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His data aren't bad.
Here's his thesis.
1. If you are really well prepared for college, then you "fit" at UCLA or Berkeley. You meet the professors' and university's expectations, you have the required skills and background knowledge, or close enough.
2. If you're a bit less prepared for college, then you "fit" at San Diego or some other UC schools. You have gaps in your knowledge and skills, and the professors and university adjust things to bootstrap you into the program. The frosh course start at a slightly lower level or the quality of the work that's needed is slightly lower.
3. If you're even less prepared for college, there are still a couple of UC schools that you "fit," as well as more CSU campuses. The quality of work expected is even lower, and the rigor of the frosh courses is lower. There are more support systems set up and a bit more hand-holding.
If you look at the stats for whites, it works. Those with a high drop-out rate at top tier schools trail in SAT scores, GPA, etc., etc. compared to those who graduate in 4-5 years. White kids with the same SAT scores, etc., as Berkeley dropouts do fine at UCI and graduate with a B. The kids that have a rough time at UCI trail in high school GPA and SAT scores (etc.) compared to successful UCI students, but are a match for those who graduate with a B at the bottom tier UC schools or mid-tier CSU schools.
His conclusion was that if those white college failures had gone to a slightly lesser school, they'd most likely have "fit" the college's profile and would have graduated.
This isn't controversial. It's what makes good schools good schools, middle-tier schools middle-tier schools. It works for 4-year colleges and law schools. Lots of kids go to a school that is pitched at too high a level for them and they crash and burn; we like to look at the exceptions and confuse the exceptions for the rule, and colleges don't like to publicize this particular "feature."
His next observation makes for controversy.
The typical affirmative action admit to UCLA and Berkeley, those who wouldn't otherwise have gotten in, had average SAT/highschool GPA like the cohort of whites that tended to drop out. In fact, if you match GPA/SAT and other criteria blacks and Latinos at top-tier UC schools "look like" the bottom decile of whites. And have the same drop-out rate, similar college GPAs. It's not a widely published number, but blacks and Latinos at top-tier UC schools have a shockingly huge drop-out rate, and those numbers are for a normative 6-year time to degree.
UCI had an active affirmative action program. *Their* average aff. action admit was very much like the bottom 10% of whites--similar dropout rate, high school GPA, etc. Just as it's not unreasonable to assume that the whites that dropped out would have done okay at a lesser school, so the blacks that dropped out would have done okay at a lesser school.
With the whites, it doesn't much matter. There are lots of whites going to school, and while it's a bunch of personal tragedies it's not a collective or group tragedy. A large percentage of black and Latino college students in the '90s had their entry scores increased by the aff. action program, in other words, they were, to some extent, affirmative action admits. His conclusion was that had minorities not been given bonus points for ethnicity/race they'd have had a much higher graduation rate.
This is not saying anything racist. It's saying that blacks that did poorly in high school are like whites that did poorly in high school--if anything, it's saying that race doesn't matter in this regard. There may be racism, but schools don't give "racism points" in coursework, they have the same expectations of a student regardless of skin melanin levels. A poorly prepared white is no more able to meet those expectations, on average, than a poorly prepared black or Latino.
It's often considered racist because we go schizophrenic. We argue that public schools disproportionately fail to properly prepare black/Latino students for college. Then we turn around and say that the lack of preparation doesn't matter, it's racist to say it does. This is lunacy. We assume that somehow a black affirmative action admit in the '90s could easily, in college, make up for years of crappy high school education *while* taking a full course load. Like that's going to happen.
Sanders' work is the model for the UCI guy's work, but he focused on law schools. If Student X is a good fit for Harvard, he'll almost certainly graduate; but because of prior gaps in training training Student X may be a better fit for a mid-tier law school, or even a bottom-tier law school. Putting a good but not excellent BA into Harvard leads to a mismatch; putting a low-grade BA into a mid-tier school leads to a mismatch. Skin color's irrelevant in this, but was used to get good black students into excellent schools, and mediocre black students into good schools. In other words, Sanders argues, they intentionally created a mismatch in order to look good.
The result at UCLA Law, like UCLA Humanities and Social Sciences (and the other two divisions) was a far higher black/Latino drop-out/fail rate. If it's not racism that leads the minority students to drop out, then you have to assume something else. Perhaps it's academic preparation--precisely what GPAs and LSATs were to test, and which were partly ignored in aff. action admit
decisions.
I saw the numbers when I was at UCLA. The administrators had been torn up over them for over a decade and continued to be unable to understand them. Sensitivity training didn't help, surveys about racism and how to fight it didn't help, monitoring didn't help, lots of tutoring (peer and otherwise) failed to help, and mentoring didn't help. Nothing moved the numbers. I doubt much would have moved the numbers for the lowest 10% of whites, either.
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