[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 9 (Friday, January 17, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1138-S1139]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
PROMOTING DIVERSITY IN INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Mrs. CLINTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the
following letter to the President, regarding his Administration's
decision to file a brief opposing the University of Michigan's use of
affirmative action, be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
U.S. Senate
Washington, DC, January 17, 2003.
Hon. George W. Bush,
President of the United States,
Washington, DC.
Dear Mr. President: On Wednesday, as your Administration
prepared to file its Supreme Court brief opposing the
University of Michigan's use of affirmative action to achieve
diversity in its student body, you reiterated your commitment
to increasing the number of minorities on college campuses. I
applaud this commitment, but do not believe that replacing
traditional affirmative action with ``race neutral'' percent
plans will fully accomplish our shared goal of promoting
diversity throughout our institutions of higher education. I
am especially concerned that such plans necessarily depend on
racial segregation in high schools and, further, that a Court
decision banning traditional affirmative action could trigger
a domino effect undermining our nation's anti-discrimination
laws.
The Michigan cases are among the most important ever to
confront the Court since Brown v. Board of Education. Over
the past several decades, the story of American higher
education has been a story of gradually expanding opportunity
for historically excluded or marginalized groups. Anti-
discrimination laws and financial aid policies have opened
the doors of higher education for millions of minority
students. But as you said on Wednesday, ``We should not be
satisfied with the current numbers of minorities on Americans
college campuses. Much progress has been made; much more is
needed.''
At the very top schools in this country, including
Michigan, significant racial diversity is largely
attributable to affirmative action. By traditional
affirmative action, I do not mean quotas, and neither does
the University of Michigan. I mean the use of race as one of
many factors--along with geography, socioeconomic status, and
other life-shaping attributes or experiences--to achieve an
educationally diverse student body. Michigan's affirmative
action policies work this way, and for 25 years such policies
have been constitutional, just as they are today.
If our best colleges, law schools, and medical schools were
to end traditional affirmative action today, without adopting
any alternative, minority enrollments would drop by two-
thirds or more. So a critical question, as you suggested, is
whether there are alternatives to traditional affirmative
action that might do as good a job--or better--at keeping the
doors of selective institutions open to qualified minority
students.
You applauded the innovation of states that have adopted
``percent plans'' guaranteeing college admission to top high
school graduates. I agree with you that after five years, the
Texas ``10 percent plan,'' where all students who graduate in
the top 10 percent of their high school class are guaranteed
admission to a state university of their choosing, has shown
some impressive results. After an initial drop in 1997,
minority enrollment at UT-Austin, one of the state's flagship
schools, has rebounded almost to the levels achieved under
traditional affirmative action.
In addition, UT-Austin is now drawing students from a
larger number of high schools and from a wider geographic
area, a change that benefits white as well as minority
students. The entering class of 2000 included students from
135 schools that had not been represented there before 1996.
Those schools included predominantly minority, inner-city
schools as well as predominantly white, rural schools. And,
despite worries that 10-percenters from poor high schools
might not be prepared for the academic rigor of UT-Austin,
the most recent evidence is that 10-percenters of all races
are performing as well as other students who scored 200 or
300 points better on the SAT. Retention is generally higher
among 10-percenters than among other students.
Notably, these results have occurred despite the fact that
average SAT scores--the often cited measure of merit among
opponents of traditional affirmative action--have decreased,
not increased, among 10-percenters and among black and
Hispanic students at UT-Austin. Like traditional affirmative
action, the 10 percent plan admits qualified students with
lower test scores over students with higher scores,
recognizing that test scores are not the ``be all and end
all'' of an applicant's merit, potential, or character.
The early evidence is very encouraging, and I am cautiously
optimistic that for some schools, racial diversity can be
achieved through alternatives like this one. Even so, I think
it would be a mistake to shut the door on traditional
affirmative action and treat percent plans as a panacea for
increasing minority enrollments. While they hold promise,
they also come with pitfalls.
As I am sure you are aware, Texas's other flagship
institution, Texas A&M-College Station, continues to struggle
with raising black and Hispanic enrollments, even under the
10 percent plan. California's 4 percent plan and Florida's 20
percent plan, though similar in concept, differ from the
Texas plan in one crucial respect: They do not guarantee top
graduates admission to a state university of their choosing.
