Kimberly Swygert points out that UC San Diego, like its UC siblings UCLA and Berkeley, admits to having admitted a significant number of students (over 800 students, just under 5% of the admitted students) with both lower SAT scores and lower grades than the class average. The average GPA for the low-scoring students was 3.8; the average in 2002 was 4.13. The UC Dan Diego data reveal that “about 58 percent of [the low-scoring admittees] were underrepresented minorities.”
Defenders of “diversity” maintain that the percentage of beneficiaries of the selectively lowered standards — a policy known as “compreshensive review” — who are minorities is irrelevant, that it does not run afoul of Prop. 209’s ban on distributing benefits based on race because racial preference is neither the intent nor the justification of the policy.
I would be more inclined to believe them if they remained equally unperturbed when confronted with evidence (hypothetical here, I hasten to add) that 58% of the motorists the state police pulled over for suspicious behavior were minorities.
But then we’ve known for a long time that racial profiling is unacceptable only when done by the police.
“But then we’ve known for a long time that racial profiling is unacceptable only when done by the police.”
The exception isn’t even that broad. When racial profiling by the police means “race-norming” the exam results, it’s fine. Even the racial profiling of suspects would be OK if it were done with an aim to arrest a more diverse body of suspects that looks more like America.
Hmm.
58%?
Actually, that doesn’t look too bad. It’s higher than the proportion of “underrepresented minorities” in the college-going age bracket, I’m sure, but not much higher. Whites are something like 40% of the population in California, now, and Asians something like 6%. Assuming that this is roughly their proportion in the relevant proportion of the population (I don’t know the relative birth rates of the various racial subgroups in California, 20yrs ago, or the immigration rates), then that 58% is only 4 pts off where it would be, *if* the comprehensive review is legitimately filtering for some trait or set of traits distributed evenly across all racial groups. Of course, the relevant test for discriminatory effect here would be whether otherwise equivalently qualified “underrepresented minorities” were substantially prefered over their Asian or white peers.
I suspect that they were, but that’s just a suspicion, and one shouldn’t be too quick to accuse institutions of racism. I don’t see truly convincing evidence in this particular case.
-Tae