Holistic Admissions and ‘Human Accomplishment’
Jay Schalin, a senior writer with the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, informs us that in February, the University of California’s (UC) administration and faculty senate plan to discuss changing the admission policy to downplay standardized test scores, and give more weight to high school class rank and subjective factors like “life experiences.” (Source)
In other words, UC is looking for a way to admit students based on race while pretending it isn’t. You may be wondering how that’s possible, considering that race-based admissions are illegal in California. In 1996, the voters chose to bar their government from hiring, contracting, and admitting on the basis of race. But tax-supported schools like UC have been using proxies for race since then.
Regardless of what the system says, the aim is to admit more black and Hispanic students. Period. That’s not the problem. The method used to admit them is the problem. Ward Connerly, former UC regent and director of the American Civil Rights Institute, said, “In this case, the faculty senate is trying to devise a system that will admit more students from low-income and underperforming high schools, which will translate into more black and Latino students.”
What schools like UC really want to do is eliminate evaluating blacks and Hispanics based on grades and scores altogether. If they could, they’d simply arbitrarily admit a certain percentage of “promising” minorities, and be done with it.
But they can’t. They must make some effort to evaluate blacks and Hispanics based on grades and scores, just as they do with whites and Asians.
A sure way to determine if UC intends to apply “holistic” admissions to every student is whether more whites and Asians are admitted, an unintended consequence of de-emphasizing grades and scores.
Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, also wrote an excellent book titled, In Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. He compiled an inventory of 4,002 significant figures over 2,750 years who pursued excellence and accomplished great things in the arts and sciences. His inventory overwhelmingly consists of white European males, as do other authoritative and respected inventories. Murray made the case that no significant non-European figures and events were omitted from the major inventories. What was known about great works of other cultures was included.
In response to charges that European accomplishment in the sciences is exaggerated and that sources used to compile inventories are biased against non-European countries (about 97 percent of significant figures and events in the sciences are Western), Murray encouraged critics to augment the list of “giants” with non-Europeans, with one caveat: You must use the same rules by which European figures and events were included.
This method would not increase the number of non-Europeans on the list, says Murray, but would add more Europeans to the list. Why? Because European countries were so prodigious; dropping standards of evaluation would result in more European countries, not fewer, and certainly not more non-Europeans.
If holistic assessments were applied equally across the board, the enrollment of whites and Asians – not blacks and Hispanics - would increase.
