Research at D ...

sybbie719 · August 6, 2008, 3:37pm

Article # 3 in the series

[quote]
Admittance rates differ drastically by race for Class of 2008

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of articles examining higher education admissions in the wake of last year’s University of Michigan Supreme Court decisions. This article looks at race preference.

For those who argue that minority students receive an unfair advantage in higher education admissions, Dartmouth’s admissions statistics could provide fodder for the debate.

College officials nationwide defend the use of race because of the educational benefit that is derived from a diverse student body. To achieve such diversity, many schools have found it important to consider race as one factor in their admissions process.

The opponents of affirmative action in admissions claim that colleges considering race give an unfair advantage to minority applicants, making it easier for those students to get in, while at the same time making it more difficult for white students to gain admission.

But the use of race as a factor in Dartmouth’s admissions decisions appears to be making more than just a nominal difference. Dartmouth accepted 44.6 percent of African Americans who applied — 2.5 times higher than the overall rate of 18.3 percent. Native Americans were accepted at 34.6 percent and Latinos at 29 percent. White students, on the other hand, had a more difficult time getting accepted; only 16.2 percent of white, non-international students received letters of acceptance.

“The rate of admissions is higher because we want to have a diverse student population,” said Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg.

Furstenberg cited two reasons for the higher acceptance rates. First, the College recruits minority populations aggressively, producing “a very well cultivated applicant pool,” he said. Second, Dartmouth and other prestigious institutions are competing for the same small pool of highly qualified minority students. The College has to accept more of them, therefore, to compensate for a lower yield.

“Its supply and demand,” Furstenberg said.

But this kind of racial preference has white students crying foul. The Supreme Court approved last summer the consideration of race in college admissions after two white appellants sued the University of Michigan for discrimination. The petitioners alleged that the University’s use of racial preferences in undergraduate admissions violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The resulting decisions handed down by the Supreme Court found that race could legally be used as a factor in admissions decisions, but not in the specific way it was used by the undergraduate school. In the majority opinion in the Michigan law school case, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor declared that the Constitution “does not prohibit the law school’s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”

Furstenberg echoed O’Connor’s argument.

“It seems to me to be unwise educationally for any institution to have a population that doesn’t at least approximate what the national population is for reason of adding to understanding and experience,” Furstenberg said.

But opponents of affirmative action remain unconvinced.

Former University of California Regent Ward Connerly has been one of the nation’s most vocal opponents of race in higher education for years. Connerly lead the successful push in California to pass Proposition 209, banning racial preference in California. Connerly now heads the American Civil Rights Institute, based in Sacramento, Calif., which continues to fight nationwide for the end of racial preference and educational reform.

“Race has been a factor for all of history in the U.S. It’s what led to the Civil War,” ACRI Director of Public Affairs Diane Schacterle said. “There are better ways to determine disadvantaged students. Your first consideration should always be merit. If you’re looking for disadvantaged students you’re doing it backward.”

The ACRI and many other groups fighting racial preference nationwide propose replacing the consideration of race with a consideration of financial background in order to achieve diversity through race-neutral means.

But not all minorities are receiving preference. The number of Asian American college applicants has grown substantially over the last decade, so that Asian Americans no longer receive a significant preference for being a minority sub-population. Asian Americans applying for the Class of 2008 at Dartmouth enjoyed just a four percent boost over the average applicant, being accepted at a rate of 22.8 percent.

This is partially attributable to the higher number of Asian American applicants compared to the other minority groups. A record 1,513 Asian Americans applied for a spot in the Class of 2008, compared to just 437 African Americans.

Michele Hernandez ‘89, author of the book “A is for Admission,” and currently a private college consultant, noticed the disparity when she worked for the Dartmouth admissions office in the mid-1990s.

“Colleges count Asian Americans in the numbers of students of color, but Asians receive no preference in the admissions process. I can’t believe Asians aren’t outraged,” Hernandez said.

While Connerly and other opponents of racial consideration of any kind use the argument of fairness to make their point, proponents of the use of race also argue that it is a question of fairness—fairness for those who have not had as much opportunity in their lives.

