Raising the Bar for Middle-Class Blacks

Next month, Jenna Bond-Louden will board a plane for North Carolina where she and other college seniors will spend all day learning to write a college essay that will wow admissions officers. Her parents have already shelled out hundreds of dollars for the Baltimore senior to take SAT prep classes.
There is nothing unusual about a high school student gearing up for the high-stakes admissions game except that Bond-Louden, a Friends School of Baltimore senior, is Black. Her mother, Karen Bond, the director of the Baltimore Educational Scholarship Trust, says that she never taught Jenna that her race would get her into some of the country's elite colleges. It is a message that she and other educators are trying to spread among middle-class Black parents: that at an increasing number of selective colleges and universities affirmative action is no longer available to help their children gain admission.
"The acceptances are not a given anymore," says Bond, whose program places Black students in private high schools. "These seats are not a given anymore and I don't know how many [Black] parents know that.  They hear it as a distant phenomenon, but it is not yet a part of their lives."
University officials say the new race-neutral admissions guidelines still allow them to give extra admissions points to Black students from poor families who have succeeded despite graduating from troubled high schools. But increasingly middle-income Black students who do not have similar disadvantages must compete on the basis of their test scores and grades.
Referenda and court decisions banning the use of race in admissions affect public colleges and universities in only a handful of states like Texas, California and Washington. And many private colleges are still aggressively courting academically talented Black students because university officials say they believe diversity is essential to their institutions. But university officials have increasingly come under fire for the practice of admitting Black students whose test scores are lower than those of White students.  
What is particularly vexing is the persistent gap in achievement between Black and White students of comparable middle-class socioeconomic status. According to figures provided by the College Board, Black students whose parents have at least one graduate degree score an average of 191 points lower on the S.A.T. than White students whose parents also hold a graduate degree.