Discriminations

UCLA has just announced, with great pride and relief, that its new, “holistic” admissions procedures have resulted in an increase in the percentage of formerly preferred minorities admitted to the next freshman class.

Prior to the university’s adoption of the new admissions policy last year, two application readers reviewed each prospective student’s academic records while a third took into account the applicant’s outside achievements and any challenges he or she might have overcome. Under the “holistic” approach, every application is read and considered in its entirety by two readers, and the readers give more consideration to the opportunities that had — or had not — been available to applicants.

Whether or not increasing the number of blacks and Hispanics was the purpose underlying the new policy, it was the effect.

The new admissions policy appears to have increased black and Hispanic students' chances of being accepted, while making it more likely that white and Asian-American applicants would be turned away.

The percentage of whites (33% of those admitted) who were admitted fell from 26.2% last year to 24.6%, but, as usually happens when factors others than academic qualifications are given more emphasis, the biggest losers were Asians. Last year Asians made up 45.6% of the admitted students; this year they are 43.1%, “with almost all of the decline taking place among two subsets whose numbers had been growing most rapidly on the campus: Chinese-Americans and Vietnamese-Americans.”

Although the applicant pools from both populations grew only slightly, the share of Chinese-American applicants who were admitted declined from 35.8 percent to 31.6 percent, while the share of Vietnamese-American applicants who were admitted declined from 28.6 percent to 21.2 percent.

ADDENDUM

As the above numbers indicate, the percentage of Chinese-Americans who were admitted fell by over 11% from last year, and the percentage of Vietnamese who were admitted fell by over 25%.

It seems to me that the UCLA admissions reviewers have made a dramatic, even breathtaking, discovery that they should publish and share with the world: the nature of the heretofore unknown “opportunities” enjoyed by Vietnamese-Americans, opportunities that have obviously expanded exponentially in the space of one generation and that equally obviously served as a burden and handicap on their applications to UCLA.