Race Baste
The LA Times is always a bit of a mess lately, after drop-kicking a good bit of their staff. I went to look online for a letter to the editor I saw in the print edition on Saturday, and they are missing that day in their online letters to the editor. They go right from September 5 to September 7.

Luckily, I saved the page, so I have Kevin Smith's letter, referencing the story about UCLA being accused of illegal admitting practices. He wrote:

I was a white student who was shown no special preference in getting admitted to UCLA, yet somehow I got in and graduated. I took the community college route because I wasn't at first up to UCLA's standards. Isn't this an option for minority students? When does the entitlement end?

The story, in brief, by Seema Mehta:

Arguing that UCLA admissions policies are being manipulated to circumvent the state's ban on consideration of applicants' race, a professor there has resigned from a faculty committee that he says refused to allow him to study the matter.

Political science professor Tim Groseclose resigned Thursday from the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools, saying high-ranking university administrators and fellow committee members are engaged in a "coverup" to block illegal activity from being discovered.

"A growing body of evidence strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions," he wrote in an 89-page report posted on a UCLA website.

...Attempts to reach Groseclose on Friday were unsuccessful, but he wrote in his report that admissions officials often learned of students' race in personal application essays, and factored it into admissions decisions.

"It is obvious that the admissions staff was under intense pressure to admit more African Americans," he wrote.

My pal Heather MacDonald had an excellent piece on the subject in Sunday's LATimes (thankfully, hers made it online), "How UC is rigging the admissions process: Officials are perverting the law in a desperate attempt to increase black enrollment":

Students admitted with drastically lower qualifications than their school's norm frequently end up in the bottom of their class and take much longer to graduate, if they graduate at all. UCLA law professor Richard Sander has shown that black law students, almost all of whom receive large racial preferences in law school admissions, are six times as likely as whites to fail the bar after multiple efforts. The reason, Sander has argued persuasively, is that students learn less in an academic environment pitched over their heads than they would in a school that matches their capabilities. Thus, racial double standards can end up hurting black and Latino students rather than helping them.

Yet UC administrators continue to devise new schemes to admit poorly qualified minority students to their most competitive campuses on the ground that objective tests of academic merit are not related to subsequent performance. The fact is, nothing else comes close to the predictive power of aptitude and other objective tests -- including the "spark" and "leadership" qualities that UC administrators purport to be seeking these days.

The academic elitism behind the effort to shoehorn underqualified black and Latino students into UC's flagship schools is an insult to the rest of California's college and university system. The proportion of underrepresented minorities in the UC system as a whole has returned to its pre-209 levels. "Irrelevant!" say preference supporters. Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has complained that there are not enough black and Latino students at Berkeley to provide minority communities with the "leadership" they need -- in other words, don't expect UC Riverside or Cal State Long Beach to graduate "community leaders." But if attending Cal State Northridge or Santa Monica Community College would so impair the life chances of black and Latino students, why should any student be subjected to such a fate? Why not close down all second- and third-tier schools so that everyone can get an elite degree?

The energies that have been expended since 1996 to re-create a full-blown preference regime have been wasted. While UC race advocates have fiddled with their admissions criteria, the test score gap in California has widened. Blacks' average math SATs in 2007 were 429, compared to 564 for Asians and 549 for whites, according to the California Department of Education. On reading, blacks scored 438, compared to 510 for Asians and 541 for whites. The dropout rate in 2007 was 41.6% for blacks, 15.2% for whites and 10.2% for Asians.

These figures reveal the true educational crisis in California: It is in the state's elementary and high schools and in its homes, not in the universities. If, over the last decade, pro-preference faculty members and administrators had devoted their considerable talents to tutoring minority students and convincing them and their families that learning is important, Groseclose's whistle-blowing might not have been needed.