Last week, Ward Connerly wrote an article for Minding the Campus about UCLA’s use of “fuzzy admissions” to increase the number of black students on campus.In a state-wide campaign spearheaded by Connerly, 54 percent of California voters banned government preferences in hiring, contracting, and admissions in 1996. It is illegal in the state of California for the government to discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to anyone on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.
Professor Tim Groseclose, who resigned from the admissions committee, suspects the taxpayer-supporter school is granting preferential treatment to black applicants. Since California voters chose to ban government preferences in admissions, application evaluators at UCLA purportedly don’t see an applicant’s race. But an applicant can – and many probably do – indicate their race in personal essays. Download Groseclose’s 89-page report (PDF).
Connerly says he supported “comprehensive review,” which would allow administrations to consider factors beyond standardized test scores but not factors like race and sex. He gave University of California administrators the benefit of the doubt – that they would not violate the law and admit blacks because they were black.
Well, it looks like UCLA has decided not to resist temptation. The taxpayer-supported school has found a way to admit under-qualified black students. Connerly explains why UCLA decided to chuck comprehensive review and circumvent the law:
The process worked well, except that it resulted in fewer black students being admitted. The reasons for this result are quite obvious. First, the pool of black students who are competitively admissible to academically select institutions of higher education, such as UCLA, is comparatively quite small. Second, when nonacademic factors are applied to the admissions process, in California, the reality is that such factors tend to benefit Vietnamese and other Asian students more than black students, because the former evidence greater “obstacles overcome” — a central tenet of comprehensive review — than the latter. Blacks in the admission pool have more likely than Vietnamese students been children of parents who have attended college, not been faced with language problems and come from households with higher incomes. Thus, while the black students in the admission pool have typically lower academic achievement, their academic performance cannot be traced to socioeconomic disadvantages inasmuch as Asian students, especially Vietnamese, can demonstrate greater obstacles.
UCLA created the “holistic” review process, which is a euphemism for race preferences, to disguise efforts to break the law. The University of Wisconsin system adopted this process in 2006. While evaluators consider non-academic factors like personal essays, the purpose is to get around the law and admit more black students for purposes of “diversity.”
Connerly has faith (and so do I) that race preferences are coming to an end, whether voters or the highest court in the land make the decision. And we’ll be here to report each victory.
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