According to this Bloomberg story, Americans of Asian ancestry are finding it harder than ever to get into top California universities because school administrators have decided to admit large numbers of foreign students who are Asian (especially Chinese).
This is very hard to square with the supposed need for more diversity (which is why “overrepresented” students of Korean, Japanese, Chinese or other Asian groups have evidently run into ceilings that keep them out, despite superb academic records), but easy to square with the desire on the part of officials to maximize revenues.
In today’s Pope Center piece, Notre Dame philosophy professor James Sterba gives his counter-arguments to the case I made against enshrining “socio-economic diversity” as another goal for elite colleges to attain through admissions preferences. We both participated in a forum back in September at Pomona College where that was the topic. I presented my case against that in a piece we published in October. Professor Sterba responds and I respond to him.
I remain convinced that “affirmative action” — whether to achieve “better racial balance” or to get more students from poorer families into top schools, has minimal and mostly imaginary benefits that come at substantial cost.
NAS is a “friend of the court” in what could be a landmark case on the diversity rationale for racial preferences in college admissions. Our press release outlines the argument in the amicus brief we joined, written by the Pacific Legal Foundation. An excerpt:
In January 2011, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld racial preferences, but one of the judges on the panel, Emilio M. Garza, wrote a 30-page “special concurrence” to accompany his decision. He wrote that although he felt that the 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger bound him to decide as he did, he considered Grutter a “misstep” which only the Supreme Court could rectify. He wrote, “Yesterday’s racial discrimination was based on racial preference; today’s racial preference results in racial discrimination.” Garza’s opinion may have set up an opportunity for the Supreme Court to at least clarify, if not repeal race-based preferences.
Cross-posted from Phi Beta Cons:
What really happened during the student protest against the findings of the Center for Equal Opportunity? W. Lee Hansen, professor emeritus of economics at UW-Madison, documents what he observed on September 13 and offers a new assessment of the controversy. He poses a number of “unanswered questions” pertaining to the episode. Here’s one:
Were the actions of the Vice Provost and the Dean of Students consistent with the guiding purpose of a university, and this one in particular, which is to use reason and argument rather than physical protest in addressing controversial issues? Did these two officials violate the spirit of the famous “sifting and winnowing” statement?
“Whatever May Be the Limitations Which Trammel Inquiry Elsewhere, We Believe That the Great State University of Wisconsin Should Ever Encourage That Continual and Fearless Sifting and Winnowing by Which Alone the Truth Can Be Found.” [See policy]
In this recent article for The Capital Times, W. Lee Hansen, a member of NAS and Professor Emeritus of Economics at UW-Madison, provides evidence that the preferential admissions process at UW discriminates based on race and ethnicity.
The Center for Equal Opportunity published two reports on the use of racial preferences at UW-Madison last month. The reports generated an angry protest against the findings (see the article by Peter Wood, “Mobbing for Preferences”). Dr. Hansen, who was present for the events of September 13, will soon publish a complete eyewitness account of the day along with a new assessment of the DoubleTree Hotel protest on the NAS website.
The admissions director at Elmhurst College thinks so.
Will LGBT status or socio-economic status become the next mania among college admissions people intent on making their campuses “balanced” and “mirroring diversity”?
Roger Clegg suggests the analogy we should use in talking about the end of racial preferences is not a football game with blacks vs. whites, but a marathon with individual runners.
An excerpt:
Now, it is true that, when the race began, the black runners had to carry weights that the white runners did not. But most of those weights have been removed over time. No one can deny that weights still exist, but everyone knows that the weights are much less now and that fewer and fewer of the current runners ever had to carry the weights that were common 50 years ago. And indeed many whites have had to wear at least some weights recently.
Finally, it is also impossible to tell how much of the existing gap between the descendants of the black runners and the descendants of the white runners is because of those old weights. For the truth of the matter is that some black runners and some white runners have always been faster (or just luckier) than other white runners and other black runners, weights or no weights. A runner’s speed can quickly make up for the weight his grandfather had, and of course a refusal to run—or, worse, an insistence on running in the wrong direction—can be the greatest weight of all.
The Center for Equal Opportunity released a study on discrimination in admissions at the University of Wisconsin. During its press conference, however, a mob of students rushed in and shouted the event down. Read about it here.
All that “critical thinking” stuff they’re learning at UW put to use!
A new study by the Center for Equal Opportunity finds that racial preferences at the University of Wisconsin are particularly acute.
Will a new Grutter case arise out of the blatant racial preferences in use by UW officials?
Cross posted from Phi Beta Cons
To boost declining male enrollment, colleges are giving admissions preferences to men. Gail Heriot, professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, initiated an investigation into the disparity last year. Last month the Commission canceled the investigation after three colleges failed to provide requested data.
Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, has a piece in Inside Higher Ed pointing out that national women’s organizations such as NOW and the AAUW have refused to support this initiative. In “Missed Opportunity,” he writes, “The women’s groups, says Heriot, see themselves as progressives favoring racial preferences. They fear any curtailment of the authority to favor men could lead to a twin curtailment placed on favoring minorities.” The AAUW’s response does not answer these charges and claims instead that there is no problem of discrimination against women in college admissions.
Whitmire, however, perceives that both men and women — but especially men — are hurt by an education system that dis-serves male students. He laments, “As long as parents of middle-class boys see their sons easily get into college, the appetite for forcing changes at K–12 schools to make academics more boy-friendly will go nowhere. And that means the academic gender gaps will persist.”
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