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Affirmative action proponents took a hit Monday as a federal appeals court panel upheld California’s ban on using race, ethnicity and gender in admitting students to public colleges and universities. The ruling marked the second time the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned back a challenge to the state’s landmark voter initiative, Proposition 209, which was passed in 1996. 0 Comments Weigh In Corrections? Personal Post . Affirmative action proponents, who had requested that the court reconsider its 1997 decision after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that affirmative action could be used in college admissions, said they...

The news that the Supreme Court is revisiting the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions, just nine years after upholding it in a University of Michigan case, has admissions officials worried about maintaining diversity and confounded that the question is being reconsidered so soon. “Nine years, when you’re talking about a decision of this magnitude, it really took me aback,” said Tom Parker, the dean of admissions at Amherst College. “What happens with the next president, the next Supreme Court appointee? Do we revisit it again, so that higher education is zigging and zagging? If the court...

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The Obama administration on Friday urged colleges and universities to get creative in improving racial diversity at their campuses, throwing out a Bush-era interpretation of recent Supreme Court rulings that limited affirmative action in admissions. The new guidelines issued by the Departments of Justice and Education replaced a 2008 document that essentially warned colleges and universities against considering race at all. Instead, the guidelines focus on the wiggle room in the court decisions involving the University of Michigan, suggesting that institutions use other criteria — students’ socioeconomic profiles, residential instability, the hardships they have overcome — that are often proxies...

In January, the Common Application decided not to include a question about college applicant’s sexual orientation or gender identity in its widely used application. Last week, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 told The Crimson that despite that decision, Harvard College is considering giving applicants that option on its supplement in order to show prospective students that the College is a welcoming space for them. If it does, Harvard will join Elmhurst College, which was the first college in the country to pose such a question this year. Peer institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania...

ABIGAIL FISHER, a white student, says she was denied admission to the University of Texas because of her race. She sued in Federal District Court in Austin, causing Judge Sam Sparks to spend time trying to make sense of a 2003 Supreme Court decision allowing racial preferences in higher education. “I’ve read it till I’m blue in the face,” Judge Sparks said in an early hearing in Ms. Fisher’s lawsuit. But the meaning of the central concept in the decision — “this esoteric critical mass of diversity of students,” he called it — kept eluding him. The 2003 Supreme Court...

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Two studies released today by the Center for Equal Opportunity reveal severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity in undergraduate and law school admissions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with African Americans and Latinos given preference over whites and Asians. The studies are based on data supplied by the schools themselves, some of which the university had refused to turn over until a lawsuit was filed by CEO and successfully taken all the way to the state supreme court. The studies were prepared by Dr. Althea Nagai, a research fellow at CEO, and can be viewed on the organization’s website,...

(Madison, WI) Two studies released today by the Center for Equal Opportunity reveal severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity in undergraduate and law school admissions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with African Americans and Latinos given preference over whites and Asians. The studies are based on data supplied by the schools themselves, some of which the university had refused to turn over until a lawsuit was filed by CEO and successfully taken all the way to the state supreme court. The studies were prepared by Dr. Althea Nagai, a research fellow at CEO, and can be viewed on the...

It's racially discriminatory to prohibit racial discrimination. That's the bottom line of a decision issued Friday, just before the Fourth of July weekend, by the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. The case was brought by an organization called By Any Means Necessary to overturn a state constitutional amendment passed by a 58 percent majority of Michigan voters in November 2006. This was not BAMN's first challenge to the proposition. It staged a mini-riot in the secretary of state's office to try to block submission of the signatures that put the proposition on the ballot. The ballot...

... Until this year, questions about race on most college applications were much simpler. A student who was white with a distant American Indian ancestor , for instance, would most likely have identified himself as white. But students can now choose from a menu of new boxes of racial and ethnic categories — because the Department of Education started requiring universities this past school year to comply with a broad federal edict to collect more information about race and ethnicity. The change has made it easier for students to claim a multiracial identity — highlighting those parts of their backgrounds...

On a visit to the north of England, the Prime Minister singled out Oxford for criticism when he accused elite institutions of having a "terrible record" of enrolling teenagers from state schools. Senior officials at the university described the figure as "highly misleading" as it related only to British students who described themselves as black Caribbean. They said Oxford admitted another 27 students who described themselves as black African and another 14 who were mixed race. The university also said that only 452 black students across the country had even achieved the A-level results demanded by Oxford to meet its...

(Columbus,OH) A new study released today by the Center for Equal Opportunity documents evidence of significant discrimination based on race andethnicity in undergraduate admissions at Ohio State University andMiami University. African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinos were given preferences over whites and, again to a lesser extent, Asians.

The University of California regents on Wednesday moved to expand the use of an undergraduate admissions practice in which applicants' grades and test scores are considered in the context of their educational opportunities and life experiences. UCLA and UC Berkeley already use the admissions process, known as holistic review, in which an applicant's entire file, including essays, are read and scored as a whole, rather than in pieces. At least two other UC campuses, San Diego and Irvine, are adopting the method this year, officials said. As the university's governing board met at UC San Diego, a regents' committee approved...

... Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class. This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in...

... [W]hat Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call "career-oriented activities" was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented...

SAT SCORES aren’t everything. But they can tell some fascinating stories. Take 1,623, for instance. That’s the average score of Asian-Americans, a group that Daniel Golden - editor at large of Bloomberg News and author of “The Price of Admission’’ - has labeled “The New Jews.’’ After all, much like Jews a century ago, Asian-Americans tend to earn good grades and high scores. And now they too face serious discrimination in the college admissions process. Notably, 1,623 - out of a possible 2,400 - not only separates Asians from other minorities (Hispanics and blacks average 1,364 and 1,276 on the...

The filmmaker Vicki Abeles features the stories of students and teachers of Advanced Placement classes and the pressures they face in our achievement-obsessed culture.

It’s hard to get a straight answer as to how pervasive racial preferences are. On the one hand, many academics say preferences hardly even exist — they’re just a tie-breaker that admissions officers use on rare occasions. On the other hand, the same academics often say preferences are crucial to diversity, and their elimination would wreak havoc on campuses nationwide. Perhaps nowhere has this bizarre contradiction been on starker display than in No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal — a book that manages, despite this contradiction, to shed light on various controversies in higher ed. THE EXTENT OF PREFERENCES Using...

Loyola College's Jesuit tradition calls for it to serve students who did not start with every economic, social or geographic advantage. Widespread research, meanwhile, shows that standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT favor those from privileged backgrounds and that such tests are less predictive of college success than excellent grades and a rigorous course load in high school. So, in search of a more diverse and accomplished student body, Loyola has joined a growing list of colleges and universities that no longer require applicants to submit an SAT or ACT score. ... Test-optional policies might calm the widespread...

About five years ago, shortly before my term ended as a Regent of the University of California (UC), I was having a casual conversation with a very high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that he was developing to increase "diversity" at UC in a manner that would comply with the dictates of California's Constitution and the prohibition against race, gender and ethnic preferences. As I listened to his proposal, I asked him why he considered it important to tinker with admissions instead of just letting the chips fall where they may. In an unguarded moment, he told me that unless...

It's fair to say the tide of elite opinion now runs solidly against the use of the SAT in college admissions. Last fall, the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC) released a report calling on its members at last to act on their skepticism by taking steps to decommission the test for use at their schools. When the report was presented at the group's convention last September, the only complaints were that it didn't go far enough in condemning the test. "It's a lousy test," one NACAC member said heatedly on the convention floor. "It's destructive of what all...

In 1995, the regents of the University of California, at the urging of Ward Connerly and Gov. Pete Wilson, voted to bar racial preferences on all nine of the system’s campuses. A year later, the state’s voters passed Proposition 209, an amendment to the constitution that extended that ban to state and local governments. But today, the regents are expected to approve major changes in admissions policies that represent the most recent of many misguided attempts to circumvent Prop 209. The move is breathtaking. It will drop the requirement that applicants take two SAT “subject tests”; if the students the...

Thousands of high school seniors are racing this month to complete their applications to the University of California in hopes of becoming freshmen next fall. Meanwhile, UC officials are struggling with the question of how to create more opportunities for low-income and minority students to attend the state's elite public campuses. It's been a tense issue since voters passed Proposition 209 in 1996, banning race and gender preferences in public institutions. Now, the UC president and regents are weighing changes to the admissions process that include dropping the SAT subject tests, loosening course requirements, and lowering the minimum grade point...

In the 1990s, several SUNY campuses chose to raise their admissions standards by requiring higher SAT scores, while others opted to keep them unchanged. [...] Thus, by comparing graduation rates at SUNY campuses that raised the SAT admissions bar with those that didn’t, we have a controlled experiment of sorts that can fairly conclusively tell us whether SAT scores were accurate predictors of whether a student would get a degree. The short answer is: yes, they were. Consider the changes in admissions profiles and six-year graduation rates of the classes entering in 1997 and 2001 at SUNY’s 16 baccalaureate institutions....

A commission convened by some of the country’s most influential college admissions officials is recommending that colleges and universities move away from their reliance on SAT and ACT scores and shift toward admissions exams more closely tied to the high school curriculum and achievement. ... It encourages institutions to consider dropping admission test requirements unless they can prove that the benefits of such tests outweigh the negatives. ... Mr. Fitzsimmons’s group, which was convened by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, also expresses concerns “that test scores appear to calcify differences based on class, race/ethnicity and parental educational attainment.”...

Ever since California voters banned the use of racial preferences in government and education in 1996, the University of California has tried to engineer admissions systems that would replicate the effect of explicit racial quotas while appearing color-blind. To some observers, the legality of those efforts has long been suspect, but proof of wrongdoing has been hard to come by. Now a professor who sat on UCLA's committee on undergraduate admissions is charging that the school is deliberately taking race into account when deciding which students to admit. The university has refused to give him access to the data to...

