UCSD is set to receive a “record number” of transfer students mostly from community colleges, which will increase “diversity” on campus. The director of admissions said “we” don’t factor race into admissions decisions but “recognize that the community college population has a natural diversity…diverse by race, age, income…”
She’s correct on that note, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if diversity of many factors—age, income, geography—were as important to admissions committees as skin color? An excerpt:
“The 2010-11 transfer class will have 82 percent more African Americans that last year, 43 percent more Mexican Americans, 52 percent more Latinos and 75 percent more Native Americans…The number of underrepresented minorities is also up significantly in the freshman class, though not as dramatically as among transfers.”
Connerly, who believes UC should be focusing on community colleges, said “I would say it complies with 209 and I would say it is good educational policy.”
Racial preferences opponents David Lehrer and Joe Hicks co-authored an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, titled, “UC proves Prop. 209’s point.”
“As proponents of Proposition 209 in 1996, we could only have hoped that the ‘underrepresented’ minorities at the center of the debate would ultimately be admitted to the UC — without preferences — in numbers approximating their rate of admission with the benefit of preferences. Our argument then, as now, was that granting preferences on the basis of race and ethnicity was wrong and that, ultimately, in a bias-free environment, students would figure out what had to be done and would qualify for admission on their merits. That argument was right.
“Here are the facts: The number of minority admissions to the University of California for this fall — without the benefit of preferences — exceeds that of 1996, in absolute numbers and, more important, as a percentage of all “admits.” The numbers are, in almost every category, quite staggering.
“Latino students have gone from 15.4% (5,744 students) of freshman undergraduate admissions in 1996 to 23% (14,081) in 2010 (a 145% increase). Asian students have gone from 29.8% (11,085) of the freshman admits to 37.47% (22,877). Native American admits have declined slightly, from 0.9% to 0.8%, but their absolute number increased, from 360 to 531. African American admits have gone from 4% (1,628) to 4.2% (2,624), a modest gain in percentage but nearly a 50% increase in numbers of freshmen admitted.
“The only major category that declined in percentage terms was whites, who went from 44% (16,465) of the freshmen admits to 34% (20,807).”
What accounts for these post-Prop. 209 numbers? Could it be that removing race from the equation puts minorities on notice that grades and scores—and not skin color—will determine their acceptance, and, therefore, attracts minority students with higher qualifications? Perhaps.
As the writers note, racial preferences proponents are under the impression that the percentage of preferred minorities enrolled in colleges must match the percentage of preferred minorities in the state, regardless of SATs, GPAs, and overall achievement. Where did this idea of proportional representation come from?
Here we go again. California voters barred their government from racial discrimination and preferences 14 years ago, but legislators don’t seem to care. These elected officials, who must uphold the state constitution, continue to try to circumvent it, without even trying to veil their attempts. Earlier this year, legislators introduced AB 2047, a bill that would effectively reintroduce racial preferences in college admissions:
Authorizes UC and CSU to consider race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions to the extent permitted by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, including but not limited to the use of such data to obtain education benefit through the recruitment of a multi-factored, diverse student body as permitted by the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Grutter v.Bollinger (2003) 539 U.S. 306.
Jennifer Gratz, the plaintiff in Gratz. v. Bollinger (2003), recently testified against AB 2047 before the Senate Education committee on June 30, 2010.
Last year, the University of California’s (UC) Board of Regents voted to eliminate the requirement for applicants to take two SAT subject tests. Effective 2012, applicants with a GPA of 3.0 or higher who’ve completed at least 11 of 15 required college prep courses by their junior year and taken the ACT with Writing or SAT Reasoning (SAT-R) exam will be considered for admission.
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Linda Chavez informs readers that UC has changed the standard again. “Now [the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools] is taking aim at the SAT directly. What makes the action more suspicious is that BOARS’ own report notes that the SAT-R was developed specifically in response to testing principles it promulgated and that the new test ‘adds significant gains in predictive power of first year grades at UC.’ Nonetheless, BOARS is now recommending that students forgo the SAT in favor of the less-popular ACT. [emphasis added]
“Both tests have been accepted for more than 30 years and do a good job of predicting first-year grades. So why is BOARS now signaling preference for one test over another? After reading the report, it’s hard to come away without feeling that the real target is standardized testing in general…It’s not too far-fetched to wonder whether BOARS’ effort to discourage students from taking the SAT may be the first step in getting rid of standardized tests altogether.”