“Not every student here is going to come from the best, most elite school in the country with lots of A.P. courses,” Furstenberg said. “People are going to have different experiences, and they can be just as talented intrinsically. Our role is to educate people, not just to take in semi-finished products and polish them up so they can go on to grad school.”

TheDartmouth.com</a> | Admittance rates differ drastically by race for Class of 2008

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sybbie719 · August 6, 2008, 3:39pm

Article # 2

[quote]
For legacies, age-old perks in admissions are still in swing

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of articles examining higher education admissions in the wake of last year’s University of Michigan Supreme Court decisions. This article looks at legacy preference.

Some say it’s for the money, others because of tradition. Regardless of the explanation, legacy applicants at colleges and universities throughout the nation continue to enjoy the preference they have received for decades.

At many schools, sons and daughters of graduates are given special consideration in the applications process. Though the weight given to these legacies varies by institution, nearly every selective school takes legacy standing into account in some form or another.

“I consider it simply a small ‘plus-factor’ in the admissions decisions,” said Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg.

But this small plus-factor appears to make a significant difference. While Dartmouth’s 18.3 percent overall acceptance rate this year was one of the lowest in the nation, the acceptance rate for legacy applicants was nearly twice that level. Of the 364 legacy students who applied for admission to the Class of 2008, 35.4 percent were accepted.

In recent years, as admission to upper-echelon schools has become even more difficult, legacy admissions have been under increasing fire as an unfair practice.

Schools across the country argued vehemently for the continued use of race as a factor in admissions in last year’s Supreme Court cases, arguing that having a diverse student population carries with it an educational benefit. But does accepting legacies have a similar educational benefit for the community?

“I guess I would say that it benefits the institution,” Furstenberg said. “Of course our alumni want us to give more weight to legacies when their kids are applying, while everyone else thinks it should receive less weight.”

Legacies receive some kind of advantage at most schools, but exactly how the admissions process treats them varies widely by school.

“At the younger or smaller schools whose endowment is much smaller they have to dip a little lower because they need to keep alumni happy to keep giving,” said Rachel Toor, the author of the book “Admissions Confidential” and a former admissions officer at Duke University.

Even the definition of a legacy applicant varies by the school. In Hanover, a legacy is considered “a son or daughter of anyone with a B.A. from Dartmouth College,” said Furstenberg. No other relation to Dartmouth makes a student eligible for legacy. Likewise, there is not an extra benefit to having had both parents graduate from Dartmouth — sometimes called a double-legacy — or being a multi-generational legacy.

Harvard defines legacies similarly, while the Massachusetts Institute of Technology confers legacy status on anyone whose parents or grandparents graduated from MIT, and even for those whose siblings attended or are attending the school, though sibling legacy carries less weight, Associate Director of Admissions Bette Johnson said.

Similarly, schools vary in the amount of extra weight actually given to legacies.

“If you ask schools directly, they will generally just say that legacy counts as a tiebreaker, said Dan Golden, a Boston-based Wall Street Journal education reporter who has written in-depth analyses profiling classes of high-school seniors through the admissions process. He contends that it is, in fact, a significant advantage at almost every school, and greater if the alumnus has been active as a volunteer or donor and if the student will not require financial aid.

Golden’s observations do not apply to Dartmouth, however, said Furstenberg. Firstly, because Dartmouth is need-blind in its admissions procedures, financial concerns cannot be taken into consideration through the admissions process. Furstenberg, eschewing the use of the word “tiebreaker,” described the advantage legacies get as a small “plus-factor.”

And while legacies do get a second look, Furstenberg said, they are assessed with the same standards.

“The acceptance statistics may be higher by percentage, but the rigor of evaluation is the same,” Furstenberg said. “The vast majority would have been admitted anyway.”

Michele Hernandez ‘89, a former Dartmouth admissions officer, author of the book “A is for Admission” and currently a private college consultant, described Furstenberg’s “plus-factor” as “more of an in-depth look.”

