Weeding out v. Building Up: Why Justice Scalia was Wrong about Black Scientists <em>(Editor’s Commentary)</em>

Abstract

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away on February 13, 2016, only two months after arguing against affirmative action because, according to him, Black students are better-suited for less-advanced school, a slower-track school. Based on the graduation rates, there is no support for Justice Scalia's claim that the nation's highest ranked institutions are too fast for Black students. In fact, the opposite is true. Black students actually have the lowest graduation rates at noncompetitive community colleges and for-profit colleges and the highest graduation rates at more selective institutions, irrespective of affirmative action policies.According to The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) the three universities that have the highest graduation rates for Black students are Yale (98 percent), Harvard (97 percent) and Princeton (97 percent). Stanford University, a private university with an affirmative action policy, has a 91 percent graduation rate for Black students; yet the University of California-Berkeley, a state university that follows a statewide ban on affirmative action, has a 77 percent graduation for Black students (National Center for Education Statistics, 2015).However, there is partial truth to Justice Scalia's point that, of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas. According to data from the National Science Foundation, Black scientists are most likely to come from two basic types of institutions: (a) institutions with a Carnegie classification of Very High Research Activity, and (b) historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs; Fiegener & Proudfoot, 2013).According to a recent report from the National Science Foundation 21 of the top 50 institutions for producing Black graduates who go on to receive their doctorates in Science and Engineering (SE they focus on building up students. Among the HBCUs, none have a Carnegie classification of Very High Research Activity and only two have a classification of High. In total, among the top 50 institutions, HBCUs collectively produced 1,819 Black graduates who earned a doctorate in S&E, TWIs produced 1,600, and foreign institutions produced 798 (Fiegener & Proudfoot, 2013).None of the southern TWIs, such as Georgia State University (GSU), University of Southern Mississippi, and University of Memphis, which are known to have a Black enrollment that is larger than most single HBCUs made the top 50. With more than 10,000 Black students, GSU enrolls more Black students than the entire Atlanta University Consortium (AUC) combined, yet every AUC school (Clark, Morehouse, and Spelman) made the list, but GSU did not.When it comes to producing Black graduates who go on to earn PhDs, HBCUs compete successfully with the nation's best universities, including Ivy League universities, elite private colleges, and flagship state universities. There really is no comparison between HBCUs and non-research intensive TWIs. …