That’s exactly right, Ms. Chavez. When schools slouch toward eliminating standardized tests, it’s typically because racial minorities tend to score lower on standardized tests. When admissions officers assess applicants under an objective standard, the pattern is obvious; hence, racial preferences and a subjective eye to compensate for the deficiencies.
We agree on the solution to the disparity problem. Watering down tests and lowering standards for racial minorities are not the way to go. The solution involves “improving the skills of those students who lag behind,” and that’s a tougher proposition, because it involves parents taking a tough stand and students finding and maintaining motivation. Holding someone to a different standard, especially based on his/her skin color, does not motivate.
Chavez reminds us that it’s illegal in California to grant preferences to and discriminate against individuals or groups on the basis of race in government hiring, contracting, and admissions. Since the law passed in 1996, the state government has attempted to get around it. In fact, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill last year that blatantly violated the law. (See Schwarzenegger Signs Racial Quota Bill) The bill directs state departments to award government contracts to the lowest responsible bidder subcontracting 15 percent of the work to minority-owned businesses and five percent to female-owned businesses. The contractor who fails to do so will be rejected, even if he’s the lowest bidder.
Always lowering standards, never raising. Few people seem concerned about this hair-trigger reaction in academia and in the workplace. To pro-preferences folks, the offense lies not in the thing, but in speaking against the thing. Backward.
Chavez wraps up on a good note:
“What [UC Berkeley and UCLA] failed to notice is that black and Latino enrollment system-wide is up over the levels when racial preferences were common,” Chavez writes. “The students now enrolled under more race-neutral standards are doing just fine, graduating in higher percentages than they were when racial preferences admitted many students to campuses where they couldn’t compete with their peers because their grades and test scores were substantially lower.”
Based on a handful of incidents by a handful of idiots, the University of California is considering lowering admissions standards to increase “diversity” on campus, otherwise known as “holistic review.”
The notion of holistic review is to consider the whole person, that is, the person’s life experiences. “I want a system that more effectively considers multiple factors beyond test scores and GPA,” UC president Max Yudof said. “I want one that has a larger pool of applicants that will be considered.”
Why a holistic review of applicants necessarily would result in more black students on campus and increase “tolerance” are never explained. Assuming UC would apply holistic review across the board, to every applicant, why would it increase the number of admitted (or enrolled) minorities?
I’ve thought about the question many times and posited an answer. In the post Holistic Admissions and Human Accomplishment, I proposed that schools like UC in fact don’t intend to apply holistic review across the board and to every applicant. If they did, more whites and Asians would be admitted. Why? I’ll quote myself:
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.
To clarify, let’s assume more whites than blacks apply to UC. Evaluating all applicants holistically would result in more admitted whites, as they on average tend to have higher grades and scores. As the pool of whites would be larger and better qualified, relaxing the rules for everyone equally would benefit them the most.
Unless…life experiences is code for something members of the white pool don’t possess. From John Rosenberg at Discriminations:
“What is the reason for assuming that the ‘life experiences’ of otherwise not accepted blacks and Hispanics provide better evidence of readiness for UC than the ‘life experiences’ of Asians or, heaven forbid, even whites who would have been accepted if those experiences had been taken into account? Does anyone really believe that the ‘holistic’ nod to ‘life experiences’ is anything other than a high-brow way to discount poor grades and test scores for certain groups?”
Some members of racial minority groups don’t seem to mind being treated this way. As long as they benefit, it’s okay. They simply ignore the double-edged sword and hope it doesn’t swing too closely.
As you probably read, the University of California system (UC) raised fees by 32 percent for fall 2010 admissions. The American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly, a former UC regent, says he voted against proposals to raise fees for students during his tenure.
“But with each vote I realized that UC was slowly moving toward the day when basic decisions would have to be made about how the university is financed, who can attend it and what the public should expect from the institution. Well, that day has come; and the public can either dodge the issues or face them, and try to craft a new relationship with UC.” (Source)
Connerly says UC is a business operating as though it were a public service enterprise. While popular campuses like Berkeley, LA, and San Diego could get away with raising fees “significantly,” other campuses can’t. UC seeks to hold on to both identities.