“Instead of looking for flaws in the application we looked for redeeming features,” Hernandez said of her time spent in the admissions office in the mid-’90s. “We were looking for a reason to accept the legacy instead of a reason to deny.”

At Harvard, however, legacy does amount to a tiebreaker, counting as a “feather on the scale if all else is equal,” Harvard admissions director Marilyn McGrath Lewis said. By treating legacy as no more than a tiebreaker, Harvard is able to acknowledge legacy applicants “without giving away quality.”

But according to Toor, that is not the case at Duke. There, the school’s alumni and development staff review rejected legacy applications, possessing an ability to “bring them back like a phoenix from the ashes,” Toor said.

While private schools provide an extra level of consideration, many public schools have decided to treat legacy applicants differently.

The University of Virginia provides no special consideration for legacies in the way that most private schools do, but many would argue its perks are actually a greater benefit to legacy applicants. UVA will consider any legacy applicant who applies from out of state as an in-state applicant, putting them in an entirely different applicant pool for review — one that traditionally has a substantially higher admittance rate.

The University of California system used a similar system until 2000 when it chose to move toward giving no advantage to legacy applicants, UC spokesperson Hanan Eisenman said.

However, legacies whose families had made regular donations to the school had a major advantage at Duke, according to Toor.

“What counts is if you’ve had a sustained history of giving,” she said. “Your child gets no legacy consideration just because you hold a Duke degree.”

This is “absolutely not true at Dartmouth,” Furstenberg said. There are legacies, and then there are “development cases,” and the two are separate. Legacies receive that designation automatically from the admissions office if their parent holds a Dartmouth degree. Development cases, on the other hand, proceed differently.

When an important development case — usually involving a big donor — shows up, the alumni relations and development office inform the admissions office of an application that should receive special attention.

But Furstenberg said such cases are few and far between.

“There are typically 10 or fewer development cases each year. There is a fairly high standard to be treated as a development case. I mean you really have to donate a building or something. Schools with big endowments don’t really give much advantage because they have so much money.”

Admissions offices at the country’s elite schools would like to downplay the effect legacy consideration has on its admissions decisions and subsequent enrollment. Although Toor established a definitive connection between Duke’s legacy admissions and the protection of its endowment, other admissions officers admitted a similar motivation for their own preferential treatment of legacies, but stopped short of acknowledging a direct relationship.

When asked about the link between money and legacies, Furstenberg said only that “alumni support is very important to this College.” He responded directly to concerns that legacy is counterproductive to the diversity of the class.

“We are now seeing more legacies who are sons and daughters of graduates of color, resulting in more and more legacy minorities,” Furstenberg said, citing a 15- to 20-year gap between the early efforts to diversify the campus and the result of minority legacy applicants applying.

But Toor was much more frank in her analysis.

“It comes down to who they are afraid of ****ing off,” she said.

Golden seemed to agree.

“They talk about tradition, but when push comes to shove it’s a business decision,” he said.

Indeed, the end of legacy is not near, but it does appear that its impact on an applicant’s chances for admission may soon decrease. Furstenberg acknowledged that “the legacy pool has gotten smaller overall” and that now the “vast majority” of the legacies admitted this year would have been admitted anyway. Legacy admits reached a five-year low last year with only 112 accepted.

This year, the number was slightly higher — around 130 accepted legacies — but still the second lowest number since the ’90s.

Dartmouth’s numbers are actually quite low by comparison. While only six percent of overall acceptances for the Class of 2008 were legacies, Princeton’s accepted pool was 11.2 percent legacy — over 180 students. Similarly, Brown accepted nearly 170 legacies.

One thing that isn’t falling is the number of legacy applicants to elite schools. This year, Dartmouth received 364 legacy applications, the highest number in at least five years, and up 20 percent from just four years ago.

Other schools are seeing similar trends. At the University of Pennsylvania, legacy applicants number in the quadruple digits this year.

“It’s a part of the institutional culture, here and at other Ivies,” Furstenberg said.

TheDartmouth.com</a> | For legacies, age-old perks in admissions are still in swing

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sybbie719 · August 6, 2008, 3:41pm

first article in the series

[quote]
Minority summer programs get axe after Michigan rulings

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of articles examining the far-reaching effects of last year’s Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action.

