermath of the Watts riots, his father, then a school
administrator and one of the few black men to hold such a job, became
the principal of Locke High School in South-Central Los Angeles.
Taylor himself went on from U.C.L.A. to earn a master's degree in
public policy and work for Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign before joining
Lehman Brothers. When we were talking in his office, he apologetically
interrupted our conversation and spent 10 minutes on the phone trying
to persuade the person on the other end not to make any changes in a
coming bond offering. There was, he kept saying, no point in doing
something that might upset the market. But Taylor's cautious,
corporate style can be deceiving. He doesn't mind a good fight. "Prop.
209 has made things more challenging," he said. "It has created a new
paradigm. But there are still things that can be done." I asked him
whether those things might include civil disobedience, and Taylor
surprised me by replying: "Exactly when you cross over into civil
disobedience is not always clear. And I probably come down on the side
of pushing the outer limits. I'm much more of the attitude of, 'So
what if someone sues?' If you lose, you at least define the line a
little more clearly. You say, 'Mea culpa,' and you don't do it
anymore."

The heart of California's higher-education problem, according to
Taylor, is that Proposition 209 created a patently impossible
situation. The law says that universities can't consider race, even
though race has an enormous effect on the lives of applicants.
California's best high schools offer so many A.P. and honors classes —
which confer bonus points on a student's G.P.A. — that the average
G.P.A. of white and Asian freshmen at U.C.L.A. is now 4.2. At many of
the largely black high schools around Los Angeles, it is sometimes
impossible to do much better than a 4.0, because of the relative lack
of A.P. classes. Black students at better high schools have a much
easier time, but it's not as if they are keeping up with their peers.
Even if U.C.L.A. tried to get around Proposition 209 by giving a big
leg up to low-income applicants, it wouldn't increase its black
population very much. At every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the
academic record of black students is worse than that of other groups.
As Taylor says: "There is a great deal of pressure to look for a proxy
for race. There is no proxy for race."

He and many other defenders of affirmative action consider this to be
a self-evident fact, but there has also been a good deal of social
science to support the view that the specific problems surrounding
race — including discrimination — endure. One illustrative study found
that résumés with typically black names are less likely to lead to job
interviews than those with typically white names. Other recent studies
have looked at intelligence testing. There have long been two
uncomfortable facts in this area: Intelligence, indisputably, is in
part genetic; and every intelligence test shows a gap between black
Americans and others. For a long time, scientific research wasn't very
good at explaining this gap. But it has gotten better lately. For one
thing, the gap between white and black adults has narrowed
significantly since 1970, according to work by the noted researchers
William Dickens and James Flynn. Four decades is too short a time
period for the gene pool to change, but it's not too short for
environment to improve. Most intriguing, Roland Fryer and Steven D.
Levitt, two economists (the latter is one of this magazine's
Freakonomics columnists), have found there to be essentially no gap
between 1-year-old white and black children of the same socioeconomic
status.

There are still vigorous debates about all this work — intelligence
tests of 1-year-olds are iffy, for instance — but it points in one
direction. Innate intelligence may be partly genetic, but it doesn't
seem to vary by race. So while race may not be the only source of
disadvantage in today's society, it is certainly one of them.

Since affirmative action began in the mid-1960s, it has had both an
explicit role and an implicit one in American life. Explicitly, it has
been about race and, to a lesser degree, sex — a policy to make up for
centuries of oppression and to ensure diversity. But there has always
been a broader notion to affirmative action as well. It has been the
most serious effort of any kind to ensure equality of opportunity,
without regard to wealth or poverty. When all else failed — the War on
Poverty, welfare, public schools — affirmative action would be there
to help less-fortunate Americans overcome the circumstances of their
origins. "Ability is not just the product of birth," Lyndon Johnson
said when he effectively created affirmative action during a
graduation speech at Howard University in 1965. "Ability is stretched
or stunted by the family that you live with and the neighborhood you
live in — by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of
your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces
playing upon the little infant, the child and, finally, the man."

