It’s difficult to matriculate at UT as a low-income student when the gap is 15k+ per year.
Most of the hispanics accepted into UT end up not going because it’s too expensive.
“But isn’t that a key reason that UT is frustrated w the percentage plan-- that it admits predominantly low income URMS?”
Partly so based on what I have read. I believe UT also would like to have more diversity in certain majors within the school (i.e. critical mass in engineering/science). Applicants are not automatically granted their major as freshman, they are again put under a review for their projected success in their 1st/2nd choice major. The decision is on UT at this point, not the mandated percentage rule fort admittance. It makes sense that they would want to have a strong applicant pool grade/score wise in the holistic review process. Targeting higher SES URM students helps achieve this goal.
How so?
Most of the applicants admitted to UT’s engineering department have high(er) SAT/ACT scores. Is there not a positive correlation with higher SES and SAT/ACT scores? Fair or not.
https://www.utexas.edu/student/admissions/research/taskforce.html is old, but it describes the academic index, personal achievement index, and other UT Austin admissions topics.
Table 1, showing the correlation of 1999 frosh year GPA to ACT E, ACT M, SAT V, SAT Q, and class rank, may be of interest.
Overall, class rank > ACT > SAT in terms of correlation to frosh year GPA. But that differed based on demographic groups:
- Female students' frosh year GPA showed greater correlation to the tests and lesser to class rank than overall.
- Black students' frosh year GPA showed greater correlation to class rank and lesser to the tests than overall.
- Asian students' frosh year GPA showed greater correlation to class rank and the M/Q parts of the tests than overall.
- Hispanic students' frosh year GPA showed lesser correlation to all of these admission factors than overall.
- Female and Hispanic students were the groups where some of the tests showed a higher correlation to frosh year GPA than class rank did.
FYI: Justice Anthony Kennedy has never cast a Supreme Court vote in support of affirmative action. However, this case is just too weak - I think it gets sent back AGAIN!
I’m sorry if this isn’t specific enough, but I did hear on the radio a lawyer saying something about “the rights of the individual are overridden by the necessity of the state right to have a diverse state college population”.
And to me that’s it. If diversity is considered only race- and/or ethnicity-based, that is one point of view. My point of view is that SES matters much more than race or ethnicity, and that true diversity is accomplished by having different SES students in your college population, not by picking race or ethnicity as the major factor.
(one could use the same argument to ban Muslims from entering a state, the state’s rights win over the individual’s rights…)
http://catalog.utexas.edu/general-information/admission/undergraduate-admission/freshman-admission/ Especially the Application Review Process.
Diversity is not merely race.
Still fixated on the $60,000 per year boarding school students? Texas residents who attend OOS $60,000 per year boarding schools do not qualify for UT admission under the percentage plan. The percentage plan does not consider SAT/ACT scores at all for the in-state students.
The holistic admissions round considers more that just test scores. Plus UT has explicitly stated that in the holistic round, they are trying to select upper income URMS to have “diversity within diversity”, in order to balance the URMs admitted in the percentage round who tend to be low SES. So paying for “fancy test prep” shouldn’t be an issue for those upper income URMs. In any case, test prep doesn’t raise scores as much as these test prep mills would lead insecure parents to believe. I’ve never paid for test prep for my kids.
I’m not seeing how dropping race in the holistic round is unconstitutional. Many prominent public university systems have legally mandated race-blind admissions that is still holistic (e.g. California, Michigan, Florida, etc). In fact, SCOTUS ruled just last year in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, that it is constitutional for states to ban affirmative action in university admissions.
It is quite possible that the lower graduation rates have more to do with family issues and money issues than any inability to do the work.
I think MIT did a study that showed for them high school grades were more predictive than scores for females at MIT.
@partyof5 wrote
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No, because you are assuming my friends were underprepared. They are no different than my daughter, accepted to a tier 1 schools, but chose to go to an HBCU for a variety of reasons.
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If your daughter & friends were such very strong candidates, then they really didnt need special preferences for race, did they?
tiger1307 #83 was such a generalization/stereotyping comments.
Most Asian students cannot afford 60,000 per year boarding schools. Significant number of them don’t take test prep classes.
“I’m not seeing how dropping race in the holistic round is unconstitutional. Many prominent public university systems have legally mandated race-blind admissions that is still holistic (e.g. California, Michigan, Florida, etc).”
It is legally OK for the States to decide that they think it is inappropriate to use race in state university admissions. Those states still use other holistic factors (like first generation and low SES) that often correlate with URM status.
[Side note. Less well noted is that those states also ban using gender in admissions. Which is why many state flagships that don’t have big tech/engineering programs are becoming super-majority female.]
The data from those states show that eschewing race and using SES status instead still gets you URM students. Say Michelle or Barack Obama. But just not as many as when you explicitly use race as a plus diversity factor. Because then you can’t give a nudge to middle/upper class black kids from the suburbs or from out-of-state. Say Malia Obama.
So this case really turns on whether it is constitutionally OK to give a break to somewhat more advantaged minority students. I think the constitutional and policy arguments for that kind of preference are quite weak.
Which is why the standard is strict scrutiny. And why Kennedy is annoyed that this didn’t go back to the lower court. No way UT can prevail under strict scrutiny imo. Eventually pure race preferences are going to disappear as Justice O’Connor predicted years ago. They really can’t be sustained in perpetuity.
@gmtplus7 under the race blind admissions program in California it has severely limited the number of blacks at UC. The attempts to allow the people of California to decide the fate of race based admissions was unilaterally blocked by a number of Asian legislators. Why not allow the citizens to decide what they want rather than use some artificial standards that allow race discrimination to run rampant ?
The states of California and Michigan enacted affirmative action bans by referendum (Prop209 and MCRI), which is direct democracy by the citizens.
@gmtplus7 there was a new initiative on AA in California that was blocked by Asian legislators. It is called SCA 5 in case you want to look it up. Why not allow the citizens to vote ?
As a side note Harry Reid called Scalia a racist on the Senate floor for his comments in Fisher regarding Blacks
Small nit: SCA 5 was actually a bill to put an initiative to over turn 209 on an upcoming statewide ballot. SCA5 passed the State Legislature with 2/3rds vote, but was unable to achieve a 2/3rds vote in the state Assembly, where it would have died, if not sent back Committee. (Yes, the failure to obtain 2/3rds vote as due in part to some Asian-American Democratic Assembly persons.)
Interestingly, that happened in the spring of '14, and I haven’t heard anything on that topic since.
@GMTplus7 we are going to agree to disagree and that’s fine. The reality is there many URMs that don’t show their strength with test scores, thats a whole different issue for another day. It doesnt mean we cant do the work. My son just graduated college with Latin honors and his test scores were quite average. I have friends who attended Ivies and a few of them had test scores that weren’t above 600 on the SAT, they all have masters and PhDs spanning UVa, Berkley, Wharton and others.
The finger is always pointed at a person of color when a majority doesn’t get in. Yet, as I said, were it that simple a lot of Whites would lose spots to Asians.
The author of SCA5 voluntarily withdrew the bill at the request of three senators.
@gmtplus7 sca5 was blocked by three asian legislators Thats why the bill was pulled. The black senators threatened retaliation over what they believed was discriminatory action. FYI one of the asian legislators was dealing in illegal arms and was busted by the FBI. Why not allow the citizens to vote???