Virginia Admissions Conflicts: Residence, Region, “Diversity”

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Admissions to very selective public universities like the University of Virginia (or at least nominally public; UVa receives only 8% or so of its operating budget from the state) are trickier and more fraught with conflict than admission to selective private institutions. There are debates, for example, over how many students to accept from out of state as well as which parts of the state are favored over others.

Virginia is now enjoying another of these hardy perennial controversies, as state legislators have introduced several bills recently to limit out of state admissions. As the Washington Post reported two days ago,

RICHMOND — Valedictorian Phillip Wears boasted a 4.01 grade point average, served as captain of his lacrosse team and won awards for photography and television production when he graduated from South County Secondary School last year. But he still couldn’t get into the University of Virginia. “He was kind of shocked more than anything,” said his mother, Millie Wears of Fairfax Station. “It’s a Virginia school. You have a student who has a 4.0. How can you say no?”

State legislators say they think they know the answer: An increasing number of Virginia students with top grades and impressive test scores, many from populous Northern Virginia, are losing slots at the state’s premiere schools to out-of-state students….

“We’re in a situation where we have the ‘University of New Jersey-Charlottesville’ campus and the ‘University of Pennsylvania-Williamsburg’ campus,” Del. Timothy D. Hugo (R-Fairfax) said. “I think that needs to come to an end.”

The same point, with quotes from other legislators, was made in the Richmond Times Dispatch a few weeks ago. These legislators, and the parents they represent, are agitated because they see their sons and daughters denied admission to the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, and William and Mary in favor of out of state students, and the anger is especially intense in populous Northern Virginia. That region has an additional grievance, seemingly voiced less in this most recent round of complaints but always present, because, as this data from 2000–2002 shows (no reason to think this has changed), Northern Virginia applicants to UVa have the highest test scores in the state but the lowest percentage of acceptances.

For their part, university and state education officials make two main arguments: money and, you guessed it, diversity. Regarding the money, they note that reducing the number of out of state students would be very expensive, since those students pay a much higher tuition.

At U.Va., each 1 percent drop in the number of out-of-state undergraduates would cost the university about $3 million, [executive director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Daniel] LaVista said.

The 31 percent of out-of-state undergraduates there account for 63 percent of the school’s tuition revenue, said Carol Wood, a U.Va spokeswoman.

The diversity argument in the recent flurry of complaints has been quite attenuated, where it has not been silly, such as when “Del. Joseph D. Morrissey (D-Richmond) said that schools would be ‘boring and sterile’ places if they admitted only Virginians who want to study law and medicine.” Well, yes, but of course all the students admitted from Virginia are not in pre-law or pre-med.

But there is another diversity argument — actually, a “diversity” argument — that current critics of out of state admissions curiously are not making but should make: that admissions officials and university minority offices actively recruit out of state in order to increase the numbers of black and Hispanic students.

I”ve discussed the problem (at least I think it’s a problem) of recruiting out of state minorities a number of times. For example, UVa chief diversity officer William Harvey has been quite explicit about this, as I noted here in discussing one of his speeches:

This was the problem Harvey addressed in his recent speech:

Harvey noted that Latinos and Hispanics currently comprise approximately three percent of the University undergraduate population, while Latinos and Hispanics make up approximately seven percent of the Commonwealth’s population.
….
The number of Latino/Hispanic faculty members at the University is also considered inadequate, Harvey noted.

And the solution, or part of it:

Harvey said as one-third of University students are not from the Commonwealth, the University should actively recruit students from states with large Latino/Hispanic communities. [Emphasis added]

So, because Virginia Hispanics are “underrepresented,” Hispanics should be rounded up and brought in from other states….

But does the number of Hispanics at UVa really represent a problem that needs to be solved? Consider:

Approximately 37 percent of Latinos and Hispanics who apply to the University are accepted, Harvey said. According to the Office of Admission Web site, 38 percent of students who applied for admission in the fall of 2004 were accepted.

Since The University turns away large numbers of qualified students, including many who could provide “diversity” on any number of grounds, is it really a good idea to spend scarce resources to persuade students who are not now applying to apply?

Another example: according to UVa data for the class entering in Fall 2005 that I summarized here,

  • 7% of the applicants were black;
  • 12.3% of the admittees were black;
  • 29.4% of the non-black applicants were admitted;
  • 57.1% of the black applicants were admitted.

