The Supreme Court’s 2023 affirmative action decision made the question of how colleges can identify, attract, and retain minority students all the more urgent. In Developing Scholars: Race, Politics, and the Pursuit of Higher Education, Domingo Morel addresses this issue by focusing on the University of Rhode Island’s “Talent Development” (TD) program. Because Morel was both a TD student and employee, this is in part a participant-observer study. He supplements his detailed history of the TD program with an intriguing look at what he calls “secondary admissions criteria”; that is, barriers to enrolling in majors that provide entry to teaching, nursing, and other professions.
Morel presents three major arguments. The first is that improving the educational opportunities of minority students requires much more than affirmative action in the admissions process. He approvingly cites Nicholas Lemann’s argument that, by itself, affirmative action is a “low-cost patch solution” to the inferior education that has been offered to minority students for decades (20).
The strength of the TD program is that it seeks “to provide the academic tutoring and support to ensure that students would be successful at the University, despite the high school shortcomings” (67–68). Thrust into an unfamiliar environment without the academic background of students admitted through the regular process, TD students needed help not just in choosing classes, managing their finances, structuring their time, and writing college-level papers but also in learning how to overcome subtle cultural differences and so better connect with other students and faculty members.
Morel lauds the TD program and its leaders for meeting these challenges despite sporadic opposition from state government and university officials; he tells us much more about TD leadership struggles than about the specific ways it assists minority students. We never learn what kind of tutoring and advising TD offered. Nor do we learn how well TD students fared in college or after graduation. Morel reports that retention rates dropped in the mid-1970s but does not write about what happened after that. He mentions that in 2016 the university commissioned a “comprehensive study of the program” but says nothing about what that study found (107). What evidence do we have that TD works as intended?
In recent years, a number of schools—ranging from the City University of New York to the University of Texas—have developed extensive wraparound programs for minority students that seem to significantly improve retention and graduate rates. How does TD compare with these efforts in terms of services, success, and cost? Morel is silent on this crucial issue.
Morel’s second major argument is that colleges have responded to the influx of nontraditional students by raising barriers to entry in career-related majors. He notes that the attrition rates for minority students who initially show interest in undergraduate degrees in business, nursing, education, and engineering are significantly higher than for white students. This drop-off is particularly large for education majors, contributing to the low numbers of African American primary and secondary school teachers.
Morel argues that a big part of the problem is that in the 1970s and 1980s many universities established GPA requirements for sophomores and juniors seeking to enter these majors. Students with weaker high school training were more likely to have low first- and second-year grades, requiring them to find other courses of study. His explanation for this policy change is simple: racism. Faculty members and college administrators wanted to keep the riffraff out of their departments.
Well, maybe. But it is also possible that some departments faced a larger number of students without a comparable increase in faculty. Or they might have been concerned about the weak background of the students they were seeing in their classrooms. In light of grade inflation, requiring a B- average in prerequisite courses is hardly draconian. Morel convincingly argues that schools should take into account that nontraditional students might need longer to adjust to the demands of college courses. But charging racism distracts from the practical problems at hand.
A June 2023 study of education programs in Michigan public universities took a closer look at the problem that Morel highlights. In “Tracking Progress through Michigan’s Teacher Pipeline,” Tara Kilbride, Katherine O. Strunk, Salem Rodgers, and Usamah Wasif found that African American students do not start to drop out of education majors until their junior year. At that point, the amount of time required to complete courses with teacher-training components becomes much longer—and so demanding, in fact, that education majors often need a fifth year to complete their student-teacher assignments. This is expensive, leading students from poor families to drop out at a high rate. This finding suggests that schools should consider reducing graduation requirements, not lowering prerequisites.
