Because de jure racism is largely a thing of the past, the ways in which race and racism impact opportunity are a bit harder to quantify. That's partly because it's actually much easier to simply abdicate empirical study by asserting that lingering racial disparities are entirely the result of intractable cultural pathology that can't be mitigated by external factors. But what Towson University, along with several other schools showed was that the racial disparity in graduation could actually be significantly impacted by external factors:
Several mid-Atlantic institutions, including American and Old Dominion universities and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, have succeeded in closing the gap in graduation rates between white and black students. Others, including Virginia Tech and James Madison University, have closed the gap between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students, according to the Education Trust report, which calculated average graduation rates for 2006 through 2008. Towson and George Mason are unusual for having eliminated both divides.
Founded in 1865 as a teachers college open only to white students, Towson remains a provincial state school but is trying to shake its reputation as a second choice for students turned away from the flagship University of Maryland in College Park. Towson admits nearly two-thirds of its applicants.
In 10 years, according to school data, Towson has raised black graduation rates by 30 points and closed a 14-point gap between blacks and whites. University leaders credit a few simple strategies: admitting students with good grades from strong public high schools, then tracking each student's progress with a network of mentors, counselors and welcome-to-college classes.
I don't want to be overly optimistic about the data, since it's clear that part of what's happening is that these colleges are being more careful about who they're letting in -- namely focusing more on grades than test scores. But the study from the Education Trust shows that even school's like Virginia's Old Dominion University, which is 25 percent black, significantly improved its graduation rates, so these results don't appear to be simply the result of having a smaller, more elite black student population.
This is what I meant when I described blanket explanations for racial disparities on black cultural pathology as social-science "creationism." Towson and the other colleges could have looked at this problem and simply decided that their black students were being admitted without the necessary cultural capital to succeed in college and abandoned them. But because social scientists like Claude Steele actually do empirical research into the psychological and social factors that cause these disparities, the colleges in question were able to figure out how to resolve a difficult problem that would otherwise have been dismissed as intractable. The Education Trust notes that nationally, black students "earn bachelor’s degrees from four-year institutions at rates 20 percentage points below those of their white peers." It doesn't have to be that way.
Ameliorating racial disparities in graduation rates means institutions of higher education actually committing to and caring about the outcomes of their black and Hispanic students, not simply shrugging off disparities as an inevitable result of out-of-wedlock birthrates or the hippity-hop music.