Bell Curve

756 Notes to pages 454-459 Notes to pages 461 4 66 75714. K. Gewertz, "Acceptance rate increases to 76% for class of 1996," HarvardUniversity Gazette,May 15, 1992, p. 1.15. F. Butterfield, "Colleges luring black students with incentives," New YurkTimes, Feb. 28, 1993, p. 116. For Chicano and other Latino students at Berkeley, the comparative positionwith whites also got worse. SAT scores did not rise significantly forLatino students during the 1978-1988 ~eriod, and the net gap increasedfrom 165 to 254 points for the Chicanos and from 117 points to 2 14 pointsfor other Latinos.17. Powers 1977, as reported with supplementary analysis in Klitgaard 1985,Table A1.6, p. 205.18. The 12-15 range cuts off the upper 11.5 percent, 14.9 percent, and 7.5 percentof matriculants with known MCAT scores for the biological sciences,physical sciences, and verbal reasoning tests respectively. By way of comparison,the top 10 percent in the SAT-Math in 1993 was a little ahove650; in the SAT-Verbal, in the high 500s.19. Shea and Fullilove 1985, Table 4, reporting 1979 and 1983 data, indicatethat blacks with MCAT scores in the 5-7 range had approximately twicethe chance of admission of white students. In another glimpse, a multivariateanalysis of applicants to medical school from among the undergraduatesat two University of California campuses (Berkeley and Davis)during the last half of the 1970s began with the average white male applicant,who had a 17.8 percent chance of being admitted. Holding othercharacteristics constant, being black raised the probability of admission to94.6 percent. Being an American Indian or Chicano raised the probnhilityto 95.0 percent (Olmstead and Sheffrin, 1980a). An Asian with identicalage and academic credentials had a 25 percent chance of admission,higher than the white probability but not statistically significantly so.Williams, Cooper, and Lee 1979 present the odds from the opposite perspective:A study of ten medical schools by the Rand Corporation foundthat a minority student with a 50 percent chance of admission would havehad about a 5 percent chance of admission if he were white with the samequalifications.20. Klitgaard 1985.21. Proponents of affirmative action commonly cite preference for children ofthe alumni and students from distant states as a justification for affirmativeaction. Given the size of the racial discrepancies we have reported, itwould be useful to have an open comparison of the discrepancies associatedwith these other forms of preference. We have found data from onlyone school, Harvard, where the legacy of having a Harvard parent continuesto be a plus in the admissions process but small in terms of test scores.For the decade starting in 1983, the average Verbal score of alumni chil-dren admitted to Harvard was 674 compared to 687 earned by the adrnittedchildren of nonalumni; for Math scores, the comparable scores were695 versus 718, respectively. Office of Civil Rights 1990.22. Higham 1984. The arguments against admitting Jews were likely to rnentionthat gentile families might not send their children to a college with"too many" Jews (institutional self-interest) or that anti-Semitism wouldmake it hard for Jewish alumni to use their college education for society'swelfare (social utility).23. Berger 1987.24. Lloyd 1990; Peller 1991.25. The formal explication of this standard is Thorndike 1971. For a discussionof how slippery the notion of "acceptable" performance can be, seeBrown 1980.26. The comparisons are based on NLSY subjects who went to the same fouryearcolleges and universities (again, excluding historically black schools).Excluding junior colleges eliminates problems of interpretation if differentproportions of different ethnic groups attended junior colleges rather thanfour-year institutions. Since the framework for the analysis assumes a multiracialcampus, it seemed appropriate to exclude the 103 NLSY subjects(all hut 6 of whom were black) who attended historically black institutions.For the record, the mean AFQT score of black students who first attendedhistorically black institutions and blacks who first attended otherfour-year institutions were within two IQ points of each other.27. We used the top and bottom half of socioeconomic status rather than amore restrictive definition (such as the top and bottom quartile) to givelarge enough sample sizes for us to have confidence in the results. Whenwe used the more restrictive definitions, the results showed admissions decisionsthat were even farther out of line with the rationale, but with smallsamples numbering just 15 pairs for two of the cells. The procedure for theanalysis was as follows: The NLSY includes the FlCE (Federal InteragencyCommittee on Education) code for each institution the NLSY subjects attended.This analysis is based on the first such institution attended afterhigh school. The matching procedure sometimes creates multiple lines forone member of the pair. For example, suppose that three whites and oneblack have attended the same school. One may either enter the black scorethree times or eliminate duplicates, entering the black score only once. Weconsider that the elimination of duplicates is likely to introduce more error,on the assumption that the differences among colleges can be large.Imagine a sample consisting of two schools: an unassuming state teachers'college, with three whites and three blacks in the NLSY sample, and Yale,with three whites and one black. The Yale scores are much higher than theteachers college scores. Eliminating duplicates-entering just one (high)