UMass and Ohio State have changed their admissions policies in response to the Supreme’s Gratz decision. Both systems had awarded points for race in a manner similar to the policy at Michigan that the Court rejected as “too formulaic and mechanistic” in treating whole groups of applicants differently because of their race.
Instead of awarding points based on race, the new systems at UMass and Ohio State will instead “will rely partly on applicants’ responses to essay questions to determine what they could contribute to diversity on the campus,” in the words of Mike Gargano, vice chancellor for student affairs at UMass. Minority students at UMass typically are 15%–17% of each entering class, and Bryan Harvey, the UMass associate provost for planning and assessment, said he didn’t expect thins to change much. “I don’t think we expect it to get out of this range,” he said.
Ohio State also abandoned racial points and stated it “would rely on their responses to four short essay questions to decide what they were likely to contribute to campus diversity.”
“The Michigan rulings showed that a student’s race can no longer be the decisive factor in college admissions, but it can continue to be one of the factors considered,” said Virginia M. Trethewey, Ohio State’s general counsel.
I’m sure that the applicants who were denied admission to UMass and Ohio State partly because of their race will be relieved to learn that race was not the only factor keeping them out. In addition, perhaps the new admissions readers Ohio State will no doubt need can inform us at some point how they avoid reading the “four short essays” by each of the 20,000 applicants in a “formulaic and mechanistic” manner to determine the diversity quotient of each.
