"Diversity" College Admissions: About The Image Of The University, Not The Needs Of The Student
California passed an anti-affirmative action -- or rather, pro-merit -- law, Prop. 209, for college admissions back in 1996, but colleges fell all over themselves ignoring it, writes Heather Mac Donald in the New York Post (adapted from her book, out Tuesday, "The Diversity Delusion"):
After Prop. 209's passage, UC Berkeley, like the rest of the UC system, "went through a depression figuring out what to do," says Robert Laird, Berkeley's pro-preferences admissions director from 1993 to 1999. The system's despair was understandable. It had relied on wildly unequal double standards to achieve its smattering of "underrepresented minorities," especially at Berkeley and UCLA, the most competitive campuses. The median SAT score of blacks and Hispanics in Berkeley's liberal-arts programs was 250 points lower (on a 1600-point scale) than that of whites and Asians. This test-score gap was hard to miss in the classroom. Renowned Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, who judges affirmative action "a disaster," recounted that "they admitted people who could barely read.""There was a huge dropout rate of affirmative-action admits in my classes by midterms," Searle added. "No one had taught them the need to go to class. So we started introducing BS majors, in an effort to make the university ready for them, rather than making them ready for the university."
...The average six-year graduation rate for blacks and "Chicanos" (California-speak for Mexican-Americans) admitted from 1991 to 1997, the last year of preferences, was about 20 percent below that of whites and Asians. The university always put on a happy face when publicly discussing the fate of its "diversity" admits. Internally, however, even the true believers couldn't ignore the problems.
Yet for the preference lobby, a failing diversity student is better than no diversity student at all -- because the game is not about the students but about the self-image of the institution that so beneficently extends its largesse to them.
Here's an example of the racist -- and individually discriminatory -- way the efforts to bring in the "right" minorities worked out:
In 2002, a Wall Street Journal article provided eye-opening details about how comprehensive review worked in practice. UCLA had accepted a Hispanic girl with SATs of 940, while rejecting a Korean student with 1500s. The Korean student hardly lived in the lap of luxury: He tutored children to pay the rent for his divorced mother, who had developed breast cancer. But he went to a highly competitive school with a high Asian population in Irvine, while the Hispanic girl came from a school filled with failing students in overwhelmingly Hispanic South Gate. Students from South Gate got into UCLA and Berkeley at twice the overall acceptance rate. Indeed, an analysis of UCLA admissions rates in the four years following Prop. 209 -- even before comprehensive review -- found that going to a school with a high-achieving student body decreased one's admissions chances sevenfold.
These affirmative action initiatives -- preferencing by skin color -- often hurt the very people they purport to help:
It is ludicrous to imagine that it is a favor to let someone into an elite institution where most students scored much higher on the SATs.In 2004, a groundbreaking study by Richard Sander found that law schools that admit black students with lower GPAs and LSAT scores than their nonblack peers actually lowered those students' chances of passing the bar. Because of the "mismatch" between their academic preparedness and the academic sophistication of the school that has bootstrapped them in, the preference beneficiaries learn less of what they need to pass the bar than they would in a school that matched their capabilities. Far from increasing the supply of black lawyers, affirmative action actually decreases the diversity of the bar.
'Rithmatic.
Crid at September 2, 2018 4:07 AM
"-- because the game is not about the students but about the self-image of the institution that so beneficently extends its largesse to them." That statement tells you all you need to know about the scam called affirmative action.
Jay at September 2, 2018 5:38 AM
Through a couple of links in Crid's post, I found an article that said, "Education experts have long considered Algebra a 'gatekeeper' course that divides the more advanced mathematics of the college-bound set from the no-frills, computational arithmetic of general math."
I was in middle school, then called Junior High, in North Florida in the '70s. Algebra was not a "gatekeeper" course, but the next, expected progression in math. If you passed Geometry, you moved on to Algebra. Even the students who asked why they needed Algebra when they were not going to college were told it helped develop problem solving skills and were shown examples where the need to solve for X was applicable in non-college situations.
The article went on to ask, "The question of whether students should be ushered through that gate in the eighth or the ninth grade may seem like a small one, but it touches on a fundamental question in education policy: should schools push over-achievers ahead if that means leaving some students behind?"
The answer is yes, emphatically, yes. Schools need to challenge students. We've gotten this idea that if a student shows any advanced academic aptitude, it's unfair to the other students not so gifted. Yet, in a double standard, we have no problem pushing the more athletically-gifted students into higher and higher level athletics.
I think some of this stems from the fact that we are not attracting our best and brightest into teaching. Study after study shows that education majors read less outside of class materials than other majors, are less academically inclined (as measured by SAT and ACT scores), and have a less rigorous curriculum than other majors.
Less academically-adept teachers often cannot handle more academically-advanced students; too many are intimidated by the thought of teaching students who may be smarter than they are. We need to start attracting some of our brightest people into teaching. That starts with higher standards in schools of education.
Some of this has to do with union rules. I knew a woman who held a degree in mathematics and easily outshone her math department colleagues. Yet she was not allowed to teach advanced mathematics because union seniority rules gave course choice preference to older, more established teachers, many of whom actually scored lower on teacher competency tests than my math major friend. The older teachers did not want classrooms of unruly remedial students, so they left those to the more qualified, but less senior teacher, and took the advanced classes of well-behaved and engaged students.
Achieving racial diversity in academic outcomes does not start in college admissions, but in elementary schools. We need to change the quality of the teachers, the union rules, and the attitude that gifted students must be slowed down.
Conan the Grammarian at September 2, 2018 7:00 AM
I have seen multiple studies showing that you are better off being a big fish in a small pond than the converse. I might have gotten into Ivy League schools but decided I might have trouble (having no study skills and loving to party) so I went to a state school and graduated with honors. I am white. It applies to everyone.
cc at September 2, 2018 10:06 AM
Cal turned down brilliant students from my daughter’s all-girl high school, while taking barely literate kids from the nearby public school. Needless to say, her high school peers all graduate on time, perused advanced degrees and/or succeeded in their careers. I’d love to see the drop-out stats on the kids that went to Cal.
KatsC at September 2, 2018 2:09 PM
And, to be honest but politically incorrect, we need to change the quality of our students. Students from broken homes, indifferent parents, or an anti-intellectual culture are not going to suddenly be turned into outstanding scholars by even an outstanding teacher.
Conan the Grammarian at September 2, 2018 3:15 PM
This is depressing.
The elite 5% will send their offspring to private schools where they will associate with their own ilk, go to elite universities, and reinforce their wealth and power.
The children of the white and Asian middle classes will be forced by economics, not being able to afford the elite schools, to send their children to public schools which are nothing more than holding tanks for the low IQ violent by nature black and hispanic hordes where the former will be raped and robbed by the later, and deprived of any real educational opportunity will pose no competive threat to the elite class.
The progressive mantra of equal outcomes for all, is really the agenda of the elites who wich to reinforce and perpatuate their priveldge by the destruction of the middle class, and the creation of what they hope will be a class of stupid easily manipulated and exploited blacks and hispanics.
Jim Watson at September 4, 2018 2:51 PM
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