Inside Duke: hurting the ones we love?

This very interesting study had access to comprehensive data ranging from Duke admissions office evaluations of applicants, to students' intended majors and subsequent shifts, to grades awarded and student composition (including abilities!) for each course offered at Duke. Interesting factoid: 40% of fathers of White students at Duke have doctorates.

For similar studies (although not emphasizing ethnicity) using U Oregon data, see Data mining the University , Psychometric thresholds for physics and mathematics.

What Happens After Enrollment? An Analysis of the Time Path of Racial Differences in GPA and Major Choice

Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban M. Aucejo, Ken Spenner

May 24, 2011

Abstract
If affirmative action results in minority students at elite schools having much potential but weak preparation, then we may expect minority students to start off behind their majority counterparts and then catch up over time. Indeed, at the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the students' freshmen and senior year. However, this convergence masks two effects. First, the variance of grades given falls across time. Hence, shrinkage in the level of the gap may not imply shrinkage in the class rank gap. Second, grading standards differ across courses in different majors. We show that controlling for these two features virtually eliminates any convergence of black/white grades. In fact, black/white gpa convergence is symptomatic of dramatic shifts by blacks from initial interest in the natural sciences, engineering, and economics to majors in the humanities and social sciences. We show that natural science, engineering, and economics courses are more difficult, associated with higher study times, and have harsher grading standards; all of which translate into students with weaker academic backgrounds being less likely to choose these majors. Indeed, we show that accounting for academic background can fully account for differences in switching behaviors across blacks and whites.

For a review of Richard Sander's analysis of affirmative action in law school admissions, see here.

The results of all of these studies can be summarized as: to first approximation, psychometric predictors work, and in an unbiased way across ethnicities.