The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

by Richard J. Herrnstein

  Our proposal will sound, and is, elitist, but only in the sense that, after exposing students to the best the world’s intellectual heritage has to offer and challenging them to achieve whatever level of excellence they are capable of, just a minority of students has the potential to become “an educated person” as we are using the term. It is not within everyone’s ability to understand the world’s intellectual heritage at the same level, any more than everyone who enters college can expect to be a theoretical physicist by trying hard enough. At every stage of learning, some people reach their limits. This is not a controversial statement when it applies to the highest levels of learning. Readers who kept taking mathematics as long as they could stand it know that at some point they hit the wall, and studying hard was no longer enough.

  The nation has been unwilling to accept in recent decades that the same phenomenon of individual limitation applies at every level of education. Given the constraints of time and educational resources, some students cannot be taught statistical theory; a smaller fraction of students cannot be taught the role of mercantilism in European history; for even a smaller fraction, writing a coherent essay may be out of reach. Each level of accomplishment deserves respect on its own merits, but the ideal of the educated person is in itself an ideal that must be embraced openly. By abandoning it, America has been falling short both in educating its most gifted and in inculcating, across the entire cognitive distribution, the values we would want in an educated citizenry.

  But what do we want to do? What courses should be required of educated persons? Do we want to have separate schools for the gifted and average student? Tracking systems? A national Great Books curriculum?

  We will say it again: Different parents will want to make different choices for their children. We are not wise enough—and neither are any of our colleagues wise enough, nor is the federal government wise enough—to prescribe for them what is best for their children. The goal of developing educated persons, like the goal of improving American education in general, will best be served by letting parents and local communities make those choices.

  Educated, Not Credentialed

  If we have not already made it plain, let us state explicitly that we are proposing a traditional ideal of education, not glorifying academic eredentials. To he an educated person as we use the term will ordinarily entail getting a degree, but that is incidental. Credentialism—unnecessarily limiting access to jobs to people with certain licenses and degrees—is part of the problem, not a solution. Because academic credentials are so overvalued, America shies away from accepting that many people have academic limitations—hence, the dumbing down that holds back the brightest youngsters.

  But parents and communities must turn to educators to implement their hopes for their children, and here is the problem: Too few educators are comfortable with the idea of the educated person. A century ago the notion of an educated person was an expression of a shared understanding, not of legal requirements. That understanding arose because people were at ease with intellectual standards, with rigor, with a recognition that people differ in their capacities. The criterion for being an educated person did not have to be compromised to include the supposition that everyone could meet it. The concept of the educated person has been out of fashion with the people who run elementary and secondary schools and, for that matter, with too many of the people who run universities.

  Our policy goal? That educators who read these words change their minds. It is a reform that is at once impossible to legislate but requires no money at all. It a reform that would not jeopardize the educational advances of the average student. All that we ask is that educational leaders rededicate themselves to the duty that was once at the heart of their calling, to demand much from those fortunate students to whom much has been given.

  Chapter 19

  AffirmativeAction in Higher Education

  Affirmative action on the campus needs, at last, to be discussed as it is actually practiced, not as the rhetoric portrays it. Our own efforts to assemble data on a secretive process lead us to conclude that affirmative action as it is practiced cannot survive public scrutiny.

  The edge given to minority applicants to college and graduate school is not a nod in their favor in the case of a close call but an extremely large advantage that puts black and Latino candidates in a separate admissions competition. On elite campuses, the average black freshman is in the region of the 10th to 15th percentile of the distribution of cognitive ability among white freshman. Nationwide, the gap seems to be at least that large, perhaps larger. The gap does not diminish in graduate school. If anything, it may be larger.

  In the world of college admissions, Asians are a conspicuously unprotected minority. At the elite schools, they suffer a modest penalty, with the average Asian freshman being at about the 60th percentile of the white cognitive ability distribution. Our data from state universities are too sparse to draw conclusions. In all the available cases, the difference between white and Asian distributions is small (either plus or minus) compared to the large differences separating blacks and Latinos from whites.

  The edge given to minority candidates could be more easily defended if the competition were between disadvantaged minority youths and privileged white youths. But nearly as large a cognitive difference separates disadvantaged black freshmen from disadvantaged white freshmen. Still more difficult to defend, blacks from affluent socioeconomic backgrounds are given a substantial edge over disadvantaged whites.

  There is no question that affirmative action has “worked,” in the sense that it has put more blacks and Latinos on college campuses than would otherwise have been there. But this success must be measured against costs. When students look around them, they see that blacks and Latinos constitute small proportions of the student population but high proportions of the students doing poorly in school. The psychological consequences of this disparity may be part of the explanation for the increasing racial animosity and the high black dropout rates that have troubled American campuses. In society at large, a college degree does not have the same meaning for a minority graduate and a white one, with consequences that reverberate in the workplace and continue throughout life.

