Access to lucrative majors is far from equitable – Study

Professor Aashish Mehta’s path to the recently released working paper, “College Major Restrictions and Student Stratification”, began with stories he heard from students in his economic development course in the University of California Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) global studies department.

Over the years, students would tell him: “I really like studying economics. I really wish I could have done that” – but they hadn’t, because they were blocked by grade point average or GPA-based entry barriers the university placed on high demand majors like economics.

Their stories raised questions about the efficacy of the internal sorting mechanisms UCSB and other universities often use to restrict entry into finance and popular STEM programmes, graduates of which have the highest earning potential.

This issue, Mehta says, had become especially acute at UCSB because, in agreeing to increase funding to the University of California (UC) system, the government in Sacramento required the UC to increase enrolment. Faculty lines (faculty assigned to a department) could not keep pace, leading to more internal sorting of students.

“What’s important about this study,” says Dr John A Douglass, senior research fellow and research professor in public policy and higher education at Berkeley University’s Center for Studies in Higher Education which published the paper, “is how it documents stratification of under-represented minorities (URM) within the university, focusing on majors.

“Most research related to URM focuses on the admission practices, and persistence [graduation] rates and similar outcomes. But the university-induced restrictions on majors, like engineering (and despite labour needs), create disparities in major public universities in the United States, as this study shows.”

Past research

The study, co-authored with Harvard University post-doctoral researcher Zachary Bleemer, follows on the “Will Studying Economics Make You Rich? A regression discontinuity analysis of the returns to college major”, that was accepted for publication in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics in 2020.

Using data from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Mehta and Bleemer found that graduates of the economics department, who barely met the GPA threshold required to enrol in the programme, enjoyed a US$22,000 (46%) per year wage premium over graduates who did not meet it and settled for their second choice major, which was, perforce, less lucrative.

“This [first] paper showed,” Mehta says, “that, if you push kids out of the economics major based on one of these thresholds, it costs them a lot of money. We ballpark that figure at over US$500,000 of wages over their lifetime.”

Using data collected by Bleemer for the University of California ClioMetric Project, which covers 900,000 students at the four University of California campuses – Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara – Mehta and Bleemer were able to track, not only the cohorts but, also, individual students (without names) from the point of application, including high school GPA, through college and into the workforce.

This data is supplemented with data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System that allows them to compare across universities – and show that the detrimental effect of internally established GPA caps on URM students in California holds across major public research universities.

Growing stratification

Bleemer and Mehta study stratification by majors, which they define as an at-least-partly involuntary racial difference in access to the most lucrative fields.

After showing that this has grown nationally, they write: “We investigate the sources of this growing stratification by constructing a data set covering the annual degree attainment and average major premia by ethnicity at every US college and university, [which permits] an observational decomposition of ethnic stratification into within- and between-institution components ... [T]wo thirds of the rise [of stratification] can be explained by within-institutions’ dynamics over time, driven, in particular, by a steep rise in ethnic stratification at public research universities.”

Defenders of stratification by GPA usually rely on two grounds. They first point to the academic capabilities needed to be successful: if, for example, a student fails to master challenges in algebra, then calculus and the courses beyond it are, more than likely, out of reach.

The second is institutional: after the 2008 financial crisis, students voted with their registration packet and flocked towards STEM fields. This triggered the need to limit enrolment; in most cases the establishment of an internal GPA threshold was the chosen tool because, at first blush, it seemed objective.

In the fall of 2019, Mehta and Bleemer report, the top 25 public universities (as ranked by US News and World Report) offered 118 courses in computer science, economics, finance, mechanical engineering and nursing science. Eighty-seven have a restriction, such as a GPA of 3.5, an ‘A’ average, a requirement to seek entry directly from high school, or, in some cases, the submission of an internal application that includes a letter of recommendation.

Because of the depth and detail of their data, one of the most innovative aspects of Mehta and Bleemer’s study is their ability to look backwards and test their thesis that, intended or not, internal restrictions negatively impacted URM students. Their data allows them to map the history of imposition of these restrictions with URMs’ access to their university’s more lucrative programmes.

Nationwide significance

After showing that, nationally, URM students increasingly complete less lucrative majors than their non-URM peers, Bleemer and Mehta show that two-thirds of this negative trend is due to increasing stratification within campuses. That is, on average URM students are increasingly falling behind their non-URM peers on the same campus.

At first glance, the 2019 figures for URM graduates from public research universities seem impressive – approximately a third of these graduates earned their degrees from these schools.

However, Mehta and Bleemer’s data shows that these institutions also account for the bulk of the within-school stratification. Some 46% of the stratification by major within-institutions in 2019 occurs at public research universities, and about 80% of it occurs at public universities and colleges more broadly.

The story Mehta and Bleemer’s graphs and tables tell is a grim one. In one table, they show that, among the highest earning fields at top-25 public universities, the percentage of students from URM backgrounds falls from 11% to 8% when considering those schools that imposed ‘mechanical restrictions’.

Why this is so is explained in another graph that charts first-year grades. In the two years prior to the imposition of GPA caps, URM students’ grades in their first-term courses were somewhat lower than those of non-URM students.

“The reason this matters,” Mehta says, “is because, if you put in a GPA cap, that’s going to screen on how you perform in your first year, or first term. And the URMs are performing significantly worse. You would expect that the filter is going to pick them up disproportionately. And that’s exactly what it does.”

