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Commenting on the University of California’s (UC) new admissions policy, which is a thinly disguised effort to get around a state law that bars the government from preferring or discriminating against any person based on factors like race and sex, the American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly told San Jose Mercury News that UC “has essentially lowered its standards.”
Any reasonable person can attest to this fact, but many are reluctant to talk about it in public. The aim of the less rigorous admissions policy is to expand the pool of applicants to include more minority students who may not have taken two SAT subject tests, a requirement the Board of Regents eliminated. The new policy states that applicants with a 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 exam will be considered for admission.
The article also notes that Asian organizations are angry about the changes, which will negatively affect students of Asian decent applying to UC. “They contend that subject tests are a better indicator of college readiness than the SAT I, which favors American-born students over immigrants because scores are influenced by expensive ‘test prep’ and family upbringing,” according to the article.
UC’s changes come in the wake of concern about the ever-present academic achievement gap between blacks and Hispanics and whites and Asians. The school contends it merely is casting a wider net to include more low-income students. That would be fine if it were that simple. The fact is UC is lowering the standards of admission. And yes, this practice does widen the net. But at what cost?
Earlier this month, I blogged about Stephan Thernstrom’s article on how UC’s new policy changes affect students of Asian descent. People of Asian descent make up 12 percent of California’s population, but accounted for 37 percent of UC admissions last year. Under the new admissions policy, their numbers will be reduced by 10–20 percent.
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Stephan Thernstrom, co-author of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, writes about the University of California’s new admissions policy at National Review Online.
Among other things, the 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 exam will be considered for admission. More students will be open to “comprehensive review.”
Thernstrom writes about what may not be an unintended or even an unanticipated consequence of the new policy. Although the change is intended to increase black and Hispanic enrollment, the prime beneficiaries will be whites, “whose share of total enrollments is predicted to rise by 20–30 percent.” Asian students, who will see a reduction in enrollment of up to 20 percent, will be affected the most.
“The net effect will thus be to make the University of California substantially ‘whiter’ than it has been,” Thernstrom writes.
Apparently, there aren’t enough blacks competitive with whites to go around, so in order to reach an arbitrary skin color goal, businesses and the government tend to lower hiring and admissions standards for blacks. Lowering standards for all would be impractical, not to mention detrimental. Generally speaking, Asians tend to be high achievers academically; therefore, they’re what I call a non-preferred minority. No bar-lowering for them.
As Thernstrom notes, Asians are 12 percent of California’s population but accounted for 37 percent of UC admissions last year. He adds:
“It’s hard to believe that, as part of this mission, the regents are deliberately trying to do their bit to stave off the ‘yellow peril.’ But proponents of racial preferences have let slip some highly unsavory attitudes on occasion. My wife, Abigail, appeared on Crossfire many years ago and was asked by liberal co-host Bob Beckel whether she would ‘like to see UCLA Law School 80 percent Asian.’ In a 1995 interview, President Clinton said that ‘there are universities in California that could fill their entire freshman classes with nothing but Asian Americans.’ In 1998, a writer for Newsday asked, ‘Since Asians outscore everyone, would we accept an all-Asian class?’”
I’m eager to know what Asian groups have to say about UC’s new admissions policy.
(Hat tip: Discriminations)
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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.
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It’s a provocative post title, but non-resident preferences may become a reality in the University of California system (UC).
Yesterday I linked to an op-ed penned by Ward Connerly, in which he cited California’s perennial budget woes. Well, UC officials may have come up with a solution: granting preferences to applicants who will pay out-of-state tuition. Naturally, the school would discriminate against qualified California applicants. An excerpt from the LA Times article:
“David Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs at the National Assn. of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges in Washington, D.C., said he expects more public universities across the country ‘as a matter of survivability’ to at least consider additional recruiting outside their states. The premium tuition for out-of-state students helps schools afford basic functions and subsidize in-state students’ fees, he said.
…
“UC regent Judith Hopkinson recently urged the university’s governing board to consider increasing the numbers of out-of-state students for the financial and social benefits that she said are provided by a more geographically diverse student body.”
Do financial concerns justify rejecting students eligible for reduced tuition in favor of out-of-state students who pay a higher tuition? I suppose we’ll never get to the point of admitting students based only on grades and scores. Then again, have schools ever considered only grades and scores without regard to family background, race, and sex?
Being “shades of gray” creatures, we know human relations involve more than hard and fast rules and numbers. Compassion and fairness come into play, as they should in some cases. Unfortunately, so does prejudice. Where do we draw the line?
Is it “fair” to admit a black applicant from a middle class background merely because he’s a member of an historically “oppressed” group over a white applicant from a poor background merely because he’s from the “oppressor” group? Surely, at some point we have to rise above the past and do things the right way in the present.
I may be overreacting and reading way too much into this out-of-state preferences plan. What say you?
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That’s what the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) wants to know. PLF, a public interest group that fights for individual rights, filed a California Public Records Act request for UCLA to release relevant information about its undergraduate applications process.
Attorney Joshua Thompson said, “PLF has been contacted by a number of students, parents, and UC faculty who suspect that undergraduate admissions at UCLA are not race- and sex-neutral, as required by Proposition 209.”
In 1996, 54 percent of California voters chose to amend the constitution to bar state and local governments from discriminating against and granted preferences to anyone based on race and sex. UCLA is a state-supported institution.
PLF requests that UCLA release undergraduate applications, including essays (with personal identifying info redacted), identities of application readers, scores given, documents that show why they admitted or denied each applicant, and other relevant information.
Color me jaded, because I know UCLA is considering race and sex when assessing applications, in violation of the law. PLF is attempting obtain the proof. After Proposition 209 became law, UCLA adopted a policy called holistic review, a poor disguise for race preferences.
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In a 2004 study called A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools (PDF), University of California law professor Richard Sander posited that law school race-based preferences result in fewer black lawyers, because blacks admitted under these conditions are placed in schools that exceed their levels of preparation. As a result, they failed the bar exam at higher rates.
In 2007, Sander asked the State Bar’s Committee of Bar Examiners for historical data on past bar exams, and the committee refused. Sander asked the state’s highest court to compel the committee to release the data. Last week the court denied his request and said he should refile in the appropriate court, citing privacy concerns. (Law.com)
We’ll post a PDF copy of the opinion when it’s available.
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Common sense says a student probably won’t perform well if he’s placed in an academic environment for which he’s unprepared.
I guess it takes a panel of researchers to make it official. Inside Higher Ed reports that researchers addressed the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last week, and the topic of discussion was the so-called mismatch theory.
According to this theory, a minority majoring in science does not perform well (relative to white students) when placed in a college that far exceeds the student’s preparation. (I’m guessing this holds true for lesser qualified students no matter what their major.) UCLA law professor Richard Sander found that black and Hispanic students “have far greater success rates in science when they enroll in the California’s less selective campuses.”
In 2004, Sander contended that law school race-based preferences result in fewer black lawyers. Why? Because blacks admitted to law schools under racial preferences are placed in schools that exceed their preparation. These students would perform better academically if preferences didn’t play a role in law school admissions. Download A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools in PDF.
Read more about the mismatch theory at Inside Higher Ed.
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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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