As a result, minority enrollment in California has increased
at less selective schools like UC-Irvine and UC-Riverside,
but not at the most selective schools. Between 1997 and 2001,
the number of black freshmen dropped from 252 to 138 at UC-
Berkeley and from 204 to 125 at UCLA. Florida's 20 percent
plan, after its first year, has kept minority enrollment in
the state system steady. But the flagship school, the
University of Florida, saw a 40 percent drop in black
enrollment and a 7.5 percent drop in Hispanic enrollment.
My primary concern, however, is that the very success of
percent plans in enrolling substantial numbers of minority
students is entirely dependent on racial segregation at the
high school level.
For the past 30 years, the Supreme Court has turned its
back on remedying inequality in elementary and secondary
schools based on race or income, even going so far as to say
that ``at least where wealth is involved, the Equal
Protection Clause does not require absolute equality or
precisely equal advantages.'' As a result, 50 years after
Brown, racial segregation is increasing in our public
schools. Seventy percent of black students now attend
predominantly minority schools, up from 63 percent in 1980.
Forty-six percent of Hispanic students in Texas, 42 percent
in California, and 59 percent in New York go to schools that
are 90 to 100 percent minority. And racially segregated
schools, except predominantly white schools, are almost
always schools with high poverty. The average black or
Hispanic student goes to school with more than twice as many
poor classmates as the average white student.
Any policy of college access that is in tension with
efforts to integrate public schools cannot be the best
option. Instead of motivating improvement in poor and
segregated high schools, percent plans give minority parents
an incentive to keep their children in those schools, instead
of transferring them to integrated and more academically
competitive schools. And no parent should have to make a
trade-off between college access and high school quality.
In fact, the Texas 10 percent plan exposes the depth of
inequality that can exist in a single state. Texas has 1,500
high schools. In the year 2000, nearly half the 7,600
freshman at UT-Austin came from 74 high schools, around 50
students per school. The other half came from 718 high
schools, roughly 5 students per school. Approximately 700
high schools sent no student to UT-Austin in 2000.
Just as traditional affirmative action should never
distract us from the task of strengthening our elementary and
secondary schools, neither should percent plans. If we are
serious about expanding minority access to higher education,
then we should not only take a closer look at traditional
affirmative action and its alternatives; we should also fully
fund Title I and increase the maximum Pell Grant. The 10
percent plan will never reach students in the poorest schools
unless we commit the resources to turn those schools around
and make college more affordable. These are commitments we
should already be making to help the 90 percent of students
not covered by the 10 percent plan.
Moreover, although percent plans have been somewhat
successful in sustaining minority enrollments at the
undergraduate level, none of them has proven effective at
graduate or professional schools. In 1995, for example,
before traditional affirmative action was eliminated at the
University of Texas Law School, 7.4 percent of first-year
students were black and 12.5 percent were Mexican-American.
But today, only 4 percent are black and 8 percent are
Mexican-American. Similarly, at UC-Berkeley's law school,
Boalt Hall, there were 14 blacks and 17 Hispanics in the 2001
entering class, down from 20 blacks and 28 Hispanics in 1996.
At UCLA Law School, the 10 blacks and 26 Hispanics in the
2001 entering class were substantially fewer than the 19
blacks and 45 Hispanics in 1996.
Between 1997 and 2001, the number of blacks fell from 10 to
6 at UCLA Medical School and from 12 to 7 at UC-San Francisco
Medical School. In the MBA program at UC-Berkeley, there were
3 blacks and 5 Hispanics in the 2001 entering class, down
from 11 blacks and 15 Hispanics in 1996. And at UCLA, there
were 9 blacks and 13 Hispanics in the 2001 first-year MBA
class, compared to 13 blacks and 18 Hispanics in 1996.
The fact is, at the graduate level, there are few options
for sustaining minority enrollments besides traditional
affirmative action. Percent plans will not achieve graduate
student diversity unless the undergraduate institutions they
draw from are segregated.
[[Page S1139]]
And preferences for socioeconomic disadvantage will not help
very much. Although minorities are more likely than whites to
come from low-income backgrounds, the vast majority of low-
income people are still white.