Accordingly, at the four research universities in California, Mehta and Bleemer find that, while the number of students in these programmes declined by about 10% after the introduction of GPA restrictions, the percentage of URM drops by about 20% at these elite schools. By contrast, the figures for female students remain unchanged.

Prior academic preparation

“This is not surprising,” Mehta told University World News, “because you are filtering on the basis of prior academic preparation, which, if anything, favours women because, as is shown in the literature, they tend to mature academically earlier than do boys.”

Perhaps the most striking finding of Mehta and Bleemer’s study is that the pre-major restrictions do a poor job of determining which fields suit particular students.

While the GPA restrictions determine which students to shunt out of their first-choice major based on courses relevant to that major (for example, low GPA in key subjects like calculus for STEM programmes), they would have largely selected the same students had they selected students on grades in courses unrelated to the major.

The data shows that, far from weeding out students who cannot cope with the rigours of these premier programmes, the restrictions impose a penalty on students who do poorly in their first year in any subject. In other words, major restrictions “restrict entry based on prior preparation, which is correlated with race,” says Mehta.

When I discussed this last point with Professor Elizabeth A Armstrong, Sherry B Ortner collegiate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, and co-author of Paying for the Party: How college maintains inequality (2013), two issues came up.

First, I asked whether these restrictions were brought in with the intent of side-tracking URM students. Her answer was ‘no’, and she quickly pointed to the fact that the universities Mehta and Bleemer studied were among the most liberal in the nation. “They are deeply interested in racial equity and closing the achievement gaps.”

Rather, this is one of the instances, when “scholars of antiracism would say: look at the outcomes of policies, not the intent. We might be saying we want to maintain standards in our programme that has only enough capacity to take 100 students. So, let’s take the top GPAs, while being unreflective of how historical and educational disadvantages are built into those GPAs,” she says.

Legal retreats from affirmative action

The second issue is the way the chronology of the institution of the GPA caps maps on to the legal and legislative retreat from affirmative action as embodied in the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision that desegregated the nations’ primary and secondary schools.

Of the 41 mechanical restricts brought in at California’s four research institutes, all but two were instituted after the Supreme Court ruled in 1979, in Bakke v The UC Board of Regents, that set-asides (16 of 100 seats in University of California, Davis Medical School for minority students) amounted to an unconstitutional quota system.

In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action. In 2006, for example, the university Federal Appeals Court of Texas ruled in a case involving the University of Texas Law School that race could not be used as a factor in admissions. That same year, for example, voters in Michigan amended the state constitution to ban affirmative action; the federal Supreme Court upheld the ban in 2014.

As summarised by Douglass, the “anti-affirmative action movement found success at the state level through propositions and pressure on public institutions to avoid race and ethnicity as a factor in decision-making. This was also largely a movement that focused on public universities with selective admissions, and the distribution of a truly highly-sought public good.”

After a moment’s thought, Armstrong continued and noted that what she was about to say slightly contradicts what she had just said about universities not paying attention to the effects of the GPA caps.

Working at cross-purposes

“Universities are complicated places, with people often working at cross purposes,” she told University World News.

Pointing to her own university and its exclusive and lucrative majors, she said: “I don’t think that students are recruited into them with something like a promise that your kid is going to be hanging out with other wealthy white students.

“But that is a sort of implicit promise when you focus on highly academically accomplished students and their GPAs. As we know, that is the way ‘colour-blind’ racism works; what’s embedded and not seen is extremely important. For example, students with means and access to parental and other help can engineer their GPA by either paying for tutoring or following the advice to drop courses that will damage their GPA.”

Behind Mehta and Bleemer’s measured tones – that URM students’ “poorer pre-college academic opportunity fully explains the observable URM enrolment decline” in finance and the STEM fields – is the reality of American educational inequality, which is beyond the scope of the fascinating and telling econometric analysis in “College Major Restrictions and Student Stratification”.

The facts on the ground, however, are well known. The almost 14,000 school districts in the United States vary widely in quality, even within the same state. The fact that the districts are financed chiefly by property taxes leads to the predictable result that more affluent areas have better schools.

History of racism

Overlaying this is the doleful history of American racism, which has resulted in thousands of racialised districts being unable to provide the facilities, materials or staff needed to support strong pre-college preparation in America’s inner cities and, especially, the rural South.

Therefore, even if URM students excel in maths and science in high school, they are much less likely to have had access to the sorts of courses, such as Advanced Placement in history or art, that would support them in getting over the GPA hurdle imposed by university departments concerned with limiting enrolment.

According to Armstrong, within days of Mehta and Bleemer’s paper being circulated, colleagues were writing to her saying that, while they had been concerned about the way we select sought-after majors, now they had hard proof they could take to their deans to argue against GPA caps as the gatekeeper into these programmes.

Douglass, too, hopes that “College Major Restrictions and Student Stratification” will prompt universities to re-evaluate their internal and largely departmentally determined requirements for entrance into these key majors in an effort to better promote socio-economic mobility.

“So much attention had been at the entrance gate to major public universities,” he says, and not enough to the internal dynamics of the curriculum and the path to majors that relate both to equity, but also meeting the labour needs of our increasingly complex labour markets.”