Preferences, Preferences Everywhere
It ain’t just the ivies.

Mr. Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity
February 22, 2001 11:00 a.m.

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 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?