Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 4 | An Interview with Marta Tienda

Marta Tienda, who served for eight years as a trustee of Carnegie Corporation of New York, is Maurice P. During Professor in Demographic Studies and Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where she served as director of the Office of Population Research. Previously she was Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where she served as department chair and editor of the flagship journal, American Journal of Sociology. Tienda also held positions at UW-Madison and a visiting position at Stanford University. Tienda is past-president of the Population Association of America and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Graduating magna cum laude with a B.A. in Spanish from Michigan State University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, Tienda has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and honors. She is interviewed here by the Carnegie Reporter.

Carnegie Reporter: Let’s start with some of your recent work. In the last few years you’ve been doing specific demographic research focused on young Hispanics and immigrants and their advancement in higher education. It was as you wrote up your findings that you became very outspoken about the need for affirmative action, but you didn’t expect that to be your conclusion when you began your research, did you?

Marta Tienda: When I began the work in higher education, about six years ago, it was an outgrowth of my broader concerns with equity, access and opportunity. In that context, I was certainly aware that the political climate around affirmative action was in flux. There had been some progress—perhaps not enough—but the benchmarks for affirmative action were not clear. And it was becoming increasingly apparent that existing affirmative action policies could not continue ad infinitum without some clear justification. But when I began to look at the evidence, the possibilities and alternatives that were “race neutral” in a society that in many ways had become race stratified, there didn’t seem to be answers. After studying the data, I concluded that there was simply no hope that an individual could break the chains of educational inequality without affirmative action.

Reflecting on my own educational opportunities—I was the first person in my family to go to college, for example—it seemed to me that there were fewer opportunities today than in the past for minorities to access higher education and to advance in that environment. Through my research, it became clear to me that there is a lot of untapped talent out there, young people who, because of different kinds of situations, because of accidents of birth or other factors, are simply being held back. They went to the wrong school, their parents lost their jobs—all sorts of circumstances can prevent young people from achieving the kind of educational success that will lead to career and economic gains. As a society and as a nation, we simply can’t go on allowing so many with so much to contribute to fall between the cracks.

CR: And you considered it imperative to support your arguments with data and detailed research?

MT: Absolutely. And in doing the research, there were several things that jointly led me to the conclusion that there is a continuing need for affirmative action. First of all, I started to read broadly on the subject, steeping myself in issues ranging from the Bakke decision¹ all the way forward to see what the trends were. And though you can look at this as a glass-half-empty or half-full issue, it is the case that while the proportion of blacks and Hispanics in higher education has risen, you have to factor in that they also now account for a higher percentage of the population than twenty-five years ago when the Bakke decision was handed down, so there have been no real net gains in over two decades. Therefore, we have to ask ourselves, while we have become the most diverse nation in the world, are we representing that diversity in our leadership? Are we using higher education to plan for the future? And that means making sure that the diversity of society is reflected in all its institutions and aspects—but in my research, I didn’t see that.

In my research, I also focused on the alternative affirmative action plan underway in Texas known as the Ten Percent Plan.² It’s a strategy that is allegedly race neutral and is supposed to provide equal opportunity, but while a bold experiment, to be sure, it capitalizes on the very inequities that required affirmative action in the first place. It attempts to level the playing field by guaranteeing automatic admission to the state’s public colleges and universities for high school graduates in the top ten percent of their class. But there’s a great deal of criticism of the plan because it allows kids who are attending less competitive schools to have an unfair advantage and also doesn’t take into account other factors that may prevent high-achieving, low-income minority students from attending college.

Next page: “Through my research, it became clear to me that there is a lot of untapped talent out there, young people who, because of different kinds of situations, because of accidents of birth or other factors, are simply being held back.”

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¹ In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled, in the case of the University of California vs. Bakke, that Allan Bakke, a white man who was not accepted to the University of California medical school, which had admitted less academically qualified blacks, had been illegally denied admission, but also said that medical schools were entitled to consider race as a factor in admission. The ruling was seen as upholding the general principle of affirmative action.

² An alternative to affirmative action for individual students, the Ten Percent Plan admits the top 10 percent of every high school graduating class into state institutions of higher education.