Affirmative action supporters lost some ammunition last week after the appearance of a new study in the spring issues of The International Journal of Public Opinion Research and The Public Interest. The study found that higher percentages of minority enrollment at universities do not correlate with higher quality of education or with fewer incidences of racial discrimination.
Stanley Rothman, an emeritus professor of government at Smith College, along with colleagues at George Mason University and the University of Toronto, conducted the study in the spring of 1999.
If the study's conclusions are correct, then the case for affirmative action has lost one of its strongest arguments. When the Supreme Court begins hearing the University of Michigan affirmative action case in exactly one week, the Court should categorically reject any claims that diversity increases the quality of higher education.
Like other similar studies, this one relied on information gathered from surveys of students, faculty and administrators -- more than 4,000 individuals at 140 different schools responded to the survey.
The authors' methodology, however, was quite unique. Instead of asking survey respondents to evaluate the direct effects of a diverse student body, the authors asked respondents only to rate the quality of education, student work ethic, racial discrimination and other variables at their respective schools. The results were correlated with the proportion of black students enrolled at each school, a common practice in this type of study. Historically black colleges were excluded from the survey.
This approach avoids the bias that often skews data in other studies, which are conducted under the assumption that diversity improves the quality of education and decreases racial tensions at universities.
The findings of Rothman and his collaborators fly in the face of conventional wisdom supporting affirmative action. The researchers found that an increased enrollment of black students, instead of correlating with an increase in the perceived quality of education, actually correlated with a very slight decrease in this variable. Assessment of student skills as perceived by faculty and administrators also dropped, as well as perceived student work effort. The proportion of respondents claiming they had been treated unfairly because of their race, gender or sexual orientation actually increased very slightly when black enrollment increased -- disproving the theory that diversity necessarily leads to increased levels of tolerance.
Of course, these statistics must be taken with a grain of salt. Correlation does not imply causation, and it would be unfair and prejudiced to claim that an increasing proportion of black students causes a decrease in overall quality of education.
The most important conclusion to take away from this study is that increasing minority enrollment in the student body does not correlate with an improved educational milieu or racial atmosphere, as other studies have found. This has profound implications for the University of Michigan, which will defend its affirmative action policies in front of the Supreme Court next Tuesday.
The University of Michigan has accumulated an impressive amount of expert testimony to support its case. One expert report was prepared by Patricia Gurin, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Michigan. Her conclusions contradict the findings of Rothman and his collaborators most directly, and the two reports are likely to go head to head in Supreme Court proceedings.
Unfortunately, Gurin's testimony -- available online at http://www.umich.edu/~urel/admissions/legal/expert/gurintoc.html -- is somewhat unclear about the methodologies and the resulting data in her study, which was undertaken solely in defense of the University of Michigan's affirmative action policies.
Gurin's testimony does not include the specific questions that were asked of survey respondents, calling into question the objectivity of the report. Perhaps even more disturbing is that Gurin left out the numbers that describe the strength of the correlations she found. We have to take Gurin's word for it when she claims that "[s]tudents who had experienced the most diversity
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