Prof: Segregation hurts college performance

With affirmative action making headlines in recent months, La Casa Latina and the Latino Coalition invited Penn Sociology Professor and Department Chairman Doug Massey to speak for the annual Festival Latino.

Massey, who spoke to roughly 30 students in Houston Hall's Class of '49, has focused his work intensively on racial segregation as well as Mexico-U.S. migration. However, his most recent study provides further insight into the affirmative action debate.

Beginning in fall 1999, Massey set out to interview freshmen at 28 different universities and colleges nationwide. He identified the list of participating schools as elite public schools, private research universities, small liberal arts schools and one historically black school -- Howard University.

Massey collected data that helped uncover everything from family background to race and ethnicity to motivations of the students. With the information, he hopes to find "how background characteristics can help us understand what happens when they get" to college.

Massey's study will continue through spring 2003, interviewing the students once each year.

So far, Massey has sorted and analyzed the data collected from the first round of interviews, which he has published in his most recent book Source of the River: The Social Origin of Freshmen at America's Selective Colleges and Universities.

His data explores the demographic makeup of institutions of higher education, showing that "women have come to predominate across groups," which include whites, blacks, Asians and Latinos, Massey said. After analyzing the socioeconomic makeup at the 28 participating institutions, "white and Asian populations tend to be fairly homogeneous in respect to class," with his data showing that the groups are mostly upper-middle class.

However, "blacks and Latinos tend to be diverse in respect to class," Massey said.

The data also highlights the "percentage of freshmen growing up in segregated schools and neighborhoods" -- he defined segregated as 70 percent minority -- with over a third of the black population growing up in segregated neighborhoods.

"Coming from a segregated background reduces performance in college," said Massey, adding that factors such as socioeconomic status and exposure to violence and disorder are also contributing factors.

Massey also mentioned that negative stereotypes of minority groups can also affect achievement. "Because of the prevalence of negative stereotypes -- in particular, of minority intellectual inferiority -- the awareness of those stereotypes hampers performance," Massey said.

How these findings impact the future of affirmative action "will soon by judged by the Supreme Court," Massey noted, adding that "American society is not structured to produce a level playing field and an equal chance of getting in and doing well in those schools."

However, Massey admitted, "Colleges and universities can't by themselves solve all these problems."

Education graduate student Elizabeth Morris was surprised by Massey's findings.

"I was interested in a lot of the data he presented," she said. "He's making efforts that really haven't been made before."

"His data focused on the hardships faced by minorities at institutions of higher education," Wharton sophomore Celia Castellanos said, data which she believes "show that affirmative action is necessary."

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