The fifth myth is that the gap is too big. The gap refers to the average SAT scores, the average grade points. You understand we look for students of all different kinds, that racial and ethnic diversity is just one factor of many. But the gap is too big. If your educational purposes, as I argued, include that you really think this is important to education just like you think Shakespeare is important to education, that all the students whom you are looking at can do the work, then this is not too big.
Nothing is too big or too small except in relation to purposes and values.
And we are trying, as every university is, to say this is extremely important in our judgment to the education of youth in this country. And we believe, based on experience, the students we bring in are very capable of doing the work and would benefit, and the educational benefits are as central as teaching Shakespeare. The second point is that they ironically depend upon there being a segregated underlying high school system, not deliberate segregation but de facto segregation. More important, we do make selections on who we think can do the work, and not everybody who graduates in the top 4 percent or 10 percent of every high school can do the work. They are not equally prepared.