Not content to identify factors that might inhibit minority students from becoming teachers, nurses, and engineers, Morel claims that these “secondary admission criteria” are part of a larger effort by “neoliberals” and “the winners in the existing political and economic order” to “mobilize the state through the instrument of credential cartels to protect their status and restrict opportunities to historically marginalized people” (154). Morel is justified in asking whether professional licensing requirements do more to limit access to the professions—and thus raise salaries—than to protect consumers. Do more education courses make for better teachers? As many “neoliberal” economists have suggested, there is ample reason for skepticism.
Morel is so quick to attribute blame that he ignores a central dilemma. He assumes that state legislators, licensing boards, professional associations, and university faculty all act in unison to discriminate against “historically marginalized people.” Such coordination is possible but unlikely. Some evidence on this score would help. More importantly, Morel assumes that virtually all licensing requirements are little more than anticonsumer barriers to entry. But do we want to eliminate all qualifications for those who teach our children, represent us in court, build our bridges, and treat our diseases? We should strive to ensure that those qualifications are closely related to the demands of each profession. Such criteria will always be imperfect, and they will always exclude some people who have made it most of the way through the arduous education process. But some form of quality control is usually needed.
This brings us to Morel’s third, explicitly political, argument. Civil unrest and protest in the 1960s, he argues, produced major gains for minority students. But backlash and retrenchment soon followed. The 1970s were characterized by Nixonian conservatism, the 1980s by the Reaganite reaction. Morel repeatedly claims that “neoliberalism” shrank the state, increasing the gap between rich and poor and eroding the civil rights victories of the 1960s. The villains include university officials, whose “original intent” was “to cut or eliminate programs” like TD (33). Since the 1960s, he claims, support for “affirmative action, student financial aid, and state support for higher education” have all “been significantly eroded” (16). The 1970s, he claims, “ushered in an era of neoliberalism, where ‘free markets,’ government deregulation, and privatization of public institutions became the dominant economic philosophy” (166).
In truth, the picture is neither so simple nor so dire. State support for higher education has indeed decreased. But federal support in the form of Pell grants, subsidized loans, and loan forgiveness has grown significantly. Means-tested programs, government-funded healthcare, and other entitlements have grown even faster. The federal government has made substantial efforts to improve education for women and girls, children with disabilities, and English learners. State governments have redirected spending for K–12 schools to reduce the gap between rich and poor districts. The 1979 Bakke decision gave a green light to extensive affirmative action policies. University leaders have fought tooth and nail to preserve their authority to use racial preferences in admissions. Morel seems oblivious to these many policy changes, most of which were the work of liberal Democrats, not the neoliberal privatizers he claims have dominated politics for the past half-century.
Morel paints this Manichean image of politics to support his claim that student activism was crucial for the survival of the TD program. TD students who bravely took over school buildings succeeded in expanding their program, despite hostile school administrators and state legislators. Their protests, he insists, brought results, not reaction.
In assessing the consequences of student activism, it helps to distinguish the insular world of the university from the real world of politics. Many university administrators have a near-religious commitment to affirmative action, generally favoring programs to help those students succeed. They are more comfortable accommodating than confronting student protesters. Within this realm, the type of student activism Morel celebrates does, in fact, work.
But outside the ivory tower things are different. Especially in red states, universities are in particularly bad odor, subject to budget cuts and many novel and troubling restrictions. The more universities move to the left, the more their support in the outside world declines. Morel does not discuss the growing cultural divide between the campus and the world of ordinary politics—a divide that became so apparent in the fall of 2023.
Toward the end of the book, Morel argues that the sort of pragmatic, incremental reform that produced TD and similar programs cannot succeed without fundamental political change: “Under existing conditions, higher education is incapable of serving as a vehicle for upward mobility, and, therefore, incapable of serving as a tool to address growing concerns of inequality” (158). This fatalistic conclusion is squarely at odds with the more convincing, more optimistic story Morel tells in the first half of his book. There he shows that there are many things colleges can do to help disadvantaged students overcome the deficiencies of their previous education. And there are many more things that public schools can do to make sure that they are prepared for college once they enter. We should not wait for the revolution before providing minority students with the support they need to succeed in postsecondary education.
