Based upon the study, a substantially greater portion of the black students selected majors and changed while white students stayed in the “Do Not Know” or undeclared as incoming freshmen.
Do not Know White 34.5% Black 21.7%
This could be a result of one person who was a minority adviser pushing their advisees to make an early selection. That resulted in an unrealistic selection by the incoming freshman. It could be caused by a simple policy that makes it more difficult to enter a major by transfer than taking advantage of the minority preference at time of admission.
There are too many unrelated factors influencing the results which were not considered in the study to give it much credibility.
Back to work for me -
I am not going to study this one.
If you get to a summary - please include me.
One thing - watch the %ages. Duke only has about 170 Black kids/year. When you start splitting down to undecided at 20% or whatever = 34 kids.
Numbers may be too small for statistical accuracy.
Plus - ballpark - +/-50% of Black kids really do belong there - have the numbers and grades, etc. So - are trying to measure - the decisions of +/-85 kids. Let’s say half in “tough majors” gets us down to 42 kids, etc.
Further - you have a football and basketball team to field. Not to be rude - but those aren’t average Duke students. 5 basketball/year and 20 football/year - = 25 Black kids at lets say the “athletic admissions” - plus a few scattered for other sports.
The Ivys and small schools - like Duke - make this analysis almost impossible - due to these small number effects. Schools the size of Michigan and Wisconsin - where you can subtract the football team without affecting totals - are where to do real numbers.
For Duke - all the %ages will be tricky - within the qty of the Defensive secondary. For instance - if all the football players were “decided” at “communications” - your decided vs undecided ratio flips.
etc.