  It is time to return to the original intentions of affirmative action: to cast a wider net, to give preference to members of disadvantaged groups, whatever their skin color, when qualifications are similar. Such a change would accord more closely with the logic underlying affirmative action, with the needs of today’s students of all ethnic groups, and with progress toward a healthy multiracial society.

  We come to national policies that require people to treat groups differently under the law. Affirmative action began to be woven into American employment and educational practices in the 1960s as universities and employers intensified their recruiting of blacks—initially on their own, then in compliance with a widening body of court decisions and laws. By the early 1970s, affirmative action had been expanded beyond blacks to include women, Latinos, and the disabled. It also became more aggressive. Targets, guidelines, and de facto quotas1 evolved as universities and employers discovered that the equality of outcome that people sought was not to be had from traditional recruiting methods. As it became more aggressive, affirmative action became correspondingly more controversial.

  Affirmative action creates antagonism partly because it affects the distribution of scarce goods—university places, scholarships, job offers, and promotions—that people prize. But it is also problematic for reasons that reach into deeply held beliefs—most fundamentally, beliefs about the ideal of equal opportunity versus the reality of the historical experience of certain groups, preeminently blacks, in this country. As the rhetoric heats up, the arguments about affirmative action become blurred. Affirmative action raises different questions in different contexts. What, people ask, are the proper goals of affirmative action, the proper methods? Which groups are to be benefited? What are the costs of affirmative action, and who should bear them
? Is affirmative action a temporary expedient to correct past wrongs, or must the American ideal of individualism be permanently modified for the collective needs of members of certain groups?

  Affirmative action is part of this book because it has been based on the explicit assumption that ethnic groups do not differ in the abilities that contribute to success in school and the workplace—or, at any rate, there are no differences that cannot be made up with a few remedial courses or a few months on the job. Much of this book has been given over to the many ways in which that assumption is wrong. The implications have to be discussed, and that is the purpose of this chapter and the next, augmented by an appendix on the evolution of affirmative action regulations (Appendix 7). Together, these materials constitute a longer discussion than we devote to any other policy issue, for two reasons. First, we are making a case that contradicts a received wisdom embedded in an intellectual consensus, federal legislation, and Supreme Court jurisprudence. If the task is to be attempted at all, it must be done thoroughly. Second, we believe affirmative action to be one of the most far-reaching domestic issues of our time—not measured in its immediate effects, but in its deep and pervasive impact on America’s understanding of what is just and unjust, how a pluralist society should be organized, and what America is supposed to stand for.

  In this chapter, the topic is the college campus. In Chapter 20, we discuss affirmative action in the workplace. In both chapters, we provide data as available on Asians and Latinos, but the analysis centers on blacks, as has the debate over affirmative action.

  THE “EDGE” IN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

  People may agree that they want affirmative action in higher education until they say more precisely what they mean by it. Then they may disagree. But whatever the argument, it would help to have some data about how colleges and universities have translated the universal desire for greater fairness in university education into affirmative action programs. Our first goal is to inform the debate with such data.

  At first glance, ours may seem an odd objective, for certain kinds of data about affirmative action are abundant. Universities and businesses keep detailed numbers about the numbers of minorities who apply and are accepted. But data about the core mechanism of affirmative action—the magnitudes of the values assigned to group membership—are not part of the public debate.

  This ignorance about practice was revealed in 1991 by a law student at Georgetown University, Timothy Maguire, who had been hired to file student records.2 He surreptitiously compiled the entrance statistics for a sample of applicants to Georgetown’s law school and then published the results of his research in the law school’s student newspaper. He revealed that the mean on the Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT) differed by a large margin for accepted black and white students.

  In the storm that ensued, an official at the law school sent a letter to Maguire’s fellow students condemning his article. Black student groups called for Maguire’s expulsion. Hardly anyone would acknowledge that Maguire’s numbers even raised a legitimate issue. “Incomplete and distorted information about minority qualifications for admission into the Law Center renew the long-standing and intellectually dishonest myth that they are less qualified than their white counterparts to compete in school, perform on the job or receive a promotion,” wrote the authors of an op-ed article in the Washington Post,3 and that seemed to be the prevailing attitude. The numerical magnitude of the edge given to members of certain groups—the value assigned to the state of being black, Latino, female, or physically disabled—was not considered relevant.

  Such edges are inherent in the process. In as neutral and precise language as we can devise: Perfectly practiced, the traditional American ideal of equal opportunity means using exclusively individual measures, applied uniformly, to choose some people over others. Perfectly practiced, affirmative action means assigning a premium, an edge, to group membership in addition to the individual measures before making a final assessment that chooses some people over others.

  The size of the premium assigned to group membership—an ethnic premium when it is applied to affirmative action for favored ethnic groups—is important in trying to judge whether affirmative action in principle is working. This knowledge should be useful not only (or even primarily) for deciding whether one is “for” or “against”affirmative action in the abstract. It should be especially useful for the proponents of affirmative action. Given that one is in favor of affirmative action, how may it be practiced in a way that conforms with one’s overall notions of what is fair and appropriate? If one opposes affirmative action in principle, how much is it deforming behavior in practice?

