Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 4 | An Interview with Marta Tienda, page 2 (low bandwidth)

CR: In studying the data, you also found that there were geographic and family factors that were critical to whether a student had access to higher education and actually graduated from college.

MT: There are a number of circumstances and characteristics that affect who goes to college and who doesn’t. We know, for example, that if parents have a higher level of education, their children are very likely to go to college. For some young people, the idea of attending college is always on their radar screen. As a first generation college goer, I can tell you that isn’t always the case for many of us, which has been confirmed by the data.

But what’s important is that when we think about the sources of diversification of the U.S. population, the fastest growth is in the number of kids whose parents don’t have any higher education. Consequently, even in those instances where the parents have moved up economically and socially, the probability of their children achieving a higher level of education than their parents is not clearly in evidence. But what is clear, as demonstrated by the data, is that the educational disparities between whites and nonwhites—particularly Hispanics—are growing. How are we going to stop that? If we, as a society, are going to accept that there are tolerable limits of inequality and that there will always be some form of economic, class, or racial inequality—not that I endorse that point of view—then don’t we at least have to say, if these are the tolerable limits, can we afford to let them get worse?

The widening gap in opportunity and achievement between whites and Hispanics—in education and other areas—is particularly important to focus on because Hispanics are growing so fast as an ethnic group. The Hispanic second generation, the children of immigrants—the children whose parents tend not to have higher education—have a median age of 12.7 years. That’s an enormously significant bulge moving through the population pipeline, and has major implications if you think of the words of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who said, in an opinion handed down in the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policies, that she hoped “…25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary [to promote educational access].” If we are going to meet that charge a quarter century from now, we have a big job to do. To begin with, we have to break the connection between parents’ educational attainment and the probability that a child will go to college because so many young Hispanics today have parents who didn’t go to college.

The only way we can address some of these inequalities is by taking deliberate and systematic steps forward, and that means that for now we need to use affirmative action to make sure that we’re getting the best and the brightest into the schools that will position them for opportunity and achievement.

CR: You’ve never been an outspoken supporter of affirmative action during your career, so did this conclusion surprise you?

MT: I was teaching a six-week seminar on affirmative action at the time that I started this project and I told my students that I didn’t think affirmative action was the best solution to the problem of educational inequality and that one of the goals of the seminar would be to identify alternative strategies. At the end of the seminar, I was stunned that I had to retract my statement and say that I didn’t think there was an alternative to affirmative action.

During that seminar, one aspect of our research focused on when young minorities began thinking about going to college, and for many, it turned out to be late in the game—nearly one-third of those we questioned as part of a survey we conducted said they didn’t think about college until high school or middle school. That’s too far along in their educational career, especially if that decision isn’t made until high school.

I was lucky, personally. When I was in seventh grade, a teacher asked me, “What are you going to do when you finish high school?” And I said, “I’m going to be a hairdresser.” I’d seen people do hairdressing and I thought that it looked like fun. But then the teacher said to me, “Don’t you want to go to college?” It was such a riveting moment for me that I even remember what the teacher was wearing that day. Until then, I thought that college was only for rich people and I was from a working class family. But when my teacher suggested college and told me that there were scholarships to help good students like me get to college, that was it. College was what I was doing and where I was going. And I never let go of that idea. Once I realized that I could earn a scholarship, that’s when I thought, well, I’m going to continue as far as I can go.

Next page: “Becoming a mature, established scholar takes time. But once you reach that mature status, you can choose the issues you want to explore and make the kinds of scientific contributions that have a lasting impact.”

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