November 30, 2021 @ Manhattan Contrarian
“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) — That’s the officially-established creed/cult currently devouring American higher education (not to mention plenty of other institutions at the controlling heights of society). At elite academic institutions, what began fifty and more years ago as a reasonable effort to identify talented but previously overlooked black candidates for admission, has gradually morphed into a crazed obsession that overwhelms and obliterates any and all other purposes and goals of the institution. Where once, with a purpose of educating students, we sought out and hired talented faculty, now our main purpose is DEI, and we hire dozens of new “diversity” deans, sub-deans and sub-sub-deans. Where once we created national standardized tests (e.g., SATs) to find and rate the most qualified candidates even from obscure places, now we ban use of such tests because members of “marginalized” groups don’t score high enough. Where once we valued academic rigor in our curricular offerings, now the key evaluation criterion for any course is its “diversity” component.
Might a dissenter or heretic from the official creed attempt to slip into our midst? Then we will require loyalty oaths, in the form of “diversity statements,” from all candidates for academic employment. You must demonstrate that DEI is a constant and burning passion of your life, or your position in academia will be no different from that of the North Koreans who failed to cry convincingly enough on the death of Kim Jong Il.
Let’s step back for a moment and take a look at this DEI obsession in academia. Does the whole thing make any sense?
Despite my current contempt for elite academia, I begin with the proposition that DEI did not originate as an intentional effort to further harm and disadvantage black people. Taking the institutions at their own word, the initial reasoning went something like this: The people currently occupying top positions in society (government officials, top corporate executives, judges, lawyers, doctors, etc.) disproportionately have degrees from elite academic institutions. Clearly then, such degrees function as a “ticket” for entry into these top positions. It follows that offering admission at such institutions to blacks will enable them to earn elite degrees and then claim their share of the top positions.
But what about the elite academic degree makes it lead disproportionately to elite employment? One theory is that the institutions themselves have little or nothing to do with it: elite institutions admit smart people (based on test scores and/or prior grades), and smart people get hired and succeed at elite jobs; smart people will succeed equally wherever they go to school, and less-smart people will succeed at generally lesser levels wherever they go to school. Of course, if that theory is correct, no one should expect any big potential gain to blacks from the practice of DEI in elite academia.
So you would think that the elite institutions must believe that it is something about their product that has produced a high rate of success among their graduates. Perhaps it would be the subjects taught, or the “rigor” of the course work, or the heavy reading loads, or the demanding and competitive tests; or some combination of those things.
But even though you would think that the elite institutions must believe that some aspects of their pre-existing product offerings are what brought about the prior career success of their graduates, as DEI has taken hold their behavior indicates that they believe the opposite. Rather than insisting that new admittees master the studies that presumably were the key to success of prior graduates, the trend has been in exactly the other direction, namely changing and dumbing down the product to accommodate the new admittees: add new courses emphasizing the experiences and culture of members of every racial and ethnic group; create departments of “studies” for every such group; expunge “dead white male” authors from the curriculum; add a “diversity” component and make it the dominant part of every course— even math!; create new departments in various ethnic studies and allow black and other POC students to major in these subjects, and so forth.
Or maybe these elite institutions think that it is just the magic of their brand names that will attach to the graduates from minority groups and transform them into future successes — no matter that these students took an easy case load and graduated with a mediocre record. Unfortunately, brand names have a way of deteriorating over time, sometimes rapidly. Does anybody today remember Compaq computers? Ipana toothpaste? The Fuller Brush company?
Is there any evidence that luring large numbers of black and other minority students into elite institutions actually launches them into successful careers that they could not otherwise have entered? After 50 and more years of affirmative action, you would think that such evidence would be easy to find. But it is not, and indeed such evidence as can be found tends to show no or even negative effects on black graduates’ careers from attending elite universities.