The more expansive idea of affirmative action as a counterweight to
those "unseen forces" has become tightly linked to the self-image of
American universities. Above all else, they are supposed to be
meritocracies. To be truly meritocratic, a college must be diverse —
or else accept that some groups in society have less merit than others
and their underrepresentation can't be helped. University
administrators clearly reject this second view, and as a result the
best colleges are now filled with students of both sexes and every
imaginable race and religion. If you were to ask admissions officers
whether they also gave special consideration to low-income applicants
— whether they gave them credit for overcoming Johnson's unseen forces
— the officers would say that, absolutely, they did.

In truth, however, they did not. Three years ago, William Bowen (the
former president of Princeton) and two other researchers discovered
what was really going on. They persuaded 19 elite colleges — including
Harvard, Middlebury and Virginia — to let them analyze their
admissions records. The easiest way to understand the results is to
imagine a group of students who each have the same SAT scores. Holding
that equal, a recruited athlete was 30 percentage points more likely
to be admitted than a nonathlete. A black, Latino or Native American
student was 28 percentage points more likely to be admitted than a
white or Asian student. A legacy received a 20-percentage-point boost
over someone whose parents hadn't attended that college. And
low-income students? They received no advantage whatsoever. A poor
white kid from upstate New York would be treated no differently from a
white kid in Chappaqua. Frances Harris would get no more of a leg up
than the black daughter of corporate lawyers.

Bowen says he doesn't believe that admissions deans were lying when
they said that their affirmative-action programs took social class
into account. The colleges apparently put even more stock in the
polish that comes with affluence — the well-edited essay, the summer
trip to Guatemala, the Arabic language lessons. In any case, the poor
lose.

There are some big problems with this approach to affirmative action.
For one thing, it rests on a very rickety base of political support.
Colleges often resort to huge preferences to create a racially diverse
student body, especially if they haven't been giving any advantage to
low-income applicants, who are of course disproportionately
minorities. And many of the beneficiaries of the preferences end up
being upper-middle-class minority students, since they tend to have
better test scores than poor minorities. The helping hand that goes to
these relatively well-off nonwhite students strikes many people as
unjust. It makes it seem as if affirmative action isn't making good on
its larger promise. Affirmative action becomes about mere diversity —
and not even all forms of diversity — rather than fairness.
Politically, that has made it weaker and weaker.

In the mid-1990s, a businessman in California named Ward Connerly
began making some of these very criticisms. Connerly was born in
Louisiana in 1939; his father left the family, and his mother died
when he was a little boy. So he was sent West to Sacramento to be
raised by his grandmother. He eventually began working for the state
government, where he became friends with Pete Wilson, a young
Republican legislator. After Wilson was elected governor in 1990, he
named Connerly to the University of California's board of regents, and
Connerly began pressuring the university to cut back on race-based
preferences. His efforts culminated in Proposition 209.

Connerly, not least because he is black, was the politically perfect
face of the anti-affirmative-action movement. He argued then, as he
still does, that the patchwork of diverse campuses and workplaces
created by affirmative action has deluded the country into thinking
that it is solving its racial problems. In truth, he says, the policy
has actually made it harder for blacks to close the achievement gap
with whites. "It's not genetic, I'm convinced," he told me this
summer. "So what is it? I think it's largely self-imposed by black
people who don't put as much emphasis on academic achievement as they
once did and as other groups do now." Connerly will tell you that he
ended up going to college (at Sacramento State) because his
grandmother pushed him to read books all the time.

Many people reject his argument as simplistic, if not worse. But
whatever you think of his solution, it's hard not to find some truth
in his critique of traditional affirmative action. Certainly, voters
seem to feel this way. Last year, Michigan passed an initiative
identical to Proposition 209, and, thanks to Connerly, several other
states are likely to vote on such proposals next year. Soon, more
universities may find themselves in the same situation as the
University of California.

