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 oday
the Center for Equal Opportunity is releasing a study prepared by
Drs. Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai,
titled "Pervasive Preferences: Racial and Ethnic Discrimination
in Undergraduate Admissions across the Nation." The report is posted
on CEO's website.
The point of the 64-page study is straightforward, even though it
is exhaustively documented: Public colleges and universities of
all kinds discriminate on the basis of race and ancestry in their
admissions policies.
The discrimination is not limited to one part of the country. The
study looks at schools from California, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota,
North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington State, in addition to the
national military academies at West Point and Annapolis.
The discrimination is not limited to just a few select schools (one
of the lies fed the media by academia's preference apologists).
It is true that the discrimination tends to be more dramatic at
the top universities, but it is found at all but open-admission
schools.
Nor is the discrimination limited to tie-breaking in close cases.
Instead, we find substantial gaps in the qualifications of blacks
and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics being admitted, as opposed to
Asians and whites.
That last point bears emphasis. While the apologists and the media
frequently refer to preferences that help "minorities," this is
generally not accurate. Asians — to say nothing of religious
minorities, like Jews — are among those most discriminated
against.
To dramatize all the above, the Center for Equal Opportunity thought
it would be interesting to create for its website an interactive
device called the "Predictor." CEO picked out three schools for
purposes of illustration — the University of Virginia, the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and North Carolina State University.
Then it did a logistic regression analysis on the admissions data
it had received — from the schools themselves, via freedom
of information act requests — at all three universities.
The website visitor can pick one of the schools, and then
| “Asians
— to say nothing of religious minorities, like Jews
— are among those most discriminated against.” |
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punch in his or her SAT math score, SAT verbal score, and high-school
grade point average or class rank (in the case of the University
of Virginia, other information is included as well). But then the
visitor has to decide whether to click on "White applicant's chances"
or "Black applicant's chances" or "Hispanic applicant's chances"
or "Asian applicant's chances."
The choice made on that last click makes all the difference.
Suppose, for example, that you're considering North Carolina State
University. A perfectly fine school, but not one that accepts only
the cream of the cream. And let's suppose that you click in an SAT
math score of 480, an SAT verbal score of 430, and a high-school
grade point average of 3.27. Again, nothing there to make the heart
of an Ivy League admissions officer go pitty-pat. A medium university,
and a rather medium student.
Then you make that last click. If it's on "White applicant's chances,"
you have a 48 percent chance of getting in — less than 50-50.
But if you click "Black applicant's chances," you get 99 percent
— essentially your admission is a sure thing.
So the point is that preferences are not limited to New Haven or
Cambridge, but can be found right there in Raleigh, and they aren't
just itty-bitty tie-breakers, but great big fat thumbs on the scale.
Last week, the president of the University of California, Richard
C. Atkinson, proposed that UC stop relying on the SAT in its admissions.
The gist of his reasoning was that the SAT is unfair because primary
and secondary schools can't prepare students for it. But this is
a bogus reason. There are things that K-12 schools can do
— like teaching kids to read, for instance — and there
is in any event no reason why colleges shouldn't consider raw ability
as well as past achievement. Atkinson's real concern is that California's
ban on preferences — still being used in most of the rest of
the country — has made it harder for him to achieve the politically
correct demographic mix of students he'd like.
The remaining question is, What is the Bush administration going
to do about the preferences that most schools are evidently using?
The Clinton Justice Department defended this sort of discrimination.
Will those briefs be withdrawn? The Clinton Education Department
actually encouraged preferences — even though it is responsible
for enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits
any school that gets federal money (just about all of them) from
discriminating "on the ground of race, color, or national origin."
Will the Bush administration do the same thing? Or will it do the
right thing?
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