Finally, there is little if any evidence that percent plans
provide an effective substitute for traditional affirmative
action at our leading private institutions. Under Title VI of
the Civil Rights Act, virtually every private institution in
the country is subject to the same legal standards regarding
traditional affirmative action as public institutions. Any
Supreme Court decision finding traditional affirmative action
unconstitutional at public universities would likely end
affirmative action at private universities as well--with very
troubling results.
It is one thing for Florida to guarantee top 20 percenters
admission to one of the state's 11 public universities, or
for the University of California to guarantee top 4
percenters admission to one of 10 campuses. But what about
schools like Harvard or Stanford or Columbia? Given how small
and selective these schools are, even a plan guaranteeing
admission to the top half of one percent of high school
graduates would not work, nor would it necessarily make good
sense.
While some may think it odd to worry about racial diversity
at private schools, since our public university systems serve
far more students, these schools have long been regarded by
the American public--indeed, the world--as the very best of
what higher education can offer. And those schools generate a
disproportionate number of our nation's leaders in
government, business, and academia. As Justice Lewis Powell
said 25 years ago in the Bakke case, which featured Harvard's
affirmative action policy as the gold standard for selective
admissions: ``It is not too much to say that the Nation's
future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to
the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of
many peoples.''
The bottom line, then, is that although percent plans and
other approaches may hold promise for some institutions, they
are not effective substitutes for traditional affirmative
action at all institutions. There is no ``one-size-fits-all''
alternative to traditional affirmative action that works at
every school, in every system, in every state. I agree with
you, Mr. President, that we need to take a closer look at
ways to achieve diversity besides traditional affirmative
action. But I do not agree that we should foreclose
traditional affirmative action as an option for pursuing
diversity where the alternatives do not work.
Finally, let me mention two additional concerns. First, no
one doubts that the percent plans in Texas, Florida, and
California were designed to achieve exactly what traditional
affirmative action was designed to achieve, namely, increased
opportunity for qualified minority students. And the
barometer of success has been whether these plans are keeping
minority enrollments at levels achieved under traditional
affirmative action. Where percent plans have been judged
successful-at UT-Austin, for example-they have lowered, not
raised, average SAT scores among former beneficiaries of
traditional affirmative action. The fact is that percent
plans, in their motivation, design, and effect, look a lot
like traditional affirmative action. If the Court agrees with
your Administration that traditional affirmative action is
unconstitutional, aren't percent plans simply the next shoe
to drop? If we accept the constitutionality, and sometimes
the wisdom, of percent plans, then logic and law dictate that
we also accept the constitutionality and wisdom of
affirmative action
This is especially true for public universities like
Michigan that strive to serve a student body representative
of the taxpayers who support the system. As you said
yesterday, ``America is a diverse country, racially,
economically, and ethnically. And our institutions of higher
education should reflect our diversity.'' I see nothing wrong
with a public university doing directly what Texas,
California, and Florida have been forced to do indirectly,
indeed what we have applauded them for doing.
Second, I am very concerned about the unintended
consequences of making a constitutional distinction between
percent plans and traditional affirmative action. If
admissions policies must be scrubbed clean of race, then
shouldn't they also be scrubbed clean of gender? Women have
made great strides in higher education, but they continue to
lag behind men in areas like engineering and computer
science. In fact, women are awarded 25 percent of doctoral
degrees in math and the physical sciences, and only 15
percent of doctorates in engineering. Percent plans cannot
solve these problems of gender inequality, just as they
cannot solve every problem of racial inequality. But percent
plans teach us what supporters of traditional affirmative
action have long known: that there are considerations
important to the distribution of educational opportunity in
America other than a standardized test score.
Traditional affirmative action, whether based on race or
gender, stands or falls on similar logic. And if traditional
affirmative action falls, I worry it is only a small step to
rolling back our most basic antidiscrimination laws, like
Title VII and Title IX. Given unconscious stereotypes and
structural inequalities that persist in our society, there is
a very fine line between taking deliberate steps to ensure
access to higher education for minorities and women, and
protecting them from unlawful discrimination.
Mr. President, I urge you to carefully consider the
implications of eliminating traditional affirmative action in
the absence of alternatives that effectively promote, and do
not work against, diversity and integration in all of our
public high schools, colleges, and graduate programs. And I
urge you to consider the consequences your Administration's
position may have for the vigorous enforcement of our
nation's anti-discrimination laws.
Sincerely yours,
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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