Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, the expert witness for the plaintiffs in SFFA v. Harvard, has shown that at Duke, 62% of entering black freshman expressed an interest in majoring in natural sciences, engineering, or economics (compared to 61% of whites), but less than 30% graduated with a major in those fields (compared to 51% of whites). In his major study of Duke, “What Happens After Enrollment?” Arcidiacono and his co-authors found that “Over 54% of black men who express an initial interest in majoring in the natural sciences, engineering, or economics switch to the humanities or social sciences compared to less than 8% of white men.”
Recruiting under-qualified students and setting them up to fail, or lowering the bar for their success, is called “inclusion.” I’m sorry to have to be so blunt, but that is the way it looks to anyone who has not drunk the social justice movement’s Kool-Aid.
There are women and minorities who can handle STEM majors, and it’s not fair to them to say that it’s the content of the courses that needs to change to accommodate students who can’t handle them.
“Social justice is an actual impediment to acquiring human capital”
–Thomas Sowell
What we need to know is if the black freshmen are academically weak or are they subjected to a concerted effort to “advise” them to switch to the humanities and social sciences?
STEM classes are some of the hardest classes in which to maintain gender and racial biases. Math is math; the laws of physics are the laws of physics. And the results – at least at the undergrad level – are objectively measured. You either get the right answers or you don’t, so there is why little room for bias in terms of grading.
On the flip side, social sciences and liberal arts are very easy to bias against different groups and interestingly, there we do see large gaps – at least in terms of numbers – against men. That’s not to say that the relative lack of men in liberal arts is a result of bias, but if you were to suspect any major of having bias, you should start there and not in STEM.
JK Brown, we know the black freshman are academically weak as “inclusion” means much lower SAT/ACT scores are required for blacks. The more interesting question is if Duke had not admitted underqualified blacks, and they had gone to a less elite school (maybe a land grant state school), would they have kept their STEM major, or would they have still switched? I do not know the answer to that question, but would love to hear others guesses. On the not as many would have switched side, the Duke blacks would now be in a school where the other students would have had similar SAT/ACT scores. On the as many would have switched side, there is an argument that many STEM majors require a certain knowledge, irrespective of the school, so you can cut it in a STEM major or not and the school does not matter. Also on the it would not matter side, in many lesser quality schools the better students are STEM majors (so the Duke blacks may be comparable to the schools student body as a whole, but not to the STEM majors).
This is very true but I’d warn against feeling too smug about the failure of social justice activists to increase the number of STEM students because any success in doing so, regardless of the underlying motivations, addresses an important unmet social need.
Our lack of understanding of how to increase the supply and/or productivity of the cognitive resources (i.e. people) correlated to STEM education is distressing. One only has to consider Jeff Bezos’ story about theoretical physics and his lessons learned trying to solve a specific differential equation (YouTube) together with his path to Amazon via a Physics/Electrical-Engineering/Computer Science education and then through the seemingly unrelated industry experience with fintech/customer-service/banking/hedge-funds to understand that we don’t understand how this all works. The fact that NetApp co-founder Dave Hitz was a roommate of Bezos at Princeton after graduating from Deep Springs College (a topic of a conversation I had with Charles W. Abbott in another comment thread) is just plain weird. Is there anyone confident enough to claim that the current post-secondary physics curriculum/requirements represents the correct path to technical/economic innovation?
Any nation-state that can even incrementally improve the quality/productivity of their cognitive work force will have a significant and sustainable comparative advantage. Being slightly less stupid than another group is not the same thing as mastery/enlightenment.
I agree that it’s not something to feel smug about; it’s a tragedy. But we don’t know how to make people smarter (which we should work on). In the meantime, I favor rigor – educational principles that work for some people are to be preferred over systems that don’t produce impressive results for anyone. Very few people can be nuclear physicists, but a few hundred such people were enough to end WWII.
Increasing the number of STEM majors is not eo ipso a praiseworthy task; when it’s accomplished by reducing standards, thereby making more people more stupid than smarter, it’s a vice.
That’s the other elephant in the room in any discussion of education. Last I heard, we graduated 2+ STEM grads for each open STEM job. STEM education isn’t so much a positive-sum game as it is an expensive ticket to an unending round of musical chairs (but it’s still way better than majoring in English).
Disclosure: I have an Ivy League STEM PhD but found it very difficult to maintain employment in the field. These days I’m an accountant.
The quip about advertising applies here too: “I know that half of what I learned in University was a waste; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.
Your comment about STEM education being an expensive ticket seems to be an emergent property of the American economy/system that is not as pronounced in other first world nations. The large variance in price and quality of American healthcare also seems to be an outlier. It is an interesting natural experiment ideal for comparative analysis if we can put aside the baggage that comes with being a participant in one system or another.