“[M]aintaining its public service identity seems to oblige UC to create and maintain its own internal subsidy for students who cannot afford the fees that others pay,” Connerly writes. “For example, a third of every dollar paid by student fees is used to provide financial assistance to students whose family incomes are considered low to moderate. As my nemesis on the Board of Regents, William Bagley, often remarked, this is a tax on families of UC students. As such, I would suggest it ought to be paid by the state taxpayers rather than solely by the families of UC students. Getting rid of this “Robin Hood” fee structure would enable UC to avoid raising its fees by 32 percent just so it can give 33 percent of that 32 percent back to lower-income students. Instead of a 32 percent hike, the recent increase would have been 21 percent.”
Connerly believes taking a market-based approach, similar to that of selective private schools, would be the better option for UC, rather than an institution that accepts government funds.
“When UC becomes a market-based entity, it might be forced to make cuts in certain courses that can no longer be justified. A market-based entity would also do a better job of reducing the time-to-degree.”
But UC likely won’t do it, because it makes too much sense.
In an effort to raise money, the University of California at Berkeley plans to admit fewer in-state students next fall and enroll more out-of-state students. This, some say, will reduce the percentage of “underrepresented minority students” on campus. (Source)
Budget shortfalls mean schools have to decide which is more important: more brown faces for the brochure and less money, or fewer brown faces and more money. If the school opts for more funds, the percentage of blacks could drop by 13 percent and Hispanics by close to 18 percent, as these groups tend to fall near the admissions “cutoff point.” An excerpt:
The potential for a decline in Berkeley’s racial and economic diversity has drawn criticism from some faculty members and others who believe the university should retain its focus on California residents in spite of the budget cuts…Christopher Newfield, an English professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said in an e-mail that the political cost of enrolling many nonresident students would outweigh the financial benefits. Berkeley officials believe new revenue from nonresident tuition will fill about 15 percent of the campus’s budget gap next year.
Mr. Newfield said it would be better to get the money by imposing a temporary surcharge on all students—a proposal unlikely to sit well with students who will already be paying for a 32-percent increase in tuition. Relying on nonresident tuition, he said, is “more of the California fantasy that somebody else will pay to fix this.”
By law, Berkeley is barred from admitting or denying applicants based on race, but there’s a workaround. The school admits students under a “comprehensive review” process that takes into account an applicant’s “personal qualities” and “[l]ikely contributions to the intellectual and cultural vitality of the campus.” (Source)
Americans of Asian descent account for about 12 percent of California’s population, yet they account for 40 percent of all undergraduates at the University of California at Los Angeles, 43 percent at Berkeley, 50 percent at San Diego, and 54 percent at Irvine.
The American Civil Rights Institute’s (ACRI) Ward Connerly has written about UC’s efforts to “tinker” with admissions. A UC administrator told him “unless the university took steps to ‘guide’ admissions decisions, UC would be dominated by Asians. When I asked, ‘What would be wrong with that?’ I got an answer that speaks volumes about the underlying philosophy at many universities with regard to Asian enrollment.
“The UC administrator told me that Asians are ‘too dull – they study, study, study.’ He then said, ‘If you ever say I said this, I will have to deny it.’ I won’t betray the individual’s anonymity because to do so would put him in a world of trouble. Yet, it is time to confront the not-so-subtle hand of discrimination against Asians that masquerades as ‘building diversity’ at many campuses.”
UCLA professor Mitchell Chang noted the “dull” stereotype. Students of Asian descent may be “disproportionately less likely to participate in certain kinds of extracurricular activities,” and the admissions committee may be biased against “academic nerd” types. (Source)
It should come as no surprise that elite schools discriminate against students of Asian descent. Princeton University released a study that showed these students were much more likely to be rejected than other students. A black student with 1150s and a white student with 1460s had the same chances of getting in as an Asian student with 1600s, top scores. Download the 11-page Power Point study (PDF).
Is this an indication of elite schools keeping numbers down because Asians are “too dull – they study, study, study,” or because these students would overrun schools but for lower standards for preferred minorities, and, as it turns out, whites? Even more damning is this (emphasis added):
“He also found some indications that while rich students make up an increasingly large share of the entering freshman classes, the top private schools appeared to be giving admissions edges to low-income minorities, but not necessarily low-income white students.”
So much for class-based affirmative action, which would help lower income students of any race. The numbers bear out the truth: schools significantly are lowering standards for blacks, moderately for whites, and not at all for Asians. But this practice may change. Three years ago, an Asian student with perfect SAT scores filed a complaint alleging that Princeton discriminated against him by rejecting his application. The article reports that the Department of Education is investigating Princeton.
