Educating a black elite The African American Talent Pool Recruiting talented black students is limited by a simple statistical fact: There are not enough to go around. There are almost 600,000 black youngsters of high-school-senior age. Not all are college material. Most people would agree that a person with an IQ of 100 or less is not college material, and that another with an IQ of 120 is. Somewhere between is an IQ boundary, fuzzy perhaps, that separates those who can from those who can't. An IQ of 110 is frequently cited as a minimum requirement for a bona fide bachelor's degree. We use this threshold here. The distribution of IQ can tell us lots about the quality of university degrees. Approximately 43 percent of white females now earn a bachelor's degree. This can only be so if there are degree holders with IQs as low as 103, and this is merely an upper bound. Bachelor's degrees are almost certainly awarded to many with lower IQs. In 1997, according to Scientific American, 18 percent of 22-year-old blacks earned bachelor's degrees. From this we can infer that degrees are awarded to people with IQs of 98. Again, this being an upper bound, we can be sure that many with IQs below 98 earn bachelor's degrees every year. The distribution of IQ among African Americans peaks at about 85 with a standard deviation (SD) variously reported between 11 and 14. Using the average, 12.5, puts the college-ready IQ threshold 2 SD out from the African American mean. About 2.3 percent of blacks with the cognitive capital to earn a good degree reach this threshold. In any given year, about 13,500 African American 18-year-olds qualify. Thousands of colleges compete for them. If we divide the 13,500 African American youngsters equally among American colleges, each campus would get at most a handful. From the viewpoint of the meritocrat, colleges and universities face another kind of problem. There are roughly 2,600,000 non-Hispanic whites in the high school senior age cohort. With a mean IQ of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, they contribute about 650,000 to the pool of whites who meet the 110 IQ threshold. For every college-eligible black there are almost 50 eligible non-Hispanic whites. When we include Hispanics and Asians, both of whom exceed blacks cognitively, African Americans make up less than 2 percent of the college-ready pool. Selective colleges have the hapless task of recruiting minorities with credentials matching their white and Asian students. In fact, it is an impossible task. There are, for example, only about 1500 blacks in the age cohort with IQs of 120 or more. Though a reasonable minimum for a professional, 120 is low for an Ivy Leaguer. About 237,000 non-Hispanic whites in the age cohort meet this minimal requirement for an elite school. For each 18-year-old black with an IQ of at least 120, there are more than 150 non-Hispanic whites who reach this score. In an open competition, the minority population of the Ivy League would be less than 1 percent.
Before the Meyerhoff students begin their first semester, a strategy of systematic spoon feeding begins.