There is almost an iron law of higher education: the more selective a
school is, the fewer low-income students it has. At Harvard and Yale,
only about 10 percent of undergraduates receive federal Pell Grants.
(Typically, students from the bottom 40 percent of the income
distribution are eligible for the Pell.) Even at top public
universities, the share is often 15 percent or less. The colleges that
are filled with poor and middle-class students almost invariably have
low graduation rates. So their graduates are more likely to end up on
the wrong side of the 21st century's educational divide. A bachelor's
degree seems out of reach to a large portion of the American
population, and, as a result, other countries have closed the gap in
educational attainment with the United States over the last
generation.

There are really only two exceptions to the rule, two universities
that are both elite and economically diverse: U.C.L.A. and Berkeley. A
chart on U.S. News & World Report's Web site does a nice job of
summarizing just how unusual they are. It lists the percentage of Pell
Grant recipients at each university in the magazine's famous Top 25
ranking. U.C.L.A. tops the list, at 37 percent, and Berkeley comes
next, at 31 percent. In third place is Columbia, with just 15 percent.

To be fair, the main explanation for this gap is demographic
happenstance. California is filled with low-income immigrant families,
especially from Asia and Latin America, with high-achieving children.
But a set of deliberate policies also plays an important role. The
University of California accepts far more transfer students, mainly
from community colleges, than most colleges. At U.C.L.A., about
one-third of the admitted students arrive as transfers instead of as
freshmen. When I was on campus, I met a 27-year-old Mexican immigrant
named Daniel Flores, who was admitted three years ago as a junior even
though, as Flores told me, "I barely graduated high school." His first
job after high school was in one of U.C.L.A.'s dining halls, where he
realized that he would need more education if he ever wanted to make
much more than minimum wage. He then enrolled in a community college
in West Los Angeles and excelled there. When he was 18 years old — the
only point in life when elite colleges usually consider candidates —
no sane admissions officer would have let him in. By the time he was
23, it was clear he had mainly just lacked for good opportunities.
Earlier this year, he graduated from U.C.L.A.; and there are hundreds
of other students with life stories not so different from Flores's who
are walking through the Italianate buildings on the university's lush
campus.

If anything, Proposition 209 may have helped keep the U.C. campuses as
economically diverse as they are. Desperate to maintain some racial
diversity, university officials set up outreach programs in
lower-income school districts, as James Traub described in this
magazine several years ago. One of them, run by U.C. Davis, which is
outside of Sacramento, visited Frances Harris's elementary school. It
was around this time that Harris first told her parents that she
planned to go to college. Over the years, when things got tough, they
both made a point of reminding her of her vow. "At times I got
discouraged, and they said, 'You've said you're going to go to
college, and you're going to go,' " she recalled. A framed
"reservation for college" certificate from the Davis program still
hangs in her bedroom.

After the initiative passed, the U.C. campuses also put more weight on
students' socioeconomic backgrounds when they made admissions
decisions. Richard Sander, a U.C.L.A. law professor who has become a
critic of affirmative action, studied admissions data at Berkeley and
found that, all else being equal, lower-income students had a better
chance of getting in after 1997 than before. Together, these various
class-based efforts have helped the share of Pell Grant students at
both U.C.L.A. and Berkeley to hold steady over the last decade, even
as it has declined at many similar colleges.

You can make an argument, in fact, that the single most impressive
university in the country today is U.C.L.A. It receives more freshman
applications than any other — 50,744 this year — and, unlike many of
its peers, it can legitimately claim to be an engine of opportunity.
About 90 percent of its students, whether they enter as freshmen or
transfers, eventually graduate. What City College of New York was to
the 20th century, U.C.L.A. is to the 21st.

And now, maybe, it is figuring out ways to solve its race problem.

One night in march of this year, Peter Taylor and three other U.C.L.A.
alumni met in his office to go over a big stack of U.C.L.A.
applications from students who had already been admitted. Over
sandwiches, the four of them — none of whom was a university employee
— helped determine how much financial aid each student would get. This
was one of the "bureaucratic cover-me exercises," as Taylor puts it,
at the heart of the new diversity push at U.C.L.A.

