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Tomorrow the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Fisher v. Texas, addressing the constitutionality of affirmative action in college admissions. I wrote a piece on the history of the case and how the Court might rule back in July, and I’d encourage you to go take a look at it if you’re not familiar with the background. But this morning I want to talk about something a little less technical.
Here’s how the case’s plaintiff, rejected University of Texas applicant Abigail Fisher, described what’s at stake in today’s New York Times:
“I’m hoping that they’ll completely take race out of the issue in terms of admissions and that everyone will be able to get into any school that they want no matter what race they are but solely based on their merit and if they work hard for it.”
For better or worse, that’s not remotely on the table.
Colleges accept and reject candidates for all sorts of reasons that have little or nothing to do with merit. They take legacies — relatives of other graduates — because those admissions are good for alumni donations. They accept football players because bowl games and shirt sales are good for the bottom line. Many private colleges consider a student’s wealth in admissions decisions, and many publics are pumping up out-of-state admissions to enhance tuition revenue. None of this has anything to do with merit.
And all of it is completely legal.
That’s worth underscoring. It’s not illegal to discriminate on the basis of non-academic factors in college admissions in the United States. There are no barriers to rejecting students because they’re not rich, or went to crappy high schools, or studied the piccolo instead of the oboe in a year when you’ve already got enough piccolo players. Unfair, arbitrary, and venal admissions standards are part of the fabric of every selective college’s decision-making process.
And there’s something truly twisted about the argument that all of that is okay but affirmative action — precisely because it’s intended as a remedy for the country’s long history of racial discrimination, a history that didn’t end in 1865 or 1954 or 1963, but continues to this very day — is not.
When we as a country say that it’s right and just to accept one student because her high school had a great gymnastics program or her parents are big donors or her grandfather was a dean while while we simultaneously recoil at the “racism” of giving a boost to another student who, as a result of the nation’s persisting inequities, had no chance to acquire any of those advantages, we aren’t saying we want to move beyond our history of racial discrimination.
We’re saying we want to lock it in.
In April the Associated Press published a story that’s gotten a lot of attention from education activists. According to the AP, a quarter of all recent college graduates are unemployed, and another quarter are “underemployed” — working part-time jobs, or jobs that don’t require a college degree. Mitt Romney has incorporated this talking point into his campaign speeches, in a highly distorted version that claims — as he did in Wednesday’s debate — that “fifty percent of college graduates this year can’t find work.”
It’s a huge leap from 25% to 50%, of course, but the claim hasn’t gotten a lot of pushback — in part because a few weeks ago the Politifact website rated Romney’s version of the stat “Mostly True.” I wrote all this up yesterday, and concluded that while Romney was misstating the facts, the AP had screwed up too and Politifact had made a bad call.
Yesterday afternoon I reached out to the AP’s main source, a Northeastern University economist named Andrew Sum who Politifact had also cited in their coverage of the issue.
He wrote back a few hours later, and said that both the AP and Politifact had bungled the story. Here’s how:
The total adult population of the United States is about 250 million, and the total employed population of the country is about 60% of that. But we don’t go around saying that 40% of the population is unemployed, because that wouldn’t make sense. Some people are retired, others are in school, and others are raising kids or hitchhiking cross-country or choosing not to work for any of a hundred other reasons.
And in compiling at their unemployment statistics for young college-educated Americans, the AP apparently made exactly that error.
According to Professor Sum, the employment rate for young college graduates is “in the high 70s,” within striking distance of the AP’s 75% estimate. But as he points out, that figure includes people who are out of the workforce voluntarily — if you add those who have chosen to go to grad school, for instance, the figure rises above 80%.
I haven’t seen Professor Sum’s data yet (I asked late last night, and haven’t yet heard back), so I can’t say for sure what his figures on college-educated youth unemployment are. But they’re clearly more in line with the 6.8% to 9.4% range that I reported yesterday than the 25% the AP implied (and Politifact endorsed), never mind the 50% in Romney’s attack.
And this stuff matters. It matters because for all the flaws in the American university system, higher education is still a tool for social mobility in this country. Unemployment rates are lower in every age and gender and race category for who have college degrees than for those who don’t, and income averages are far higher. If wildly exaggerated claims of college-grad unemployment have the effect of pushing students out of higher ed, most of those students will suffer. It’s just not right.
And that brings us back to the AP, and to Politifact. Professor Sum says the Associated Press “misrepresented” his findings, and that Politifact “ignored” the corrections he presented to them. In so doing, both news organizations have disseminated false information, provided ammunition to wrongheaded attacks on higher education, misled the nation’s students and policymakers, and given cover to repeated blatantly false statements made by the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States.
Like I say, it’s just not right.
October 7 Update | Still no correction from Politifact, and I’ve noticed another, more egregious version of the error elsewhere on their site.
