Discriminations

Peter Schrag, the respected columnist for the Sacramento Bee, has an interesting article on a recent proposal to lower the objective requirements for admission to the University of California and replace them with the more “squishy” and flexible standards of “comprehensive review.”

“Any plan,” Schrag writes,

to change the undergraduate admissions system at the University of California is likely to bring charges that it's yet another politically correct attempt to reinstitute race preferences. That applies especially to reforms that de-emphasize grades and test scores.

Well, duh. That’s because such plans usually are, in fact, attempts to re-introduce racial preferences. And a new attempt is now underway.

A set of major revisions now proposed by BOARS, UC's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, will be no exception. It would make more high school graduates eligible for consideration for UC but end the virtual guarantee of eligibility that students with high grades and test scores – those in the hypothetical top 12.5 percent of California high school graduates, many of them Asians – now enjoy.

Only those in the top 4 percent in their respective schools would still be guaranteed a place in the system.

Schrag is willing to grant this proposal more good faith than I would, but even he is more skeptical than most observers in the mainstream media.

Leaving aside suspicions of bad faith by admissions officers – that in applying the more squishy criteria of comprehensive review, they'll pursue diversity and overlook competence by giving blacks and Latinos preferences, either consciously or otherwise – the system will still find it tougher to justify its decisions.

When hard numbers – tests, grades – are used at least to define eligibility for the pool from which campuses choose, decisions can always be defended with “objective” facts. That those numbers sometimes don't mean much doesn't make the alternative criteria any easier to defend. And, of course, the numbers do mean something. There may not be much difference between 650 and 700 on an SAT math test, but there surely is between 500 and 750.

In the decades before (and just after World II), the Ivy League and other elite colleges downplayed tests and grades in order to pick the “whole man,” meaning white shoe WASPS from the right social backgrounds. Comprehensive review may never become the black-brown version of that, but UC could still have a hard time persuading the skeptics.

As one of those skeptics, I can assure Schrag that he’s right; UC will have a hard time convincing us that its motive is not simply to increase the numbers of blacks and Hispanics by reducing the numbers of Asians, who score very high on the objective measures whose weight will be lowered.

ADDENDUM: What Goes Around Goes Around

The UC System, and Berkeley and UCLA in particular, are so determined to increase the numbers of underrepresented minorities that their “reforms” to accomplish this, having failed, are now themselves being reformed.

It hasn’t been that long, for example, since UC Chancellor Richard Atkinson favored dropping the SAT I aptitude test and relying instead more on the SAT II achievement tests, which led, as I discussed here, to “a widespread suspicion that at least part of his motive was adopting procedures that would allow Spanish-speaking Hispanic applicants to boost their scores by taking the Spanish test.”

Now BOARS wants to drop the SAT II altogether:

because a large percentage of poor, Latino and black students don't take the SAT II tests, that requirement alone – not grades or test scores – has shut out a large percentage of those groups from the pool of eligibles....

BOARS calculates that without the SAT II requirements many more students would be UC eligible. The existing system ... denies the campuses the opportunity to choose students who might contribute more than those admitted now.

Contribute more what?