Places like Yale, Harvard and Princeton put an enormous amount of effort into keeping track of their alumni and following their careers. If there was good news to report about the widespread success of their black and other minority graduates in the world, I would have no doubt that they would be trumpeting it to the heavens. Yet over the years I have searched repeatedly for any such studies or reports, and I just can’t find them. Maybe somebody else can, if not for these institutions, then maybe for some others (other Ivies? MIT? Cal Tech? Berkeley? Stanford? U of Chicago?).
What I can find is at least a small number of studies that suggest that obtaining a degree from an elite academic institution does not convey any notable advantage on black candidates in the job market. For example, there is this 2014 study from the journal Social Forces titled “Discrimination in the Credential Society: An Audit Study of Race and College Selectivity in the Labor Market.” A summary of the study at Inside Higher Ed in 2015 concludes:
Black students who graduate from institutions like Harvard University are about as likely to get a well-paid job as a white graduate from a less-selective state university, new study finds. . . . Black graduates at elite colleges not only had a response rate similar to that of white graduates from less-selective institutions, but the employers who responded to black applicants were often offering jobs with less prestige and with salaries that trailed those of white candidates by an average of $3,000.
Admittedly that study is several years old. But I can’t find anything more recent reaching a different conclusion. And the conclusion seems quite remarkable, given that essentially all significant employers in the country claim to be bending every effort to increase their own “diversity.”
Meanwhile, with the same searches it is quite easy to find some very encouraging data coming from what are called the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs. For example, a 2018 study from the United Negro College Fund collected these statistics:
[D]espite representing only 3 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities, HBCUs enroll almost 10 percent of all African American undergraduates and award 17 percent of all bachelor’s degrees received by African American students. Most notably, HBCUs award 24 percent of all bachelor’s degrees received by African Americans in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
You might treat those statistics with some skepticism, given that the UNCF is an advocacy group for the HBCUs. Still, if the statistics are anywhere near correct, the data that HBCUs enroll only 10% of black undergraduates, but award 17% of degrees to them, would imply a relatively very high drop-out rates among blacks at non-HBCU colleges and universities.
A July 2021 study of HBCUs from McKinsey & Co. contains these data:
HBCUs . . . supply more Black applicants to medical schools than non-HBCU institutions. And HBCUs have graduated 40 percent of all Black engineers; 40 percent of all Black US Congress members; 50 percent of all Black lawyers; and 80 percent of all Black judges.
I would think of McKinsey as a credible source for such data, although I have attempted to trace the footnotes for the data back to the original studies, without success.
Still, the elite institutions have been practicing increasingly aggressive affirmative action and racial quotas for a good 50 years. They have the data on the careers and successes of their graduates. If they have statistics indicating high success rates of their minority graduates in entering and rising in elite occupations and positions, they should and would come forward with that.
A few years ago I had a conversation with a senior professor who was then at one of the elite universities, although one just below the very top tier. After several decades as a teacher and researcher, this person had recently accepted a dean position at the institution in question. I asked whether the institution practiced aggressive affirmative action, and what the consequences of that were. The response went something like this:
“We absolutely must practice aggressive affirmative action. You have to understand that although we are a very elite school, there are multiple institutions that stand above us in the academic pecking order, and they have already skimmed off all of the best black and other minority candidates, leaving for us only candidates whose qualifications are far below our normal criteria. If we didn’t practice aggressive affirmative action, we would not have a single black student at the school. If that happened, we would not survive.”
For a much longer and more detailed version of the same story, I highly recommend Gail Heriot’s recent book “A Dubious Expediency.” Heriot then plays out the consequences of these policies for the black and other minority students: other than at HBCUs, most are condemned to sink to the bottom of the class; as a consequence, many drop demanding majors and go into one of the “studies” programs, or alternatively drop out entirely.
In other words, at this point it is completely known that aggressive affirmative action as practiced in American academia is not to the benefit of the black and other minority students, and indeed likely is an overall harm to them. But the practice continues for the benefit not of the students, but rather of the institutions, in their competition for prestige among their own group.
If I were a black student contemplating college today, I would want to have nothing to do with these places. Actually, the same is probably true if I were a white student in the same position.
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