The May 1 deadline for high-school seniors to decide where they will be enrolling next year marked the conclusion of this year’s college admissions process — the first admissions cycle since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down two landmark decisions on the legality of racial preference in higher education admissions.

Last June, the Supreme Court confirmed the legality of the use of race as a factor in the college admissions process. Ruling five to four in favor of the Michigan Law School’s program to achieve diversity, the Court in effect approved admissions systems based on individualized assessment of applicants, similar to those used at Dartmouth and at many other selective institutions across the country.

At the same time, the High Court struck down six-to-three the specific point-based system used for Michigan undergraduate admissions.

Proponents of affirmative action claimed victory, and it was widely believed that the rulings had finally legally established affirmative action in higher education admissions.

But the Michigan decisions have had unexpected effects, particularly in the fields of pre-matriculation summer enrichment programs for high school students and financial aid.

Selective programs of all kinds that had previously been limited to minority applicants are being opened up to students of all races. Additionally, minority applications this year were down nominally at many selective institutions across the country, including Dartmouth — possibly a short-term consequence of the decisions.

Even in name alone, programs previously designed for minorities are quickly disappearing from colleges across the country. Schools are dropping the word “minority” from the titles of a wide variety of programs ranging from scholarships to orientation and recruitment programs. While these programs were designed initially to target black, Hispanic and Native American populations, many are being forced to open their application processes to populations that had been excluded, including white and Asian students.

“There are a lot of institutions — not Dartmouth, not Ivy institutions — that had a variety of scholarship programs targeting minorities students and I think those are on shaky ground,” Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg said. “None of this is a problem for a place like Dartmouth because all our scholarships are need-based and we have a ton of money to distribute, so we’re not as constrained as some of these other places.”

The Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship program was among the older and more established of such programs. The program takes students from 34 colleges across the country, including Dartmouth, and until this year was open only to minority students. Students selected as fellows in the program are provided with a faculty mentor and financial support to continue their education.

In July the Mellon Foundation decided to open its program to whites and all other applicants in order to comply with the Supreme Court decisions. The new program, just now finishing its inaugural application process, is now called the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, a change made to comply with the law while maintaining the program’s original purpose, Director Lydia English said.

“What we have done is to reaffirm our mission to bring diversity to the faculties of universities and colleges around the country by encouraging minority students to go on to PhDs,” English said. “We will take anyone who shares these goals and is committed to this cause.”

Students of any ethnicity will now be evaluated on the basis their commitment to this ideal, though it is unclear at this stage how the change will effect the composition of the program. Non-minority students who hope to be accepted in the program will have to demonstrate their commitment to the goals of increasing minority representation in higher education in their essays, recommendations and previous activities toward that end.

Summer enrichment programs at Princeton, MIT and Carnegie Mellon have also been forced to open to students of all ethnicities and change their selection process in the wake of the Court’s rulings.

At Carnegie Mellon, the selection process for academic programs now considers “an array of academic and extracurricular credentials, backgrounds, interests, achievements and experiences,” according to Assistant Director of Admission Megan Dempster. Previously the program accepted only black, Hispanic, and American Indian students.

Carnegie Mellon, responding early in 2003 to challenges by two affirmative-action advocacy groups, had insisted that its summer program would remain closed off to non-minority groups. But the university yielded in February, after deciding that its previous policy was no longer consistent with the law.

Not all minority programs are yielding under the pressure of the Michigan ruling. Washington University in St. Louis has continued to offer its four-year John B. Ervin Scholars Program for Black Americans. The program is open exclusively to African American U.S. citizens and offers a minimum of 10 scholarships per year — each with full tuition and a $2,500 stipend.

Pepperdine is the only other school in the country that refused to alter its minority scholarship programs despite having been challenged by the two advocacy groups.

The Supreme Court decisions, however, did not require any changes either to Dartmouth’s existing admissions process, or to those of most other upper-echelon colleges and universities.

