Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 27

Barbara doesn't have a business major, so it's common for
business-focused students to major in communications instead.)
The major is so popular that the university limits enrollment
to students who earn a 3.0 or better in prerequisite
courses their freshman year. That C in statistics bumped
Gonzalez down to a 2.77. When she received an email saying
she had failed to qualify, " my heart dropped, " she says. Her
carefully laid plans were ruined.
" I got in here, " she told me this summer, which she
spent finishing her degree in a different major. " I did the application.
I did the essays. I was accepted. But then there was
another admissions process I didn't even know about. It was
like running a race with one leg. "
Gonzalez's experience is, sadly, a common one. New research
from UC Santa Barbara and Yale University indicates
that major enrollment requirements like these have been
systematically excluding minority and low-income students
for decades. Across the country, students who grew up with
fewer resources to prepare for college earn lower grades during
their freshman year, which means they disproportionately
run afoul of restrictions that limit popular majors by
GPA. The popularity is the problem: Since college attendance
began to rise nationally in the 1970s, universities-
most often large, public ones-have protected their limited
resources by gating off sought-after majors like economics,
engineering, and computer science. The unintended consequence
has been that underprivileged students are shunted
to less lucrative majors in terms of post-college income,
according to a December 2021 study by Aashish Mehta, a
professor of global studies at UC Santa Barbara, and Zach
Bleemer, an assistant professor of economics at Yale.
The policy is simple-reach the threshold, or don't get
in-but it has changed many thousands of lives. Gonzalez,
for instance, dropped her plans for a business career and
enrolled in global studies, an interdisciplinary field that
delves into the effects of globalization. (She met Mehta in
a recent class.) Now 21, she's still figuring out what career
to pursue, but for now is thinking of working in nonprofit
educational outreach in poor minority communities like
hers-a noble path, but not as likely to provide as much
financial security as a business career. People's questions
about the future scare her, she says: " A global studies major?
What can you do with that? How do you market that? "
Meanwhile, though the policy that landed Gonzalez here
is easy to understand, any potential solution must wrestle
with the fundamentals of how colleges distribute their
resources-a much thornier problem.
B
leemer first encountered this phenomenon as a grad
student in the economics department at the University
of California, Berkeley, which has had a 3.0 GPA
minimum since 1976. The grade requirement helps conserve
the department's resources, but its primary function is as
a winnowing tool to make sure that the strongest students
become majors and lower-performing students are directed
to other majors that faculty believe they can better handle,
Shachar Kariv, chair of the UC Berkeley economics department,
told Undark magazine this summer. (Kariv declined
to speak with the Monthly.) Over time, Bleemer noticed that
many students who weren't making it into the major were
people of color from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.
He wondered if he was seeing a pattern. In University
of California schools, whose data on major enrollment
is public information, it was possible to find out-and,
moreover, to track those trends across decades. So Bleemer
teamed up with Mehta, who had been noticing for years that
his global studies classes tended to be filled with a disproportionate
number of students rejected from majors like communications
and economics.
First, the pair made a wider sweep of major American
universities to see where and how these restrictions are in
place. What they found was that large public schools are
far more likely than private ones to limit popular majors
" I got in here, " Gonzalez
told me this summer, as
she finished her degree in
a different major. " I did
the application. I did the
essays. I was accepted.
But then there was another
admissions process I didn't
even know about. It was like
running a race with one leg. "
by GPA. Among the top 25 publics in the U.S. News & World
Report rankings, 75 percent of majors have these policies.
Only 20 percent of the top 25 private school majors do. Then
they drilled into four schools in the UC system that they believed
were representative of the trend and for which they
had roughly 50 years of data for 900,000 students: Berkeley,
Davis, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz.
For each major at those schools that limits enrollment
by GPA, Bleemer and Mehta compared rates of minority
students attending pre-major classes to the percentage
who were able to declare those majors. They found that
underrepresented minority (URM) " students were over
twice as likely to exit the major as a result of the restriction
than non-URM students. " They also used SAT scores
to track pre-college preparation, finding that those rejected
students' scores were an average of 300 points lower. As
Bleemer and Mehta followed the rejected students through
Washington Monthly 27

Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

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Contents
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Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - Cover3
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