The Freshman Cascade

After the Supreme Court ruling that effectively banned racial preferences in college admissions, the admission of black and Hispanic students to the most selective schools in the country declined. But it isn't like the minority students who had any chance of getting into Harvard weren't going to get in somewhere. And now data shows that many of those students went instead to "flagship" state schools. NY Times:

Overall, freshmen enrollment of underrepresented minority groups increased by 8 percent at public flagship universities.

The people who did this study are very worried that this will lead to a sort of downward "cascade," whereby less qualified black students who would have gone to those flagship state schools will now be pushed into ever less impressive schools, etc. But so far that isn't what the data shows; black enrollment at schools like LSU, Ole Miss, and Flordia has increased by more than 10%. Hispanic freshman enrollment at the University of Miami was up by 45%.

As I have written here before, our obsessive focus on who gets into Stanford and Harvard ignores most of what matters in higher education. While it is true that the higher reaches of a few professions (law, academia) are dominated by Ivy Leaguers, that is not true of other professions; most American CEOs went to state schools.

The real issue in higher education is not who gets into Harvard, but how to make college better for the vast majority of students who don't go to top ranked schools.