<p>Arguing that UCLA admissions policies are being manipulated to circumvent the state's ban on consideration of applicants' race, a professor there has resigned from a faculty committee that he says refused to allow him to study the matter.</p>
<p>Political science professor Tim Groseclose resigned Thursday from the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools, saying high-ranking university administrators and fellow committee members are engaged in a "coverup" to block illegal activity from being discovered.</p>
<p>"A growing body of evidence strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions," he wrote in an 89-page report posted on a UCLA website.</p>
<p>I have read over and that race is only a “slight tip,” all other things being equal. I think an admissions chance of increase of 28 percentage points is more than a “slight tip”! It is nearly as much of a boost as recruited athletes get!</p>
<p>“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. And low-income students? They received no advantage whatsoever.”</p>
<p>But many students fit into more than one category. Black, Latino and Native American students can often be low-income. How can you say that low income gets you no advantage if you don’t consider overlap?</p>
<p>Based on results from our local public high school, low income URMs with high GPAs (top 10%) and above average (but not super high–think in the 600s) SAT scores were very successful in the super-selective college admissions derby. Middle income URMs with the same stats were not successful. I think URM status, without the low income component, is overrated.</p>
<p>I really don’t like how the status quo strives at all costs to make the admissions process as opaque as possible to people they don’t like.</p>
<p>Cass Cliatt of Princeton has said that they because “don’t want their data misconstrued,” they won’t release it to just anyone. Well, if the data is egregiously misconstrued, any decent peer reviewer would pick up on that and flag the paper as not worthy of publication. So, that’s a terrible excuse.</p>
<p>The privacy excuse is also lame. If I support the status quo (e.g. Bowen and Bok), I can have access to the data without privacy concerns, but if I oppose it (e.g. Sander, Groseclose), then I get nothing?</p>
<p>Very good fabrizio. If the diversity rationale is so good, let the schools be honest about it and allow the public to understand exactly what they’re doing. But they want to eat their cake and have it too.</p>
<p>I can tell you – as a researcher who has failed to get access to lots of data – that admissions people are reluctant to release info even when it’s unrelated to AA because of fear that people will find out how underperforming their “holistic” admissions are. Many professors have tried to quantify which non-academic criteria pick out “diamonds in the rough” and which are just hypothetical diversifiers which in fact do not help select strong students who are underrated, but have given up due to stonewalling from admissions people.</p>
<p>I’ll toe the Libertarian line here – ALL institutional bias is bad. That said, institutions are peopled by well, people, and people are inherently biased. Is my bias “better” than anyone else’s? I think so. (Darn, there’s that bias again.) BUT I don’t ascribe sinister notions to viewpoints other than my own. As one corporate lawyer was once told by his CEO “I don’t want a legal opinion on whether my offer is legal, I want you to tell me how to structure the offer so it is legal.”</p>
<p>QUOTE:
//“I can tell you – as a researcher who has failed to get access to lots of data – that admissions people are reluctant to release info even when it’s unrelated to AA because of fear that people will find out how underperforming their “holistic” admissions are.”//</p>
<p>Actually, Bowen & Bok, who did an extensive study of holistic and specifically AA admissions, found that although the incoming scores, etc. of such admittees were significantly below the non-AA accepted students, they nevertheless performed quite well. (And the researchers were quite surprised by this.)</p>
gee, no kidding! Do you think the push for “holistic admissions” was anything other than a way to tiptoe around the ban on affirmative action? Some actions are blatant violations, like giving points for enrollment in programs ONLY offered in minority-dominated schools. But overall it has always been clear to any fair observer that the whole point of “holistic” admissions was just this. And the people that put it in place admitted it in public! For example
</p>
<p>The publicity around this might temporarily throw the brakes on the overall plan to restore de-facto affirmative action, but I doubt it will last long. Already there have been calls from some committees of the UC faculty to remove the top 12.5% guarantee. Currently every CA HS grad who is in the top 12.5% of the state is promised a slot at a UC campus. It might not be one that they want, usually Riverside and Merced are the ones that can handle the overflow, but it is nonetheless a guarantee that the UC system will take them at one of its campuses. </p>
<p>But bottom-line there are only so many seats available in the UC system, and when the retooled affirmative action really gets rolling they plan on giving a significant number of them to favored applicants. Meaning someone has to get left out, and by eliminating the traditional guarantee they’ll remove any grounds for those (primarily white and asian) who are left out the UC system to legally complain.</p>
<p>So alarming as the news that UCLA is showing racial favoritism in admissions might be to some, that’s just par for the course and a mere prelude to what’s coming. As they say in their ads, “You think the Future’s exciting? What til you see what we’ve done today.”</p>