Spokesman Cass Cliatt said, “Princeton considers factors such as interest in and demonstrated commitment to a particular field of study or extracurricular activity, exceptional skills and talents, experiences and background, status as an alumni child or Princeton faculty or staff child, athletic achievement, musical or artistic talent, geographic or socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, any unique circumstances, and a range of other factors.”
Terms like “experiences and background” and “any unique circumstances” typically refer to noncognitive factors designed to give preferred minorities with lower grades and scores an admissions boost.
Nevertheless, the study shows that whites are given an edge as well. The question is, will Americans of Asian descent rise up against this practice?
The Washington Times recently published an editorial about Thomas Perez, Maryland’s secretary of labor and President Barack Obama’s nominee for assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Focusing on his record on illegal immigration and comments on racial preferences, the Times writes:
“[Perez] has served as president of the board of CASA de Maryland, an immigrant-advocacy organization known for taking several rather extreme positions. For instance, CASA has fought against keeping illegal immigrants from getting state drivers’ licenses. Mr. Perez himself has supported efforts to grant in-state tuition rates to undocumented immigrants. And he has been a strong proponent of giving preferential treatment to members of some races or ethnicities in admissions to schools to train health professionals…On that latter point, Mr. Perez argued that racial preferences could be used not just for ‘remedial’ purposes — not just to make up for past discrimination.”
Indeed, Perez believes medical schools should drop standards for black applicants, because he contends they are more likely to work in “underserved” communities than white doctors. Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) tackles the topic of Perez’s strange ideas published in a law journal in 2006. An excerpt from her column:
“[Perez] cited a handful of studies purported to show that minority doctors are more likely to provide medical care to under-served poor minority populations than white physicians…He then leapt to the conclusion that the best way to improve access to medical care for underserved populations was to insist that medical schools use race or ethnicity in choosing which students to admit.
“In effect, Perez appears to be arguing for a form of medical apartheid in which minority patients should be served by minority doctors under the presumption that both groups benefit from this practice. The argument is both insulting and dangerous.”
Last month, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called the president’s health care bill’s race-based preferential treatment provisions discriminatory and found that such efforts likely won’t reduce heath care disparities. Increasing access to high-quality doctors, regardless of race, “is the best way to mitigate such disparities.” (Source)
There’s an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times that discusses the University of California (UC) system’s revised admissions policy in the context of Proposition 209, which became state law in 1996.
Since voters barred the state from discriminating against or preferring individuals or groups based on race in hiring, contracting, and admissions, certain government institutions have tried to find loopholes. The UC system, for example, recently changed its admission policy to eliminate two previously required SAT subject tests, a change intended to benefit blacks and Hispanics. Some Americans of Asian descent, who’ve complained about the changes, believe the new policy will negatively impact them.
Other changes include reducing guaranteed admissions for high school students graduating from the top 12.5 percent of their class to the top nine percent.
“The theory is that this will guarantee more spots for students at underperforming high schools where opportunities are not as great and more of the students are underrepresented minorities,” Marc B. Haefele writes.
The writer brings up a point I often emphasize when discussing attempts to attract more black students. If UC applies the new (lower) standard to all students, it would increase the percentages of white and Asian students, because they too will benefit from the lower standard. The only way the system can admit more black students while keeping white and Asian numbers more or less constant is to apply the changes only to blacks, and that’s against the law.
The views and opinions expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect those of the American Civil Rights Institute. This blog is written and maintained by La Shawn Barber. E-mail her at lashawnbarber@gmail.com
Racial preferences opponents David Lehrer and Joe Hicks co-authored an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, titled, “
Last year, the University of California’s (UC) Board of Regents voted to eliminate the requirement for applicants to take two SAT subject tests. Effective 2012, applicants with a GPA of 3.0 or higher who’ve completed at least 11 of 15 required college prep courses by their junior year and taken the ACT with Writing or SAT Reasoning (SAT-R) exam will be considered for admission. 
Based on a handful of incidents by a handful of idiots, the University of California is considering 
As you probably read, the University of California system (UC) raised fees by 32 percent for fall 2010 admissions. The 
Americans of Asian descent account for about 12 percent of California’s population, yet they account for 40 percent of all undergraduates at the University of California at Los Angeles, 43 percent at Berkeley, 50 percent at San Diego, and 54 percent at Irvine.
The 
