Chronicle In Higher Education

Chronicle of Higher Education wrong on NH lawmaker degrees

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently put New Hampshire at the very bottom of its list of State Houses when it comes to the percentage of members with college degrees.

The journal reported that 53 percent of lawmakers here have a bachelor’s degree or higher, which would put the state solidly at the bottom of its list. California was at the top with nearly 90 percent of lawmakers who have college degrees, with Virginia, Nebraska, New York and Texas filling out the top five.

There’s just one problem with the New Hampshire data: It’s wrong.

New Hampshire came out at the bottom of the Chronicle of Higher Education report in large part because researchers could only find information about three-quarters of the 400 members of the House here.

The New Hampshire Sunday News reviewed the self-reported biographical data for all 424 state lawmakers in “The Handbook of New Hampshire Elected Officials” for 2011 and 2012. According to our review, of the 405 legislators who reported their educational attainment, two-thirds have at least a bachelor’s degree.

Thirty-four percent report having bachelor’s degrees and 32 percent have advanced degrees, such as law degrees, MBAs and Ph.D.s

If you add legislators who report some college study, such as an associate’s degree, the figure reaches 85 percent.

All 24 state senators went to college; 12 have B.A. degrees, 10 have advanced degrees.

The Sunday News review would take New Hampshire out of the bottom five for percentage of state legislative bodies with college degrees — but it’s still in the bottom 10.

Alex Richards, a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, acknowledged there was a data gap for New Hampshire and said as a result its position at the bottom of the list should be “taken with a grain of salt.”

He pointed out the Chronicle’s report both online and in print notes that New Hampshire’s information was lacking. “Because of its unusually large, part-time Legislature, the educational attainments of an inordinate number of lawmakers are unknown,” it states.

Richards said the Chronicle’s study was based first on data from Project VoteSmart, which provided information on about 200 of the 400 House members here.

Is Affirmative Action Headed Back to the Supreme Court ...

, Have not yet announced whether they will appeal, a source close to the case indicated to me that the U.S. Supreme Court is a likely next stop. If the Supreme Court accepts a petition to hear the case, the oral argument could take place in the spring, with a decision likely a year from now—smack in the middle of the presidential campaign.

Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Edith Jones, writing for five dissenting judges, faulted the three-member panel for sustaining racial and ethnic preferences because UT Austin’s Top Ten Percent Plan, which automatically admits students at the top of their high-school classes, produced sufficient racial diversity on its own. She noted that without using race, the Ten Percent plan produced a class that was more than 20 percent African-American and Hispanic. Texas, she said, had achieved more racial and ethnic diversity without using race in admissions than had the race-conscious University of Michigan law school plan upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which produced a class that 14.5 percent black and Hispanic. Texas’s decision to reinstate the use of race on top of the Ten Percent plan may be unconstitutional, she said.

Moreover, Jones rejected as “pernicious” the three-member panel’s support for the idea that even if the undergraduate school were diverse without using race, racial preference would nevertheless be necessary in order to ensure that individual classrooms were diverse as well. She wrote: “The panel opinion opens the door to effective quotas in undergraduate majors in which certain minority students are perceived to be ‘underrepresented.’”

If the suit is appealed, will the U.S. Supreme Court agree to consider the case? On the one hand, there is no split among Circuit courts—with one court ruling one way and another court ruling another—which sometimes prompts the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. But Chief Judge Jones and her dissenting colleagues seemed to be signaling to the Supreme Court that the question of how the 2003 Grutter , Kennedy complained that the university was not sufficiently pressed to show that it was impossible to find race-neutral means—such as top-percent plans or class-based affirmative action—to achieve racial diversity prior to resorting to racial preferences.

Finally, the Court may wish to revisit the question of affirmative action given accelerating demographic changes.