How much should we prepare students for The Inequitable Stuff after graduation?

What kind of tradeoff might there be in providing an equitable education and preparing students for bias and inequities in cultural capital?

I recently had a conversation that cut straight to heart of an important maybe-tradeoff that we experience while we teach and work to foster student opportunity.

We are working to fix the system, but as long as it’s not working right, we also need to reckon with inequitable practices that abound within and beyond higher education. Our students need to be able to navigate those inequities, because their success hinges on their ability to thrive in spite of everyday biases and harmful practices.

Because I work in a university that was designed to serve a population of students who receive the raw end of these inequities, this is the kind of stuff that we deal with on a daily basis. We talk about these things. A lot. On the micro scale, as faculty we teach, advise, and provide training and mentorship. On the macro scale, our university does it best to roar as a powerful engine of social mobility. While we’re underresourced and every day is a struggle, I think we do okay considering the grand forces that stand in the way. We try, because that’s the only choice.

We all approach this work differently. I don’t know what’s the best. There are a couple contrasting philosophies at play. My friend pinned this issue down very tidily with a very concrete situation: how we choose to deal with multiple-choice testing. For this example I’ve chosen cartoonish polar opposites, with the comfort of you and I realizing that these cartoons are not modeled after any particular person.

There’s a tall mountain of evidence indicating that standardized multiple choice tests, such as the SAT, GRE, MCAT, LSAT, et cetera have substantial cultural and socioeconomic biases baked in. Which is part of the reason that the exodus from the SAT and GRE became a thing over the past few years. That said, a lot of programs are still relying on standardized tests to evaluate student performance. Moreover, a lot of courses are using standardized tests and they are almost never developed with validation techniques to minimize biases.

One line of thinking — let’s call it “Team Pipeline” — recognizes that students from minoritized groups need to be perceived as successful using the evaluation templates that are developed and deployed by folks from the upper-middle-class white norms maintained by the folks in leadership.

Team Pipeline argues that we need to make sure our undergraduates have ample exposure to multiple choice tests throughout the curriculum, and that these tests should be a reflection of the kinds of gatekeeping standardized tests that our students may face in the future. By preparing our students to succeed on the terms of the norms that are (unfortunately) prevailing in our fields, we’re giving them the education and professional development that they need.

Let’s call the opposite approach “Team Braided River.”

Both Team Pipeline and Team Braided River recognize that a lot of testing with multiple choice tests doesn’t really help student learn the course material, and perhaps no tests at all might best. Both Teams recognize the harsh reality of discrimination that our students face. The difference is that Team Pipeline leans into the perspective that students benefit from experiences that resemble unwelcoming environments. In contrast, Team Braided are reluctant to adopt teaching practices that recapitulate the same poor design decisions beyond the walls of our minority-serving institution. These folks lean into the reality that students will grow and learn when they are in environments that accept them and engage in equitable pedagogical practices. So they don’t feel compelled to train students to be experts at multiple-choice tests, because they’re focused on other aspects of learning that are tied to curriculum and professional development.

This is much bigger than standardized tests. That was just a useful lens.

The pipeline is a high pressure environment with limited space. The braided river is a broader “collection of paths that change and adapt to the needs of the individual.”

I imagine that the archetype of the Pipeline Program is the famous Meyerhoff Scholars program at UMBC. There is very limited space, and the students in this program are get many resources and support to help them succeed under the terms set by the dominant (white) culture in STEM. This program chooses students who have shown that they are already capable of great success in less welcoming environments, and then invests a lot of energy, money, and pressure into these students so that they will be able to thrive even in environments where they are discriminated against because of their identities. This program chooses the “cream of the crop” and pours in a lot of effort to retain them in STEM, by routing them though a highly prescriptive pipeline so that when they emerge, they’ll be fit the template of what the establishment wishes to see in scientists of color.

Pipelines are both expensive and prescriptive. Even if you think what we need is a pipeline for everybody, we simply don’t have that kind of funding. Even if you ignore inequities in K-12 education, the tiered university system provides the resources per-student in the universities that enroll the most students with minoritized identities. Programs like the Meyerhoff will never solve our STEM equity problem simply because it’s designed to be elitist. It’s designed to train students who are perceived to be more special than others. If you try to scale it up to serve everybody, it will fail, because the prestige and exclusivity of it will be gone. The whole point of the Meyerhoff program is to pick out the “cream” and let everybody come to the conclusion that the rest are chaff. Which isn’t really a braided river serving the needs of our community, is it?

Beyond multiple-choice testing, what are some other differences between Team Pipeline and Team Braided River? Team Braided River is focused on educational outcomes, learning, personal growth, and helping students find their path in the world. On the other hand, Team Pipeline is focused on providing students with the skills, mindset, and grit to succeed in unwelcoming environments.

Our students deserve an equitable education. They also need to be prepared to reckon with people and spaces that are not as accepting and supportive as we try to be. It might be possible that both of these things are compatible. I sure hope they are! But when we are teaching a class and running our research labs, we face a decision tree with thousands to little choose-your-own-adventure style choices, and we need to have some principles and values to guide us.

I’ve argued that two of the key guides are to ask ourselves, “Is this treating our students with the respect that they deserve?” and “Is this equitable?” I feel like those answers send me more down the pathway of the braided river. But there are some people who I value, whose lived experiences are on a closer pathway to ours students than myself, who are not so jazzed about educational practices that are designed for accessibility and leveling the playing field, when they know that the playing field outside our classrooms is not leveled. They might think it’s more respectful and equitable to take a pipeline approach for the “creamier” students.

We all know our students are facing much more difficult obstacle course than the majoritarians running our institutions. What can we to do operate our courses and our programs to prepare students for that realm without adopting the inequitable practices that are designed around gatekeeping and inaccessibility?

My general philosophy is that our students deal with this kind of BS in every aspect of their life, and I’m not a fan of adopting educational practices that make it any harder, especially when I haven’t experienced these barriers on account of my identity. I will continue to have high expectations of my students, but I think I can do this without knowingly putting up inequitable barriers for them to cross so that they gain experience with those hurdles. They already are jumping those hurdles every day, I don’t need to put more of them in my classroom. But I’m open to the idea that this could be seen as a disservice to my students if it doesn’t help them thrive once they leave the university.

This tradeoff of preparing-students-for-the-inequities-while-giving-an-equitable-education is best resolved by having instructors who look like their students and have the same backgrounds as their students. I think the best way to solve this is to make sure that the professoriate has the same representation as the student body. Which my university most certainly does not have. This creates a gap that often looks like a gulf to the students. Imagine the impact of having a whole suite of professors who made it through grad school and wound up with their career of choice, being the ones to train students from the same background while they are undergrads. Until we get there, what am I to do now that I’m one of those white professors trying to do right by my students?

Is it possible to prepare students for thriving in an unwelcome environment without creating one in which students are trained? What does that look like? I imagine one of our guides would be to look at what HBCUs are doing right. These institutions disproportionally train undergraduates to go on to STEM PhD programs. However, HBCUs are remarkably different than other MSIs, which have more diversity.

Thoughts on how you navigate this dynamic? Does this framing of the heuristic even make sense?