A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

Much of this book is about the consequences of racial admissions preferences on student learning in American higher education. Most public discussions of this issue (and related issues) use terms that have multiple or ambiguous meanings, so this note explains and defines a few key ideas and introduces usages we use henceforth.

Affirmative action is a particularly confusing (and often political) term. In this book we generally distinguish between affirmative action and racial preferences . We use affirmative action to refer to proactive efforts to prevent discrimination against minorities and promote genuinely equal opportunity by ensuring that selection procedures are fair and by using outreach and recruiting to correct past patterns of exclusion. Racial preferences, in contrast, describe programs that allocate college admissions or other opportunities based partly on the race of a candidate.

In common parlance “affirmative action” usually refers both to the pool-expanding efforts we note above as well as racial preferences. Advocates of racial preferences often use this broad sense of affirmative action because there is—as hundreds of polls confirm—much more public support for affirmative action in some form than there is for racial preferences. We sometimes use “affirmative action” in this broad sense when we refer to general usage, as in “the affirmative action debate.”

By higher education we mean all postsecondary schooling in the United States. We often refer to “colleges and universities” similarly to refer to higher education, and sometimes we use college alone to refer to undergraduate education and universities to refer to institutions that confer both undergraduate and graduate degrees.

We use an academic index to roughly quantify and compare the academic preparation of people applying for admission to a college or graduate program and to make discussions of things like racial preferences more concrete. When expressed as a number, the academic index runs from 0 to 1,000; applicants may receive up to 600 points based on their score on a standardized admissions test taken for a particular program (e.g., the SAT I for college applicants, the GRE for applicants to doctoral programs, the LSAT for law school applicants, etc.), and up to 400 points based on their GPA in whatever academic program they have most recently completed (e.g., high school for college applicants, college for graduate school applicants). Thus, for example, a high school senior who received an 1800 on the SAT I and had a 3.5 high school GPA would have an academic index of 750 (400 points for the SAT I score, because the student got two-thirds of the possible points on it, and 350 points for the HSGPA, because the student got seven-eighths of the possible points for that). Many higher education programs use some variation on this academic index, though they have many different methods of giving weight to test scores and grades. But however an academic index is defined, it is generally a strong predictor of whether a student will be admitted. At most law schools, for example, one can predict over 80 percent of the applicants who will be offered admission simply by knowing each applicant’s academic index.

Sometimes, with academic indices and other measures of academic preparation, we will use percentiles to compare students or applicants. If Student Jones has an academic index at the 90th percentile of applicants to a particular school, that means that 90 percent of the other applicants have lower academic indices than Jones does. If Student Lee is at the 20th percentile, that means that 20 percent of the other applicants have lower academic indices than Lee does. Similarly, a decile refers to tenths of a distribution. A student in the top decile of her class is in the top tenth and is at the 90th percentile or above.

The concept of the academic index can help us distinguish between large and small admissions preferences. These are obviously subjective terms, but when we refer to a large admissions preference—whether it be based on race, alumni connections, or athletic ability—we generally mean a preference that is equivalent to adding 80 or more points to the academic index of a an applicant. This would be equivalent to a 240-point upward adjustment to an applicant’s modern SAT I score. We discuss these ideas in more depth in Chapter Two.

We use black as a shorthand reference for African American, white as shorthand for Caucasian Americans, Hispanic as shorthand for Hispanic Americans (which subsumes the terms Latino, Chicano, Cuban American, Mexican American, etc.); we use Asian as shorthand for Asian Americans, including all American residents whose ethnic origins are in Asia; we use American Indian as shorthand for anyone who traces ancestry to one or more of the native tribes indigenous to the territory of the United States. We generally eschew the term minority, but when we do use it we are referring to all nonwhite groups. Racial preference programs often focus on underrepresented minorities, a term that includes any ethnic group that would be accepted at a lower-than-average rate under a race-neutral admissions program. Depending on the program and the context, Filipino Americans, Cambodian Americans, Cuban Americans, and many other ethnic groups might or might not be included. Because this can be a confusing term and is not widely used in common discourse, we generally avoid it. Moreover, in much of the book we do not specifically mention American Indians as the beneficiaries of admissions preferences, partly to simplify the discussion but more often because the relevant numbers are so small that we cannot make confident generalizations.