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“There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less advanced school… a slower-track school, where they do well.” This now-famous quote, by Justice Antonin Scalia, has spurred many reactions, including the #Staymadabby attached to tweets of African American students happily doing well at top schools.
As professors at top Public Universities, we would like to add another wrinkle to the discussion — and to highlight the multifaceted danger of thinking like Scalia’s.
We both have noticed that many of our minority students end up applying to our more competitive colleges because of strangely random circumstances. They were discouraged from applying by family members and guidance counselors, or never met with a guidance counselor at all. They somehow applied anyway, but a number of their qualified friends and neighbors did not. For this reason many minority students who would have been qualified never make it to the gates of four-year institutions because they were not given access to the information they needed, or because they were not sure they would “belong” there.
The discussion of race and college in the popular press and on social media largely concerns the fear that underqualified minority students take the “rightful place” of qualified non-minority students: the worry that minority students are “overmatching” and attending schools beyond their ability. The idea that a rightful place exists and is possible to discern is a nice idea, that everyone is considered and that the worthy are chosen. But what if not everyone puts themselves into consideration in the first place? What if there is an unspoken but dangerous bias to this idea of a “right place?”
Had Scalia conferred with leading thinkers in education policy, he might have known that the more pressing problem facing minority students at present is not overmatching, but undermatching. Minority students often exempt themselves from consideration before they even get the chance to succeed by applying to fewer and less-selective colleges than they are academically qualified to attend. A 2015 study in the top economics journal showed that even when minority students would be automatically admitted (as in Texas’ system that offers admission to the University of Texas to students in the top 10% of their high school graduating class) they are less likely than white students to apply and attend top colleges. In the long-term, undermatching leads to poorer college completion rates, lower starting salaries, and often, higher debt levels than students would have experienced had they attended a better-matching school.
A recent summit on the issue included Kenyon College President Sean Decatur, who received a diversity scholarship when he went to college. He explained that we have to start paying attention to “the big piece of the undermatching story — that many students have the potential to succeed on our campuses [but] are sometimes either worried about making that first step themselves or are discouraged from doing so.” In order to really achieve equity in higher education we have to figure out how to fix this problem.
It would help to eradicate assumptions that a top college education is somehow more obviously the birthright of white students versus minority students. Scalia’s quote perpetuates this blindness, whether he himself believes what he said or was just stating it rhetorically.
Because of undermatching, colleges are not getting access to the best students. As a country we have lofty goals for our public college system: to serve people who can benefit from it and to produce an educated society. There is nothing wrong with this idea, in fact it is beautiful. But it will be tough to make it happen if we do not admit that the relationship between race and college education involves who applies to college, not just who gets admitted.
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