TOM WALSH: High court will judge U-M success TOM WALSH: High court will judge U-M success
February 25, 2003
BY TOM WALSH FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
Now that President George W. Bush, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Kellogg and Steelcase have weighed in on the University of Michigan's use of race in admissions, I'm feeling the pressure. I should decide what I think. But I'm stuck on the following question. Does it work? Does U-M's practice of boosting minority enrollment by awarding extra admission points for skin color benefit (a) the minority U-M students themselves and (b) the larger community, including the companies that hire its graduates? I've read legal briefs and pored over flimsy supporting data for the arguments of both sides (you'd think the nation's great scholars would have done more conclusive research on this subject by now).
My hunch is U-M's lawyers will run into a buzz saw when they face the U.S. Supreme Court justices April 1. Graduation eludes many The justices will want to know what actually happens to students at U-M and how those outcomes relate to its admissions policy. That's when the U-M lawyers will have to concede: Graduation rates for black students are much lower than for whites in Ann Arbor. Not a little lower. A lot lower. So much lower that the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which tends to support race-conscious admissions policies, wrote last summer that U-M had an "extremely poor record in graduating black students." The black graduation rate at U-M was 60 percent in 2000, the journal said, versus 87 percent for white students.
That was the largest gap among 53 prestigious universities tracked by the journal, which also noted that U-M's black graduation rate had declined in the seven years from 1993-2000. U-M spokeswoman Julie Peterson says more recent data show a graduation rate of 86 percent for whites and 67 percent for blacks; the 10-year average is 86 percent for whites, 63 percent for blacks. In a 2001 article, the journal looked at black dropout rates at 29 top-ranked colleges. Michigan had the third-highest black dropout rate (38 percent, to 14 percent for whites).
U-M contends that the graduation gap stems from a broad range of factors and doesn't prove that students who gained admission due to a boost from race-preference points are unable to compete at U-M. Peterson says the university is doing a retention study to gather more data on the graduation gap. Questioning greater good Philosophically, I'm inclined to support many affirmative action efforts. The end can justify the means. Just as we accept civilian casualties in a necessary war to halt genocide or oust a dangerous tyrant, we can accept a few white kids having to go to a decent school other than in Ann Arbor if there's a greater good in admitting more minorities.
But the Supreme Court will want to see that greater good demonstrated persuasively. Having a bunch of Fortune 500 companies support U-M by saying diversity is a good thing, that they need a diverse workforce to compete in a diverse world, is fine. The other side will argue forcefully that we do students no favors by sending them to a place where they have significantly greater odds of failure than the student body at large. There will be much huffing and sputtering about the numbers. But don't be surprised to see five or six of the nine Supreme Court justices sink their teeth into U-M's black-white graduation gap and refuse to let go.
Contact TOM WALSH at 313-223-4430 or twalsh@freepress.com.
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