Reducing standards, is not how the social justice activists would describe it, but I agree that the approach used amounts to the same thing. If you/they stop looking through the “oppression” lens and focus on a story such as Richard Fulmer provides below, it becomes clear that some problems are structural at the K-12 level and are independent of natural ability. The question is not whether to lower standards, it is whether interventions to ameliorate past failures is beneficial.
What I’m arguing is not wishful thinking about making people smarter, it is about shifting the distribution of skills/specializations at the education level to match economic needs. It is equivalent to the historical shifts from illiterate to fully literate societies, or agricultural to industrial. It doesn’t matter where on the IQ spectrum a person falls, “numeracy” is useful and becoming more important over time.
The trouble there is that there aren’t many majors that are actually in high demand, and for the few that are the demand is probably temporary (e.g. nursing is in demand because the Boomers are old, but in 10-20 years that demand will be gone and nurses are likely to be underemployed).
I’m not seeing evidence that we need to invest in a different type of education; it looks to me like we’re systematically overinvesting in most types of education. And that includes two of my own four college degrees.
I grew up in a small mining camp in New Mexico, and the math classes offered in my high school were very limited. However, my SAT and ACT scores were good enough to get me a scholarship to New Mexico State where I got a Mechanical Engineering degree. But even at a state school, I had to work my butt off to keep up in math because I was so far behind my classmates. Had I been a minority student, I probably could have gotten a scholarship to Georgia Tech or MIT. I’ve worked with graduates from both of those universities since, and they would have eaten my lunch had I gone to either of those schools.
Another stated purpose of diversity in admissions at selective colleges is to improve the education of all students through interactions among diverse students. After all, selective colleges usually are residential colleges, where ‘community’ can shape civic education; and students often learn more from one another, than from professors. Alas, here, too, rhetoric contrasts sharply with reality. Statistical diversity doesn’t produces little academic interaction, integration, or friendship. Arcidiacono & co-authors have done analysis of broad databases and also have done a careful case study at Duke University. A key finding is that African American students have fewer interracial friends in college than in high school. Here (below) are a link to an overview—Peter Arcidiacono, Michael Lovenheim, & Maria Zhu, “Affirmative Action in Higher Education,” Annual Review of Economics 7 (2015) 487-518—and an excerpt from the overview:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115445
“Arcidiacono et al. (2011b) suggest that a weakening of racial preferences would actually increase cross-racial interaction. Using the College and Beyond database, they show that, within a school, whites with higher SAT scores are more likely to know two or more Asian students well and are less likely to know two or more African American students well. Because racial preferences primarily come into play at top schools and affect where individuals go to college rather than whether they attend at all, diversity at one college comes at the expense of diversity at another college. With the U-shaped relationship between the share of African Americans and the average college SAT score, a weakening of racial preferences would result in a more even distribution of African Americans across selective colleges. Because the interaction depends both on representation and on similarity of background, the weakening of preferences has the further effect of reducing the gap in African American and white characteristics, potentially resulting in more interaction. [… .] African American students had a significantly higher fraction of same-race friends (and thus a lower fraction of other-race friends) in college than in high school. That colleges seem to be less conducive to interracial friendship formation is surprising, as students in most colleges live in closer proximity to students of other races and ethnicities than typically was the case in the neighborhoods from which they came. Because of housing segregation, college campuses tend to be more diverse than the areas in which students were raised, and because most students live on campus for several years, one might predict the closer contact would lead to more interracial friendships. That colleges do not tend to foster much interracial friendships thus suggests substantial room for improvement in promoting cross-racial interaction. The literature on friendship formation suggests that similarity in academic background plays some role in cross-racial interaction, providing a mechanism for the findings of Arcidiacono & Vigdor (2010) that benefits from diversity can be realized when the increases come from students with similar academic backgrounds. Support for the importance of similarity in academic backgrounds also can be found in papers on the Air Force Academy.” (p. 510)
I am reposting with corrections of typos:
Another stated purpose of diversity in admissions at selective colleges is to improve the education of all students through interactions among diverse students. After all, selective colleges usually are residential colleges, where ‘community’ can shape civic education; and students often learn more from one another, than from professors. Alas, here, too, rhetoric contrasts sharply with reality. Statistical diversity produces little academic interaction, integration, or interracial friendship. Arcidiacono & co-authors have done analysis of broad databases and also have done a careful case study at Duke University. A key finding is that African American students have fewer interracial friendships at selective colleges than in high school. Here (below) are a link to an overview—Peter Arcidiacono, Michael Lovenheim, & Maria Zhu, “Affirmative Action in Higher Education,” Annual Review of Economics 7 (2015) 487-518—and an excerpt from the overview:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115445
