Competitive Colleges: Addressing Minority Performance Gaps

In an article in the Summer 1969 Journal of Negro Education, Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer raised a cautionary flag about the prospects of attaining ethnic group parity in the area of educational achievement. “History and social research convince me,” he wrote, “that there are deep and enduring differences between various ethnic groups in their educational achievement and in the broader cultural characteristics in which these differences are, I believe, rooted.” Such differences, Glazer continued, “cannot be simply associated with the immediate conditions under which these groups live, whether we define these conditions as being those of levels of poverty and exploitation, or prejudice and discrimination.” “If we are to have a decent society,” he concluded,

men must learn to live with some measure of group differences in educational achievement, to tolerate them, and to accept in some degree the