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| From the September 2003
Anthropology News, p 9
Shifting the Affirmative Action Yolanda T Moses Along with most of my colleagues in the higher education community, I breathed a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court decided to uphold the principle of affirmative action, and validated the claims of many corporate and military leaders, that diversity on our nation’s campuses is crucial to educating the next generation of American leaders and professionals. As a result of the decision, in the coming months, the top-ranked colleges and universities especially will be devoting an immense amount of time to analyzing the implications of the decision and adjusting their admissions policies accordingly. This is important and necessary work to ensure that they continue to reach out and recruit a richly diverse student body. Yet the Supreme Court’s decision, important as it is, is only one step on the path we must follow to achieve what must be our ultimate goal: the success of all minority students in all of our higher education institutions. The fact is, that although they are not represented among the 146 most competitive, so-called “elite,” institutions, millions of minority students— constituting nearly a third of all US undergraduates—do already have access to higher education. They attend a mixture of institutions: less-prestigious state universities, a wide range of private four-year colleges, and in huge numbers, two-year institutions, primarily community colleges. In fact, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, these latter institutions enroll between 46 and 55% each of the primary undergraduate minority groups in this country—black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander and Native American. Nevertheless, for many minority undergraduates, having access to education has not meant succeeding in their chosen course of study. In May of this year, the General Accounting Office, an arm of Congress, found that one of the factors associated with students not completing a four-year college program in as many as six years, was being black. And according to the most-recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics, among students who enrolled in two-year colleges (where most students of color in this nation tend to go for postsecondary education) in the 1995-96 school year, 44% had not received their credential, nor did they return to school by spring of 1998. (Of course, a number of other factors interacted with these race-based figures on graduation. For instance, being the first member of an immigrant family to attend college, working part-time, and being older than the traditional college age often correlate with being a member of a racial or ethnic minority.) These course completion rates assume greater importance in light of what we know about who our students will be in the future. A report by the Educational Testing Service predicts that by 2015 undergraduate enrollment will expand by 16%, and 80% of the additional students will be minorities. The number of black students is expected to rise from 12.8% of undergraduates in 1995, to 13.2%; the number of Hispanics, from 10.6% to 15.4%; and the number of Asians, from 5.4% to 8.4%. In the same year, the report says, minorities will become the majority on campuses in Washington, DC, and at least three states—Hawaii, California and New Mexico—and they will be very close to the majority on campuses in Texas and New York. These trends pose post-Supreme Court decision challenges to the higher education community that go beyond the issue of access, but they all boil down to one moral imperative: To use what we already know about student learning to organize and reinvigorate our institutions to increase student success—defined not only as completion of a course, certificate or program, but also as creating graduates who will become lifelong learners. It seems to me that anthropology and anthropologists have a role to play in making sure that we not only reach out to students of color to interest them in the various sub-fields of anthropology, but we need to also commit ourselves to understand how to keep them engaged in the learning process as well as the subject matter. Yolanda T Moses is a consultant to the chancellor and executive vice chancellor at UC-Riverside and past President of the American Association for Higher Education and Past-President of the AAA. |
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