  It is not obvious precisely where questions of fact trail into questions of philosophy, but we will attempt to stay on the factual side of the line at first. A bit of philosophical speculation is reserved for the end of the chapter. We first examine evidence on the magnitude of the ethnic premium from individual colleges and universities, then from professional schools. We then recast the NLSY data in terms of the rationale underlying affirmative action. We conclude that the size of the premium is unreasonably large, producing differences in academic talent across campus ethnic groups so gaping that they are in no one’s best interest. We further argue that the current practice is out of keeping with the rationale for affirmative action.

  The Magnitude of the Edge in Undergraduate Schools

  We have obtained SAT data on classes entering twenty-six of the nation’s top colleges and universities. In 1975, most of the nation’s elite private colleges and universities formed the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE), which, among other things, compiles and shares information on the students at member institutions, including their SAT scores. We have obtained these data for the classes entering in 1991 and 1992.4 They include sixteen out of the twenty top-rated private universities and five of the top ten private colleges, as ranked in U.S. News and World Report for 1993.5 The figure below shows the difference in the sum of the average Verbal and Math SAT scores between whites and two minorities, blacks and Asians, for the classes in the COFHE schools that matriculated in the fall of 1992. In addition, the figure includes data on the University of Virginia and the University of California at Berkeley in 1988.6

  The difference between black and white scores was less than 100 points at only one school, Harvard. It exceeded 200 points at nine schools, reaching its highest at Berkeley (288 points). Overall, the median difference between the white mean and the black mean was 180 SAT points, or, conservatively estimated, about 1.3 standard deviations.7 This would put the average black at about the 10th percentile of white students. In all but four schools, Asians were within 6 points of the white mean or above it, with a median SAT 30 points above the local white average, working out to about .2 standard deviations. Or in other words, the average Asian was at about the 60th percentile of the white distribution. This combination means that blacks and Asians have even less overlap than blacks and whites at most schools, with the median black at the 5th to 7th percentile of the distribution of Asian students. Data for Latinos (not shown in the figure) put them between blacks and whites, with a median of 129 points below the white mean, or about .9 standard deviation below the white mean in the typical case. The average Latino is therefore at about the 20th percentile of the distribution of white students.8

  At selective schools, the median black edge was 180 SAT points, while Asians faced a median penalty of 30 points

  Sources: Consortium on Financing Higher Education 1992; Sarich 1990 (for Berkeley); L. Feinberg, “Black freshman enrollment rises 46% at U-Va,” Washington Post, Dec. 26, 1988, p. C1 (for University of Virginia).

  The ordering of black, Latino, white, and Asian is similar to that reported for IQ and SAT scores in Chapter 13. In other words, elite universities are race norming (though it is doubtful they think of it that way), carrying with them into their student populations the ethnic differences in cognitive distributions observed in the population at large.
/>
  We would prefer to have a sample of nonelite state universities represented in our data, but such numbers are closely guarded.9 The only data we have obtained come from the University of California at Davis, for 1979. The black-white difference then was 271 SAT points, and the Latino-white difference 211 points.10 The Asian mean at Davis was, atypically, 54 points below the white mean, the largest such difference we have found.

  The data from the University of Virginia and the two University of California campuses suggest that the gap between minorities and whites among freshmen at state universities may be larger than at the elite private schools. It is only a suggestion, given the limited data, but it also makes sense: Places like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and MIT get first pick. Because the raw numbers of high-scoring black and Latino students are so small, the top schools dig deep into the thin layer of minority students at the top of the SAT distribution. In 1993, for example, only 129 blacks and 234 Latinos nationwide had SAT-Verbal scores in the 700s—and these represented all-time highs—compared to 7,114 whites. Even highly rated state institutions such as the University of California’s Berkeley campus and the University of Virginia lose many of these most talented minority students to the elite private schools while continuing to get many of the top scorers in the larger white pool. Such are the mathematics of competition for a scarce good, borne out by the limited university data available, which show the three state universities with three of the four largest black-white gaps in SATs.

  Are Asians the Victims of Reverse Discrimination?

  Complaints that Asian-American applicants were being subjected to reverse discrimination led eventually to a full-scale inquiry in the late 1980s by the federal Office for Civil Rights. Harvard, which was examined closely, was able to show that the SAT penalty of their Asian admitted students was accounted for by the smaller number of alumni children and athletes in the pool, and eventually got a clean bill of health, but the controversy remains at many other institutions.11 Brown responded to a report from its Asian-American Students Association by admitting the existence of “an extremely serious situation” and called for “immediate remedial measures.”12 At Berkeley, Stanford, Princeton, and other elite schools, special committees have investigated the issue, issuing reports that tend to exonerate their colleges of actual reverse discrimination but acknowledge shortcomings in keeping up with the revolution in Asian applicants.13