In the previous few months, Taylor and his group had raised $1.7
million for scholarships, the plan being to offer virtually all of it,
immediately, to admitted black students. The easiest thing to do would
have been to hand over the money to the U.C.L.A. Foundation, which
holds and invests the university's endowment, and then allow
financial-aid officers to give it away as they saw fit. But U.C.L.A.'s
general counsel said that allowing the foundation to handle funds
specifically set aside for black students might violate the law. And
letting the financial-aid office disburse the money almost certainly
would have done so, since Proposition 209 prohibited colleges from
recruiting students and offering scholarships based on race. But it
didn't prevent student and alumni groups from doing so. In effect,
Taylor and his task force began outsourcing work that normally would
have been done by the university.

Students and alumni stepped up their recruiting efforts. They visited
high schools and set up a phone bank, with the help of a sympathetic
alumnus who owned a call center, to reach out to black high-school
seniors. Southwest Airlines donated plane tickets, helping black
students who had been admitted to visit the campus. (A survey in 2005
had shown that admitted students were far more likely to choose
U.C.L.A. if they had visited it. If you've been to the campus, this
won't surprise you.) One program that greeted prospective black
students, called Black by Popular Demand, was run by the African
Student Union and the Black Alumni Association. Another program —
Scholars Days — was aimed broadly at less-than-privileged students,
and it was run by the university. The two were scheduled to overlap.

This outsourcing was the second part of the task force's two-pronged
strategy. The group also urged U.C.L.A.'s faculty senate last year to
alter the admissions process. In the past, the admissions office
divided every application between two readers: one evaluated a
student's academic record, the other looked at extracurricular
activities and "life challenges." Berkeley, by contrast, had taken a
more holistic approach, with a single reader judging an entire
application, and Berkeley was attracting more black students than
U.C.L.A. Why? Maybe the holistic approach takes better account of the
subtle obstacles that black students face — or maybe the readers, when
looking at a full application, ended up practicing a little
under-the-table affirmative action.

Last fall, U.C.L.A. made the switch. Two applications readers I
interviewed said that they had received clear, written instructions
not to consider race and that they hadn't. (There are 150 readers in
all, a mix of university employees and paid outsiders.) On the other
hand, applicants seemed to understand that something had changed.
Daniel Fogg, a computer programmer in the admissions office and an
application reader, told me that he noticed more students mentioning
race in their essays this year.

Whatever the reasons, every phase of Taylor's campaign turned out to
be a success. More than 2,400 black students applied last spring, up
13 percent from the previous year. Their admission rate rose to 16.2
percent, from 11.5 percent. Of those who were admitted, slightly more
than half said yes, up from 41 percent in 2006. In all, about 200
African-American freshmen started classes last week, double the number
the year before.

One of them was Frances Harris. Back at her high school in Sacramento
this spring, a group of seniors decided to celebrate their school's
turnaround by photocopying their college acceptance letters and taping
them to the walls. An entire hallway was filled with hundreds of
letters. Until I stood in the hallway with Harris, I wasn't sure it
was possible to find any part of today's college-application process
inspiring. Eleven of the letters were hers, including ones from Pitzer
College, Boston University, U.C.L.A. and U.C. Davis. (Berkeley
rejected her.) She liked B.U., but it seemed too far away, especially
from her mother's perspective. So Harris's decision came down to
Pitzer, which offered her nearly a full scholarship, and U.C.L.A. In
the end, a $1,000 scholarship from Taylor's group, a campus visit
(flight courtesy of Southwest) and a phone call from U.C.L.A.'s
director of financial aid — a combination of official recruiting and
outsourced recruiting — pulled her toward U.C.L.A. "The biggest thing
was seeing so many beautiful, intellectual black young students, being
cool and having discussions about calculus," she said. "It was so
pure. I was so impressed. It was amazing."

