"Court Rules That College Admissions Are Kind of Arbitrary Anyway"

Parents Forum
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<p>From the Chronicle of Higher Education:</p>

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<p>As a result of the so-called "clout list" of applicants to the University of Illinois, the president of the institution resigned, the Illinois governor named six new members to the Board of Trustees, and the board overhauled the university's admissions process. </p>

<p>One thing that will not result from the scandal is a class-action lawsuit. A federal judge this week smacked down a pair of Chicago-based lawyers who filed the class action on behalf of basically everyone NOT on the list.</p>

<p>In his rejection of the class action, Judge Milton I. Shadur of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois said what parents and high-school students across the land know all too well: Nothing is certain, not even a safety school.</p>

<p>The judge wrote: “Anyone who has had direct (or even vicarious) exposure to the uncertain world of college admissions has encountered instances in which -- without any untoward practices at work -- a student is turned down by a supposedly "safe" school, or a student (sometimes even the same one) is struck by the lightning of acceptance by a school that would have been thought in objective terms to be out of reach."</p>

<p>The lawyers for the plaintiff, Timothy Radke, had proposed their client as the representative of a broad class of applicants who had applied to the university and been rejected from 1999 to 2009.</p>

<p>The lawyers, Judge Shadur said, were trying to "springboard" from the "front-page publicity and resulting furor" of the scandal. He dismissed the suit as an "overly expansive effort."</p>

<p>"Each year, over 20,000 high school seniors from across the nation apply to the university for approximately 7,000 available seats," Judge Shadur wrote. "By definition, then, some two-thirds of the class as proposed by counsel would not have been admitted in any event." --Eric Kelderman

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<p>^ The judge’s main point is that not all rejected applicants could have been rejected wrongly, because the university had many fewer spaces than applicants. Some applicants would not have been admitted even if the admission system were totally fair, so one can’t constitute a class for a class-action lawsuit consisting of all rejected applicants.</p>

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<p>^^^^^^</p>

<p>Which makes sense to me. The lawyers need to reduce their class action to a more reasonable subset of rejected students.</p>

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<p>I don’t always agree with Shadur’s decisions, but he is an excellent judge and this is a good one. I like the discouraging language he added. Just the idea of the cost of defending a class action suit on admissions is mind-boggling, especially since the university is struggling for dollars like all the state-funded elements in Illinois.</p>