“Arcidiacono et al. (2011b) suggest that a weakening of racial preferences would actually increase cross-racial interaction. Using the College and Beyond database, they show that, within a school, whites with higher SAT scores are more likely to know two or more Asian students well and are less likely to know two or more African American students well. Because racial preferences primarily come into play at top schools and affect where individuals go to college rather than whether they attend at all, diversity at one college comes at the expense of diversity at another college. With the U-shaped relationship between the share of African Americans and the average college SAT score, a weakening of racial preferences would result in a more even distribution of African Americans across selective colleges. Because the interaction depends both on representation and on similarity of background, the weakening of preferences has the further effect of reducing the gap in African American and white characteristics, potentially resulting in more interaction. [… .] African American students had a significantly higher fraction of same-race friends (and thus a lower fraction of other-race friends) in college than in high school. That colleges seem to be less conducive to interracial friendship formation is surprising, as students in most colleges live in closer proximity to students of other races and ethnicities than typically was the case in the neighborhoods from which they came. Because of housing segregation, college campuses tend to be more diverse than the areas in which students were raised, and because most students live on campus for several years, one might predict the closer contact would lead to more interracial friendships. That colleges do not tend to foster much interracial friendships thus suggests substantial room for improvement in promoting cross-racial interaction. The literature on friendship formation suggests that similarity in academic background plays some role in cross-racial interaction, providing a mechanism for the findings of Arcidiacono & Vigdor (2010) that benefits from diversity can be realized when the increases come from students with similar academic backgrounds. Support for the importance of similarity in academic backgrounds also can be found in papers on the Air Force Academy.” (p. 510)
Social sciences are as difficult as the STEM, we are mostly lousy at it. Consider history, some of hat is real science, forensic science, digging through sparse evidence. I have seen some great cognitive studies on the level of knowledge after direct participation referendums, stuff that tells us when and how to raise an issue fairly.
I agree that social sciences ‘should’ be hard. I’m not sure that they actually *are* hard as undergraduate majors. The elimination of language requirements and a light reading load tend to make them easier than they might be.
This is going to be an interesting discussion.
For what it’s worth, this post and the unfolding discussion reminded me of this essay from West Hunter about 5 years old. Don’t miss the quote from Luis Alvarez. The blogger (presumably Prof. Greg Cochrane) attributes the cause to biology, but his essay mostly works whether you favor nature or nurture.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/07/31/biology-and-human-capital/
Not too worried about Duke graduates. Privileged enough. What about the non-elite getting fleeced? https://www.thecollegefix.com/bulletin-board/five-public-colleges-have-pell-grant-graduation-rates-under-1-percent-theyre-in-the-same-state/
Testing for credit. Real education reform: https://www.city-journal.org/html/return-moocs-15650.html
Thanks, Stirner. Much, maybe most of a university degree from a big-name college is the accreditation.
Testing is great.
Just like no-tie required style, testing thru coding might lead to testing in more subjects, allowing more MOOCs.
An optimistic hypothesis: maybe a significant amount of this disparity is due to the social sciences positively marketing themselves to women and minorities. Especially fields like gender studies and ethnic studies, for which the content is based on oppression narratives, sell a particular kind of emotional gratification to students who belong to the putatively oppressed groups, as well as possibly convincing them that the natural science departments are their enemies. Perhaps the disciplines most upset over underrepresentation in other fields are successfully diverting female/minority students away from those disciplines.
Since when is economics NOT a social science?
Economics is very much a social science but applied mathematics is more foundational than it is in other social science disciplines. Some aspects of economics are arguably more STEM-like than some aspects of psychology and the life sciences.
It may be true that economics has become a bit more “sciencey” than other social sciences.
But as far as I can tell, the old adage still holds:
“You could stack every economist end-to-end, and they still couldn’t reach a conclusion.”
Quite the opposite. If you’ve chatted with economists, it should be obvious that economics is an ANTI-social science. That’s why there’s so much research into the Golden Ratio–the maximum percentage of economists you can have at a faculty party before you ruin the conversation.
Perhaps the affirmative action by Democrats has resulted in a form of intellectual castration of blacks? Instead of being the smartest black guy among blacks, those with fairly high SATs get sucked into top schools where they are seldom the smartest, or even in the top 50%.
Whether it is poor genes or poor K-12 prep or poor parents, the lower SAT scores accurately predict lower school achievement. Especially in the black-white gap.
On the other hand, there is good news in comparing today’s blacks with those of the 20 years ago:
https://quillette.com/2019/09/28/the-case-for-black-optimism/
That is an excellent article. Thanks.