Back in August, a few weeks before they took on Mitt Romney’s version of the 50% unemployment rate claim, Politifact devoted an article to addressing a near-identical assertion in a presidential election ad put together by a group called the Republican Jewish Coalition. Like Romney, the RJC made the false claim that “one out of every two kids who are graduating college right now can’t find a job.”
Unfortunately, Politifact took the same “not having an ideal job is pretty much the same as not having any job at all” tack here that it would later take with Romney’s claim, and judged the assertion “Mostly True.” Even worse, they misrepresent Professor Sum’s findings even more baldly in this piece than in the September one, claiming — in flat contradiction with what Professor Sum told me about his conclusions — that “according to Sum’s research, about a quarter of recent college grads literally can’t find a job.”
October 16 Update | Still no correction, update, or acknowledgment from Politifact, though I reached out individually to each of the writers, researchers, and editors on the story a week ago today. I sent them all a link to this post via Twitter just now — we’ll see if that helps.
This is really welcome news.
For-profit higher ed behemoth Kaplan, which is owned by the Washington Post, announced last week that it is closing thirteen of its seventy campuses nationwide. Nine will shut down completely, and another four will be folded into nearby locations.
Even better news is the reason for the shutdowns — three of the campuses were apparently just stripped of their accreditation, and thus their students’ eligibility for federal loans.
Loan defaults at for-profit colleges are ridiculously common, with three-year defaults standing at 22.7% in newly-released figures, more than twice the rate of public colleges.
Put another way, for-profit students represented a bit more than a tenth of the students in the cohort, a quarter of the borrowers, and half the defaults. And this is public money — as the Post itself acknowledges, nearly 90% of Kaplan higher ed revenue comes from federally guaranteed student loans.
For-profit colleges are a huge fraud on the nation’s students and taxpayers, but because of their parent companies’ lobbying clout regulation has been slow and lax. New rules implemented during the Obama administration have been far less aggressive than I’d like, but even in their weakened form they’re proving sharp enough to have an effect. As the Chronicle of Higher Education notes, “of the colleges that would not meet the new standards, 160 are for-profit, 35 are public, and 23 are private.”
In its most recent annual report Kaplan’s higher ed division showed a $500 million decline in revenue, a 74% drop in profits, and a loss of 25,000 students. Here’s to more of the same, and better, in coming years.
When the student union at the University of Florida was built in 1967, students requested that it be named in honor of outgoing university president J. Wayne Reitz. Today, students are fighting over whether that name should stand.
As UF president, Reitz participated in a purge of gay faculty and students that involved the firing and expulsion of dozens of people. During his administration, the university also failed to integrate until placed under court order, and then only haltingly, and in 1967 a popular professor was denied tenure because of his political views.
Student activists at UF want the union building renamed for Virgil Hawkins, a local black scholar who fought a ten-year battle to integrate the UF school of law in the 1940s and 50s, but the attempt has run into resistance from the campus student government.
Student of color and LGBT groups on campus have held several demonstrations around the issue, with tensions rising after a popular law professor’s car was vandalized with the word “faggot” in mid-September.
Activists collected five hundred signatures in recent months in favor of a non-binding campus referendum on the name change, but student government officials have attempted to block it twice — first by claiming that the signatures were improperly obtained, and then, when that challenge was rejected, by objecting to the wording of the referendum question. Critics of the student government say the body is being improperly influenced by the Reitz family, who remain major donors to the university.
In a late September ruling the student government court stripped the contested language from the question, but allowed the referendum to be placed before the students, with the referendum expected later this month.
Last weekend some forty Wesleyan students entered a closed meeting of the university’s Board of Trustees, looking to give input on a matter of university governance. The students were advocates of need-blind admissions, a policy under which students are accepted for admission without consideration of their ability to pay. (Admissions have traditionally been need-blind at Wesleyan, but at the start of the summer, after many students had left campus, the trustees voted to scrap that policy for the class of 2017.)
This wasn’t a long occupation — it lasted only about fifteen minutes before students left voluntarily. It wasn’t particularly aggressive — video of the incident shows a conspicuously quiet, and respectful, discussion. And it was far from unprecedented — on the video, one trustee is seen declaring that “students barging in [to trustee meetings] is a long and time-honored tradition at Wesleyan.”
But now at least five of the students who participated in the action are being brought up on campus judicial charges. As the campus online newspaper Wesleying notes, the five stand accused of “disruption” and “failure to comply.” According to the campus student handbook, it looks like punishment for these two violations could be anything from a warning to expulsion.
I watched the video, and I gotta say — that’s some seriously non-disruptive disruption, and some seriously compliant non-compliance. Shame on Wesleyan for making it into a judicial issue.
studentactivism.net 
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