But while the law school decision allowed for schools like Dartmouth to continue admissions as usual, the undergraduate case officially put an end to any method that was not “truly individualized” and “used in a flexible, non-mechanical way,” as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor required in her majority opinion in the law school case.

The most obvious casualty was, of course, the University of Michigan itself, which had used a points-based system that rewarded minority applicants based solely on their race.

The extra cost for Michigan to redesign its program totaled $1.8 million. The University was forced to change its application, adding multiple essays and hire over 20 new staff members — five admissions counselors and 15 part-time readers — required to individually review every application submitted.

“We revised the undergraduate admissions system. We discarded the points system and put together a much more holistic file review,” Michigan spokeswoman Julie Peterson said. “Each application is reviewed by both a reader and a counselor who do a qualitative assessment.”

Schools with admissions systems in place similar to Dartmouth’s required little change in structure, but the Michigan verdicts nonetheless had other side effects within selective college admissions. This year many selective institutions across the country saw nominal declines in minority applicants. Down two percent from last year, 36.2 percent of Dartmouth acceptances this year were students of color. Though he admitted that it may be related to the Michigan cases, Furstenberg characterized the decline as “a very short-run transitional issue” and “an immediate PR aftershock from the Michigan case” that he expects to “rebound.”

He speculated that some minorities may have assumed that all schools were operating like Michigan, with a separate track or a point system. Since such programs were banned by the Michigan rulings, some minority applicants may have received the false impression that their chances of being admitted to selective schools had decreased.

Now, focus seems to have turned to another under-represented segment of the population: students from low-income backgrounds, regardless of race.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘yes, diversity is great, diversity is important, but diversity shouldn’t just be about race,” Furstenberg said. “And when you look at some of the data nationally, and see that low-income people are not as well represented at these places, you put all that together, and say there should be more effort of an affirmative action nature to reach out to students from less-advantaged backgrounds, regardless of race.”

Nor have Michigan decisions have not made groups opposing racial preference disappear. In fact, focus on the college admissions process has expanded to other privileged groups in the process who some say receive unfair advantages — among them legacies, minorities, students from wealthy high-schools, and athletes.

“People who have been arguing against affirmative action, they’re not going away. They’re just going to continue to look for other ways to attack these kinds of programs, to launch suits,” Furstenberg said. “I just think we need to continue to be thoughtful about the way we articulate our values, the way we structure our various selection processes, so that we stay consistent with the law.”

TheDartmouth.com</a> | Minority summer programs get axe after Michigan rulings

[/quote]

sybbie719 · August 6, 2008, 3:49pm

My bad, almost 50 percent of the students accepted during ED (178 of 382 students) are athletes or legacies.

Class of 2011 Early Decision Admissions :

The students — 193 males and 189 females — were notified of their admission to the College on Dec. 7, 2006.

Recruited athletes -- of which there were 120 -- comprised about 31 percent of the admitted group. According to Furstenberg, the majority of athletic recruitment in the Ivy League is accomplished through early admissions programs, a process he said is a "fairly efficient way" to enroll recruited athletes in the absence of athletic scholarships.

The geographic distribution of admitted students showed a strong variation from previous years with a large decrease in students from the Northeast. Ninety-one students were admitted from New England and 110 students were admitted from the Mid-Atlantic

Thirty admitted students live outside the United States and 23 are non-citizens, making up the largest number of international students ever to be admitted to the College during early decision.

Approximately 50 percent of those accepted attended public school, down from 59 percent in 2005. Of the 382 admitted applicants, 45 percent attended private school and 5 percent attended parochial.

Fifty-eight of the accepted students were legacies, a slight drop from the 60 legacies admitted early last year.

Valedictorians made up 27 percent of the admits, salutatorians 10 percent and students in the top tenth of their class 90 percent. Among accepted students the mean SAT verbal score was 702, the mean SAT math score 713 and the mean SAT writing score 701.

Despite slight fluctuations among groups, the total number of students of color admitted early remained similar to last year; 70 students of color were admitted early to the College this year, compared to 71 students in 2005.

TheDartmouth.com</a> | Early decision numbers hold steady for ‘11 class

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