And, as I asked here, “what was the reaction among officials at UVa” to the fact that the black admission rate was so much higher than for other groups? The answer (quoting from an article in the Cavalier Daily):

“You have to attribute that high-yield rate to the excellent job that the Office of Admission has done this past year,” African-American Affairs Dean M. Rick Turner said. “They were on a special mission to really cull the country, enticing the very, very best African-American students to come to the University of Virginia….” [Emphasis added]

Finally, here is my discussion of data in an article that appeared in the Washington Post back in 2003:

A front page story in today’s Washington Post discusses discrimination in admissions at the University of Virginia … against applicants from Northern Virgina.

Of the current sophomore, junior and senior classes, 47.7 percent of Northern Virginia applicants to the university’s College of Arts and Sciences were admitted, compared with 54.5 percent from other urban and suburban regions, such as the Richmond and Norfolk areas, and 54 percent from rural communities.

This despite the fact that Northern Virginia’s schools are generally considered the strongest in the state, and one school, the highly selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, typically has a UVa admission rate of 80% or more.

In a very interesting and unexplored comparison, the article points out — but does not analyze in any way — that black applicants are accepted at a significantly higher rate.

Black applicants appear to have had an edge in the process. Though as a group they had lower SAT scores, about 69 percent were offered admission, higher than any other racial [or geographical!] subset.

Does this very high acceptance rate reflect only applications from blacks who are Virginia residents? The article doesn’t say. Are out of state blacks with low scores accepted at a higher rate than white or Asian or Hispanic Virginia residents with high scores? The article doesn’t say.

So far as I know, UVa has never released data that would answer this question.

If the legislators who are examining out of state admissions are serious about their effort, they will confront the degree to which the decision to “cull the country” in search of racial and ethnic “diversity” discriminates against residents of Virginia.

ADDENDUM

Here’s another question the legislators should pursue. As we’ve seen, one of the main justifications university officials give for admitting out of state students is financial — those students are charged a much higher tuition than Virginia residents. But inasmuch as the University of Virginia works closely with several organizations that provide racially exclusive scholarships, what percentage of out of state minorities do not pay that tuition because they receive such scholarships?

Say What? (3)

  1. revisionist February 26, 2009 at 9:56 am | | Reply

    I agree that the diversity argument is ridiculous, but UVA is correct in citing the loss of income if they accept fewer out-of-state students. If the state is only willing to fund 8% of the cost, then maybe only 8% of UVA students should be required to be from Virginia.

    It should also be noted that in California, Latino legislators have been the most aggressive in cutting the state University budgets due to the latter’s lack of Latino students. Indeed, “comprehensive review” was forced on UC by the state Latino Caucus, which according to Ward Connerly threatened large cuts if more of their people were not admitted. I would bet that the Latino and Black legislators in VA are very reluctant to increase UVA funding for the same reason. In fact, Lani Guinier predicted the demise of public higher education funding due to hostility from an increasingly Latino/Black (as well as a racialist progressive white) electorate.

  2. K February 26, 2009 at 2:26 pm | | Reply

    There is an old adage.

    When someone tells you isn’t about the money but the principle involved, they mean it is about the money.

    Many state universities have almost completed their evolution into for profit organizations. The administrators, and many faculty, often make large incomes. And their intent is to solicit more funds, secure more grants, form alliances with more special interests, and grow ever richer.

    The higher out-of-state tuition is all profit. So universities all over the country prefer to shunt locals aside and fill slots with foreign students.

    For political reasons the new goals cannot be admitted so bogus excuses are invented and defended with a fervour seldom seen since the Crusades.

  3. ACF February 26, 2009 at 5:08 pm | | Reply

    The problem here is generic to most modern societal ills, that is the need for some to alter true costs in order to “help” others.

    For instance, we don’t want people to actually earn enough to afford a house, so we give them the money (and they go bankrupt).

    We don’t want people to earn enough to afford college, so we force everybody (according to their productive capabilities) to pay taxes to state governments, and then we give that money to public universities who then give it to people who don’t want to earn enough to afford college.

    Meanwhile, we can’t enslave professors by forcing them to teach for free, so we have to dramatically raise the tuition cost of college for the most productive in order to make college free for the least productive in society.

    You could get out of all this mess by simply charging the same amount for everybody (productive, unproductive, in-state, out of state, etc.). Then, you wouldn’t force state residents to pay taxes to the university, and you would not give them a break on tuition. Further, there would be no incentive for the university to game the system for economic advantage in recruiting out of state students simply to make more money.

    The Soviet Union learned all about this crap. They had to burn huge amounts of energy to prop up their Rube Goldberg economy.

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