Harris's parents and her biological father all attended her
high-school graduation. In late July, her parents drove her to Los
Angeles so she could attend a six-week voluntary summer school that is
officially open to incoming freshmen of all races but is dominated by
black and Latino students. I saw Harris on campus in August, and she
told me that she missed her friends from home but was happy to be a
college student. On her first paper, in English composition, she got a
B-plus, and on her second she got an A-minus. She's thinking about
becoming a pre-med student. Next summer, she plans to go to Washington
to work as an intern with the new chancellor of the school system
there, Michelle Rhee, whom Harris met through her high school.

A few weeks after getting to U.C.L.A., Harris wrote an e-mail message
to P. K. Diffenbaugh, one of her old teachers, telling him to send
some of his current students to visit her soon, so they could get
excited about college. "In my comparative English class we read a book
a week. It goes superfast so encourage your students not to fall off,"
she wrote. "It's like the major leagues. . . . Academia!!!!"

The big question that hangs over U.C.L.A.'s success, of course, is
whether the university broke the law. Looking at the numbers, it's
hard not to conclude that race was a factor in this year's admissions
decisions. The average SAT score for admitted African-American
students fell 45 points this year, to 1,738. For Asian, Latino and
white students, the averages were much more stable. "I'm quite
confident that U.C. factors race in, in various ways," said Sander,
the U.C.L.A. law professor and affirmative-action critic. "There is no
way to explain the disparities otherwise." He has filed a
public-information request that would allow him to examine the data
more closely.

In particular, U.C.L.A.'s experience suggests that some tension
between race and class in the admissions process may be inevitable.
Even as the number of low-income black freshmen soared this year, the
overall number of low-income freshmen fell somewhat. The rise in
low-income black students was accompanied by a fall in low-income
Asian students — not a decline in well-off students. U.C.L.A.
administrators say they don't fully understand why.

In a way, though, the question of whether race was a factor is itself
misplaced. Proposition 209 forbids universities to consider race, but
it doesn't stop them from considering disadvantage. So what if
U.C.L.A. is somehow taking into account the disadvantages that black
students face because of their race? Isn't that legal? And isn't it
just? As Tom Lifka, a U.C.L.A. assistant vice chancellor who oversees
admissions, said, "It's the fallacy of 209 that you can immediately
move to a system that doesn't take account of race and that treats
everybody fairly." Lifka said he was confident that U.C.L.A.'s current
system could withstand legal scrutiny.

I asked these same questions about race and fairness of Connerly, who
does favor preferences based on socioeconomic status (as do almost 85
percent of Americans, according to a 2005 New York Times poll). His
first objection was constitutional: he believes the Supreme Court has
given colleges very narrow instructions on when and how to consider
race. Beyond that, he finds it hard to imagine that colleges would be
able to strike the appropriate balance. "I suppose you could craft
some kind of system that says, 'We're going to acknowledge that there
has been and continues to be discrimination in our society,' " he
said. "But I believe it is almost impossible to decide on the
acceptable range — say, from 1 to 10 — to take race into account."

He may well be right. But it sure seems worth the effort. Somewhat
accidentally, U.C.L.A. appears to have gotten much closer to the ideal
answer than most American universities. Unlike those of other elite
colleges, its student body isn't dominated merely by the best and
brightest of the upper middle class. U.C.L.A. has also figured out how
to do a bit better by the standard diversity benchmarks than it had
been doing. Despite all the political heat that still surrounds the
issue in California, its universities seem to be pointing to a better
version of affirmative action — one that uses a little less race and a
lot more class. "What would be nice is if we could craft a social
compromise that could keep the best of the program while admitting
some of its flaws," says Sander, who supports the idea of affirmative
action, despite his criticisms of the current system. "It's way
beyond, 'Mend it, don't end it.' Let's fundamentally restructure this
and be much more aware of class. If we did that, we'd build a much
bigger consensus and take a lot of wind out of the sails of Ward
Connerly." Such a consensus might show us, finally, how to put the
accomplishments of a student like Frances Harris into the right
perspective.


David Leonhardt is an economics columnist for The New York Times.


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