<p>Here's an interesting NYTimes article about the new AA at the UC system.</p>
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The heart of Californias higher-education problem, according to Taylor, is that Proposition 209 created a patently impossible situation. The law says that universities cant consider race, even though race has an enormous effect on the lives of applicants.
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At every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the academic record of black students is worse than that of other groups. As Taylor says: There is a great deal of pressure to look for a proxy for race. There is no proxy for race.
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If you were to ask admissions officers whether they also gave special consideration to low-income applicants whether they gave them credit for overcoming Johnsons unseen forces the officers would say that, absolutely, they did. </p>
<p>In truth, however, they did not. Three years ago, William Bowen (the former president of Princeton) and two other researchers discovered what was really going on. They persuaded 19 elite colleges including Harvard, Middlebury and Virginia to let them analyze their admissions records. The easiest way to understand the results is to imagine a group of students who each have the same SAT scores. Holding that equal, a recruited athlete was 30 percentage points more likely to be admitted than a nonathlete. A black, Latino or Native American student was 28 percentage points more likely to be admitted than a white or Asian student. A legacy received a 20-percentage-point boost over someone whose parents hadnt attended that college. And low-income students? They received no advantage whatsoever. A poor white kid from upstate New York would be treated no differently from a white kid in Chappaqua. Frances Harris would get no more of a leg up than the black daughter of corporate lawyers.
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Colleges often resort to huge preferences to create a racially diverse student body, especially if they havent been giving any advantage to low-income applicants, who are of course disproportionately minorities. And many of the beneficiaries of the preferences end up being upper-middle-class minority students, since they tend to have better test scores than poor minorities. The helping hand that goes to these relatively well-off nonwhite students strikes many people as unjust. It makes it seem as if affirmative action isnt making good on its larger promise. Affirmative action becomes about mere diversity and not even all forms of diversity rather than fairness. Politically, that has made it weaker and weaker.
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After the initiative passed, the U.C. campuses also put more weight on students socioeconomic backgrounds when they made admissions decisions. Richard Sander, a U.C.L.A. law professor who has become a critic of affirmative action, studied admissions data at Berkeley and found that, all else being equal, lower-income students had a better chance of getting in after 1997 than before. Together, these various class-based efforts have helped the share of Pell Grant students at both U.C.L.A. and Berkeley to hold steady over the last decade, even as it has declined at many similar colleges.
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The big question that hangs over U.C.L.A.s success, of course, is whether the university broke the law. Looking at the numbers, its hard not to conclude that race was a factor in this years admissions decisions. The average SAT score for admitted African-American students fell 45 points this year, to 1,738. For Asian, Latino and white students, the averages were much more stable. Im quite confident that U.C. factors race in, in various ways, said Sander, the U.C.L.A. law professor and affirmative-action critic. There is no way to explain the disparities otherwise. He has filed a public-information request that would allow him to examine the data more closely. </p>
<p>In particular, U.C.L.A.s experience suggests that some tension between race and class in the admissions process may be inevitable. Even as the number of low-income black freshmen soared this year, the overall number of low-income freshmen fell somewhat. The rise in low-income black students was accompanied by a fall in low-income Asian students not a decline in well-off students. U.C.L.A. administrators say they dont fully understand why.
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