It’s spring and the great migrations are underway. From throughout the north, college students are heading south for a week or ten days of sunstroke, public inebriation and reverse peristalsis. In college towns, administrators have a week to sort out all the nagging paperwork that never seems to get finished while the kids are around. It’s a particularly onerous task in California, where everyone is still picking through the remnants of Proposition 209, which did away with affirmative action in the University of California system of schools, as well as the rest of the state government.
Rather than get involved in a potentially tenure-damaging political debate, professors at one of those schools – UC Santa Barbara – went out and did what they are supposed to do: scholarly research. By interviewing students and asking them to keep diaries of their activities, the researchers were able to track the college experience for students of various ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds. The results, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education last November, indicate that if anyone is gumming up our university system, it’s the rich white kids.
Let’s start with a few statistics: white males reported the highest rates of drinking and drug use, white females came in second. African-Americans and Latinos of both sexes followed and Asian-American students party least. Those results are from Santa Barbara and they conform to studies done elsewhere in the country. The Santa Barbara study found white students spend much of their social time at parties, often sponsored by a fraternity or sorority. African-American and Latino students are twice as likely to go to a concert, play, film or museum and three times as likely to belong to a service organization as white students.
The researchers developed a tool they call the “adversity index.” Students whose parents are college graduates, who have taken few student loans, who do not have to work during the school year are deemed to have “low adversity.” Although “low adversity” students have more time to devote to their studies, the students themselves report they spend their time drinking and doing drugs. Students who work full time spend more hours studying than students who don’t work at all.
Interviews with professors yielded complementary data. It is students of color and working class that visit their offices to talk about term papers and class work. The affluent students only appear to complain about their grades.
That’s the data. The anecdotal evidence, collected by my eyes and ears, agrees. It was Thanksgiving 1992 and I was in New Orleans, as were several thousand students from African-American colleges, in town for a basketball tournament. At Saturday midnight, Bourbon Street was thronged and while the kids were boisterous, they weren’t obnoxious, while they were drinking, they weren’t drunk. It was the only time I’ve seen Bourbon Street undecorated by vomit.
The UC Santa Barbara study concluded that for affluent students, college is just a place to spend four years. Their families have risen to the top of the socio-economic ladder and an “F” in Twentieth-Century Political Philosophy will probably not affect junior’s future one way or another. It’s really not about race, but opportunity. It’s not that rich white students are innately lazy or prone to drinking, it’s just that the society we have created leaves them few chances to fail and therefore little incentive for initiative. But when California cuts affirmative action and the numbers of minority students plunge, then California – or any other state – closes the door of opportunity to whole classes of people who are best placed to take advantage of it.
As the commercial says, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Not About Race, But Opportunity
It’s spring and the great migrations are underway. From throughout the north, college students are heading south for a week or ten days of sunstroke, public inebriation and reverse peristalsis. In college towns, administrators have a week to sort out all the nagging paperwork that never seems to get finished while the kids are around. It’s a particularly onerous task in California, where everyone is still picking through the remnants of Proposition 209, which did away with affirmative action in the University of California system of schools, as well as the rest of the state government.
Rather than get involved in a potentially tenure-damaging political debate, professors at one of those schools – UC Santa Barbara – went out and did what they are supposed to do: scholarly research. By interviewing students and asking them to keep diaries of their activities, the researchers were able to track the college experience for students of various ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds. The results, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education last November, indicate that if anyone is gumming up our university system, it’s the rich white kids.
Let’s start with a few statistics: white males reported the highest rates of drinking and drug use, white females came in second. African-Americans and Latinos of both sexes followed and Asian-American students party least. Those results are from Santa Barbara and they conform to studies done elsewhere in the country. The Santa Barbara study found white students spend much of their social time at parties, often sponsored by a fraternity or sorority. African-American and Latino students are twice as likely to go to a concert, play, film or museum and three times as likely to belong to a service organization as white students.
The researchers developed a tool they call the “adversity index.” Students whose parents are college graduates, who have taken few student loans, who do not have to work during the school year are deemed to have “low adversity.” Although “low adversity” students have more time to devote to their studies, the students themselves report they spend their time drinking and doing drugs. Students who work full time spend more hours studying than students who don’t work at all.
Interviews with professors yielded complementary data. It is students of color and working class that visit their offices to talk about term papers and class work. The affluent students only appear to complain about their grades.
That’s the data. The anecdotal evidence, collected by my eyes and ears, agrees. It was Thanksgiving 1992 and I was in New Orleans, as were several thousand students from African-American colleges, in town for a basketball tournament. At Saturday midnight, Bourbon Street was thronged and while the kids were boisterous, they weren’t obnoxious, while they were drinking, they weren’t drunk. It was the only time I’ve seen Bourbon Street undecorated by vomit.
The UC Santa Barbara study concluded that for affluent students, college is just a place to spend four years. Their families have risen to the top of the socio-economic ladder and an “F” in Twentieth-Century Political Philosophy will probably not affect junior’s future one way or another. It’s really not about race, but opportunity. It’s not that rich white students are innately lazy or prone to drinking, it’s just that the society we have created leaves them few chances to fail and therefore little incentive for initiative. But when California cuts affirmative action and the numbers of minority students plunge, then California – or any other state – closes the door of opportunity to whole classes of people who are best placed to take advantage of it.
As the commercial says, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.