Uproar Over Preferential Admissions In Illinois

In a long series of articles the Chicago Tribune has ignited a major firestorm over preferential admissions at the University of Illinois. Not the sort of preferential admissions we usually follow here, but preferential admissions nevertheless. As summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education,

The articles, which examined university e-mail and records dating to 2005, detail the existence of a “Category I” list at the university for applicants who have been recommended by lawmakers, trustees, or other politically connected people. This year, about 160 high-school students landed on the list out of 26,000 applicants, according to the Tribune. About a quarter of those students were denied admission, and many of those who were admitted appear to have gained admission in their own right.

These preferences are thus analogous to preferences extended to legacies, the only difference being that these “Category I” students showed their foresight by choosing to be born to influential politicians and other movers and shakers rather than university alumni.

The demand for special help getting into the U of I has been sparked by the University’s increasing selectivity. As the Tribune noted recently,

In 1984, nearly 14,000 students applied for roughly 6,000 freshman spots on the Urbana-Champaign campus, few students from outside Illinois enrolled and high school graduates with decent grades had a good shot of getting in.

Today, 26,000 students are bidding for 7,100 spots, non-residents make up a growing percentage of the freshman class and applicants across the board have more impressive academic credentials than ever before, said Stacey Kostell, director of admissions….

At the U. of I., the influx of out-of-state students has [also] resulted in a lower acceptance rate for Illinois students, Kostell said. In 1989, non-residents made up 7 percent of the freshman class; in 2008, they made up 17 percent.

As the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Peter Schmidt pointed out in his book, Color and Money, and most recently on his blog,

the University of Illinois is hardly alone in systematically lowering the bar on behalf of applicants with political connections. College lobbyists in state capitals say they must routinely accept requests to grease the skids for certain applicants from the state lawmakers that their institutions rely on for funds. College lobbyists in Washington similarly field requests from members of Congress to help applicants who might not gain admission on their own.

Moreover, Schmidt has a nicely revealing reminder of the links and similarities among various preference programs.

Two of the university administrators who oversaw the admissions practices examined in the Tribune investigation–the current president of the University of Illinois, B. Joseph White, and the former chancellor of university’s Champaign-Urbana campus, Nancy Cantor–had maintained a similar mechanism for helping favored applicants circumvent merit-based admissions in their previous positions at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Under the point-based undergraduate admissions system ultimately rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2003 Gratz v. Bollinger decision, Michigan reserved the right to award any applicant a 20-point bonus–the equivalent of the different between a 3.0 GPA and a 4.0 GPA–on its 150-point scale.

Many readers will recall that the University of Michigan also awarded 20 points for “membership in an ‘underrepresented’ racial or ethnic minority group,” until the Supremes required it to achieve by stealth and subterfuge what it had been doing openly. There is something about rewarding the offspring of the politically connected or big donors that strikes almost everyone as unfair, and there is also substantial opposition to legacy preferences, but sometimes the grounds for this opposition is not clear. For some it is a principled devotion to pure academic merit, but for others the reasons for their opposition (other than they are theirs don’t benefit) are more difficult to discern.

Long-time readers will recall that I have been on a campaign for years objecting to the false equation of all forms of preference. For example, even before Gratz and Grutter had been decided I criticized the New York Times for “continuing [its] tradition of equating racial discrimination with other, comparatively trivial forms of discrimination,” quoting a Jacque Steinberg article on the unfairness of legacy admissions:

Now that critics of affirmative action have persuaded the Supreme Court to consider whether black and Hispanic applicants are taking the rightful spots of more-qualified whites, some supporters of race-conscious admissions are mounting a counteroffensive. They complain that it is the preferential treatment afforded some applicants because of their parents’ wealth or college affiliation that is unfair.

So, supporters of race preferences argue that discrimination in favor of legacies or big contributors is unfair but racial discrimination is not unfair. This will give philosophers of fairness quite a bit to work on over the next generation as they create clever arguments to support this bizarre view.

I have not read all the Chicago Tribune articles on the “clout” controversy, but in the ones I did read there was, oddly, no mention of the extent of race-based special treatment in admissions. An article yesterday the Tribune noted that

The University of Illinois has refused a request by the Chicago Tribune for test scores and grade-point averages of applicants who appeared on its admissions clout lists, saying the release would violate privacy rights even if the students are not named.

Insofar as the objection to “clout” preferences is based on merit, i.e., on opposition to less qualified students being admitted, then the Tribune should also be pressuring the University to release test-score and grade point averages of its entering class broken down by race and ethnicity. If it did, I’m sure the University would engage in the same stonewalling all institutions do when this data is sought. (See, for example, the California Bar Association’s refusal to release privacy-protected data to researchers.)

Yesterday the Tribune reported that

Gov. Pat Quinn will appoint a panel Wednesday to investigate University of Illinois’ admissions practices, stepping into the controversy nearly two weeks after the Tribune first reported the existence of a clout list for well-connected applicants….

“This is a troubling situation. Admission to this great university should be based on merit, never on clout,” Quinn said in a statement provided to the Tribune. “This Commission is charged with investigating claims of such special treatment and making sure any and all problems are rooted out and corrected.”

If the Governor really believes that admission should be based only on merit and that all “special treatment” should be “rooted out and corrected,” he will direct his commission to investigate “any and all” special treatment, including preferences based on race and ethnicity. And if the Chicago Tribune believes that all applicants have as much a right to be treated without regard to race as they do to be treated without regard to the power or influence of their parents, it will insist on a thorough investigation of all special treatment programs at the University.