<p>I wanted to mention that the proposed changes in the UC admissions process are not ones I favor. I’ve weighed in on this on another forum. I believe that the current system is actually fairer & inclusive without jeopardizing the standard of excellence that UC needs to maintain to remain world-class, as well as to serve the residents of the State.</p>
<p>When I was talking about the Bowen & Bok study, that was a study of privates, which nevertheless concluded that apparently ‘lower qualified’ minority enrollees performed at a high level after admission. In my opinion the UC Comprehensive Review examines the kinds of factors that make for similar <em>high</em> college-level performance, which include previous (pre-college) successful triumphs over challenges (be those minority status and/or economic status and/or family circumstances, etc.)</p>
Oh, come now! You can’t really say this with a straight face, and I imagine neither did they. Bowen was head of Princeton, Bok head of Harvard. Both had strongly favored affirmative action in their official roles. Do you for a minute think they ever could have produced a study that showed the effect of affirmative action were anything but laudatory? And to claim they were “surprised” by this? Which presumes their expectations were the opposite. Yeah, right. They were about as surprised as the Republicans are when they announce they are “surprised” to find a tax cut for the wealthy is the best measure to help the economy, I suppose.</p>
<p>In my reply I limited myself to the <em>performance</em> factor which was brought up by another poster. Regardless of whether or not they were indeed “surprised” (and I think you are not in a position to know that), the authors of the study determined that the evidence showed that the admits who were less competitive for admission on quantitative measures nevertheless easily performed to the standard of the institution after admission. Such a result tends to validate a methodology (in that case, by privates) which tends to admit likely scholastic winners, whatever their circumstances, versus likely scholastic losers, whatever their circumstances. Circumstances are germane to the extent (and only to the extent) that because of or despite that, the individual has already shown to have potential for a rigorous college setting (because they have overcome negative circumstances and/or maximized positive ones). </p>
<p>Individual variances after admission cannot ultimately be controlled, of course, which is why it is difficult for any institution to guarantee or even predict a 100% graduation rate or even a 100% correlation of high performance post- and pre-admission. Do not assume that all who under-perform in college are AA admits (or even low-income, btw). In fact the UC ELC study showed that the highest qualified high-income admits extremely underperformed vs. their pre-college record and vs. their equally qualified competitors of low income.</p>
<p>My complaint about the proposed UC changes is that it moves toward a reduction of the ratio of given challenge to known performance, because it puts less weight on performance. The denominator is constant, but the numerator is lower. UC does not have the resources (esp. personnel) to spend on remediation at the University level, which is what happened with the original, poorly designed AA back in the '70’s, which was so controversial because the poor planning & poor methodology yielded mixed results & compromised the reputations of those AA admits in the group who in fact <em>did</em> perform well.</p>
<p>This isn’t the first report on this. About a year ago, there was a previous report which showed an increase in URM students at UCLA and a decline in low income Asian-Am students which the admissions office couldn’t explain.</p>
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<p>But that doesn’t mean that other potential non-AA applicants who weren’t admitted could have done just as well or better.</p>
<p>And while AA applicants do, overall, perform well at the university level – they still lag behind their counterparts. Hence med, law, biz and other grad schools needing to implement AA as well in their admissions.</p>
<p>Now, having said that – I have no problem w/ a “holistic” admissions standard taking into account family income, parental educational background, quality of schools, etc.</p>
<p>What I DO have a problem w/ is that it seems one group – low income Asian-Am applicants had to pay the price.</p>
<p>I’d much rather see UCLA accept less nos. of upper-middle class Asian-Am and white applicants and admit more students (of all backgrounds) from a lower socio-economic background, but UCLA won’t since it would hurt their standing in terms of overall scores, etc. which would hurt their ranking in the all important USNWR and other like publications.</p>
<p>Along the same line – I have no problem w/ black applicants from upper-middle class backgrounds who score a little lower on tests or have a lower GPA within reason (say 60-80 pts on the SAT and a 3.75 instead of a 3.9) for the sake of diversity, but those who score materially lower shouldn’t get admitted simply b/c a school needs to get the nos. of URM students up (these URM students have all the advantages and shouldn’t be rewarded w/ acceptance if they didn’t work as hard as their peers).</p>
<p>The funny thing is that there are a few poster here, ahem, who still try to argue that admissions boards/colleges don’t use race as a criteria.</p>
<p>what incentive does UCLA have to go against its ideals and interests by ignoring racial diversity?</p>
<p>The more racially diverse UCLA becomes the more, and more exceptional, students it can attract. UCLA doesn’t lose applicants if there are rumors it maintains affirmative action.</p>
<p>Prop 209, while I vehemently disagree with it, went about abolishing AA completely wrong. The state of California isn’t going to punish UCLA regardless of the outcome. No motive to change.</p>
Obeying the law might be a big reason. UCLA is one of the most racially diverse campuses in the nation. It just doesn’t have politically correct diversity.</p>