The President and the Muzzle

Yesterday President Brodhead gave his annual address to the faculty. You can find the full text here.  The topic was Duke and the Legacy of Race. One of the motivations for his talk was the controversy over my paper with Esteban Aucejo and Ken Spenner.

While there was much good in President Brodhead's address, outlining the dramatic progress that has occurred on matters of race in the past fifty years, the way my paper was handled was very disappointing. Despite one troublesome line in the administration's initial response to the study, I was okay with how the administration handled the issue given the tough spot they were in. But President Brodhead's speech was not okay.

Stereotype Threat

On a radio interview that you can listen to here, I describe the controversial paper and then there is a discussion involving the president of the Black Student Alliance and Sandy Darity. Sandy Darity stated that he had two problems with the paper. First, it was being used by others in a Supreme Court case against racial preferences, which is not a problem with the paper itself. Second, we didn't take into account stereotype threat.

Stereotype threat is the concept that certain marginalized groups will underperform on tests relative to their actual abilities due to having to endure negative stereotypes. If someone repeatedly calls you an idiot right before you take a test, this may have a negative impact on your performance.

Mismatch

To an economist, the idea of affirmative action actually being bad for its beneficiaries seems, at first blush, crazy. Fundamentally, affirmative action in higher education expands the number of schools its beneficiaries can attend. Since from the perspective of economics individuals are making choices to maximize their well-being, having more options should be beneficial. After all, adding another possible school to the set of schools an individual can attend doesn't mean the individual has to attend the newly available option. The individual will only take advantage of this new opportunity if the expected benefits are higher than the previously available opportunities.

However, additional choices may not be helpful if individuals have incomplete information about their prospects for success at particular schools. In work with Esteban Aucejo, Hanming Fang, and Ken Spenner, we establish conditions under which affirmative action  can lead to intended beneficiaries being made worse off. The paper is titled "Does Affirmative Action Lead to Mismatch? A New Test and Evidence" and was published in Quantitative Economics.

Hostile Environments

NOTE: I had been putting humor into the blog because affirmative action is such a touchy subject and I was hoping to lighten the mood. However, with the Supreme Court hearing the Texas case, I plan on keeping the posts more serious. No more links to Duke basketball, professional wrestling, or Austin Powers movies.

How can a study about racial differences in college performance and major switching be silent about the role of discrimination? After all, isn't there anecdotal evidence that African Americans feel discriminated against in college?

Sink or Swim

So the last two posts have been about 1) differences (on average) in study times and course difficulty across majors and 2) how affirmative action results in its beneficiaries, particularly African Americans, coming in with worse academic backgrounds than their non-affirmative action counterparts. At every school, those with lower SAT scores tend to switch out of the natural sciences. Affirmative action leads to certain groups at each university having lower SAT scores than their majority counterparts. Hence, we should expect these groups to be less likely to persist in the natural sciences.

Even though we're not supposed to talk about it, this is exactly what we see at Duke for African Americans. Of those who report an initial major, over 75% of African American males start out interested  in the natural sciences, engineering, or economics yet only 35% finish in these fields.

The Third Rail

The third rail (not to be confused with the fourth wall) is the rail you're not supposed to touch unless you're interested in meeting certain death. Affirmative action is a third rail. Most sane people simply don't want to deal with the hassle. This is reflected in the very weak evidence on both sides of the two Supreme Court cases involving the University of Michigan, Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger.

As a result, few people know the extent that affirmative action takes place, let alone which universities use it. I had promised to discuss the interplay between major choice and race in my next post. But in order to understand the interplay, it is first necessary to understand how affirmative action works.

Major Matters

One of the tag lines of the press coverage is that my study claims African American students are taking the easy way out by switching to easy majors.  There are two parts to the claim, one has to do with racial differences in choice of major and two is that there are easy majors. I'll deal with how majors are different first, saving the issue of race and major choice for the next post. (A preview of the next post: a correct characterization of the finding is that, on average, race doesn't matter for persistence in STEM fields once differences in academic background are taken into account.)

Having a professor in one discipline call out other disciplines for being easy seems, at the very least, to be inconsiderate as well as raising a whole host of questions. How is easy defined? Shouldn't it depend on the individual? Surely some people will be better in math-based courses and others in writing courses?