Project Description

As America moved from policies of racial exclusion to policies of inclusion in the 1960s, many hoped that declines in discrimination would produce greater integration and a convergence in social and economic outcomes between blacks and whites. Though this occurred in some settings, many observers in higher education concluded that progress there would be slow indeed if racial barriers to entry were simply dropped without any affirmative efforts to improve minority access and participation. One obvious strategy involved outreach (Toepfer 1966). But a fundamental obstacle for many schools was the underlying, pervasive gap between blacks and whites on standardized tests and other measures of academic achievement. On most such exams, such as the SAT and the LSAT, black scores lagged behind whites (usually by more than a full standard deviation). Somewhat smaller but still large gaps existed in conventional GPA measures as well. This meant that at elite colleges and many graduate programs, admissions based largely on hard credentials would produce only tiny numbers of black enrollees. Many schools consequently adopted policies in the late 1960s and early 1970s that essentially used different quantitative admissions standards for different groups (especially blacks) so that the racial/ethnic composition of the students admitted would more closely reflect the composition of the underlying applicant pool.