Rather Steep Learning Curve by: Bethany Stotts, June 12, 2008 Some might have thought that the 2004 election scandal would have ruined the career of Dan Rather. Instead, he was given his own show at HDNet. Now, four years later, Rather’s show, Dan Rather Reports, offers viewers a glimpse into what the former CBS news anchor considers good reporting: not citing sources, overlooking conflicts of interest, and sensationalizing material to promote marxist class-warfare perspectives. All this is touted as news, even when Rather relies solely on anecdotes and ignores publicly-available statistics. “And college admissions also strike at some of the...

Spurred partly by campus and community concern over dwindling numbers of African American students, UCLA is moving toward a major shift in its admissions process, perhaps as early as this fall. The changes in admissions, pushed by acting Chancellor Norman Abrams and several faculty leaders, would be the most dramatic at UCLA in at least five years. They would move the Westwood campus toward a more "holistic" admissions model — much like UC Berkeley's — in which students' achievements are viewed in the context of their personal experiences.

AACRAO reports that about 400,000 students - 2 percent of all college students, 3 percent of students attending community colleges, and 4 percent of students in fopros - do NOT have a high school degree! But, how can they get in without a high school degree, and what difference does it make anyway? Well, they can get in with a GED, of course, but that is not the case here. These students get in by old-fashioned 'fudging.' I have had students in my classes at the fopro where I teach who did NOT have high school diplomas. NO! I didn't...

If the nation's top colleges stopped considering race in admissions the number of African-American and Hispanic students at elite schools would plummet, while the number of Asian students would rise, according to a new study. A pair of Princeton University researchers reviewed more than 45,000 applications from three elite colleges and universities to determine what would have happened if the schools eliminated affirmative action. "The most important conclusion is the negative impact on African-American and Hispanic students," said Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociology professor who co-authored the study published in June's issue of Social Science Quarterly. The study found the...

Story last updated at 4:39 a.m. Thursday, May 27, 2004 Perry knocks top 10 percent admissions law AUSTIN (AP) — Gov. Rick Perry said Tuesday the state needs to overhaul a law requiring state colleges and universities to accept all students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class. The law, passed in 1997, was intended to boost minority admissions after a lawsuit ended affirmative action in admissions policies. "I clearly think it is a problem in the state of Texas when you've got highly qualified young men and women leaving the state of Texas because...

TEMPE - President Peter Likins on Friday tried to dissuade regents from adopting minimum standards of admission for homeschooled students, saying the universities should be allowed to admit them based on their own criteria. But some homeschooled students say a tougher admissions policy, which takes effect in 2006 and grants automatic admission only to students in the top 25 percent of their high school classes, discriminates against students who were educated at home. Those students have no class rank. They want universities to grant home-schooled students automatic admission based on standardized test scores. But Likins said that would create a...

Here is the problem with the college-admissions system. It is a vast and intricate bureaucracy designed to do one thing, and it does that very well; but it is under intense social and economic pressure to do something different—something more or less directly at odds with its supposed goal. The resulting tensions affect everyone involved: The high school guidance counselors who try to steer students toward the right school. The college admissions officers who sort through ever mounting piles of applications to choose an entering class. The college administrators who wonder how many of those accepted will enroll—and how many...

State universities will have more discretion in deciding which applicants to admit beginning in 2006, under new policies adopted Friday by the Arizona Board of Regents. Resident students in the top 25 percent of their high school graduating class will still be guaranteed admission to the state university of their choice, but UA, ASU and NAU will be able to decide which other applicants to accept. Currently, regents’ guidelines grant admission to the top 50 percent of students, or anyone with a 2.5 GPA, though some students must take remedial courses after arriving at the universities. President Pete Likins has...

Link to poll.

Beyond their Texas residency and sunny dispositions, Padron and Hunt have little in common. But both are busy adapting their calculations about the future to accommodate a five-year-old state law under which the top 10 percent of every high school's graduating seniors are automatically eligible for admission to public universities in Texas. Now, as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether to rule on the constitutionality of affirmative action in college admissions, Texas's law is being scrutinized as a model that could replace the explicitly race-based admissions criteria that have been a feature of public education for decades. Following the Texas...

At the height of the college admissions season in early April, the director of admission at Princeton and possibly others in his office improperly and repeatedly entered a Web site set up to let Yale applicants know if they had been accepted as students, officials at both Ivy League universities confirmed yesterday. Yale officials filed a complaint yesterday with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Princeton officials apologized for what they called a "serious lapse of judgment" by the director, Stephen E. LeMenager. Princeton placed him on administrative leave pending an investigation of the incident, which was first reported yesterday by...

<p>"Black applicants have a far better chance of admission to the two leading Virginia law schools [University of Virginia, and William & Mary] than Asians and Hispanics. Blacks with LSAT scores of 160 and grade-point average of 3.25 have a 95 percent chance of being admitted to Virginia, versus a 3 percent chance for equally qualified Hispanics and whites, and a 5 percent chance for Asian applicants."</p>