Alive and Not Well: Affirmative Action on Campus
Barkan, Joanne
IN THE EVER-EVOLVING and convoluted story of affirmative action in the United States, June 28, 2007 will stand out as a paradox. The Supreme Court's conservative majority managed in one ruling...
...Voters approved an almost identical ban in California in 1996 as an amendment to the state constitution and in Washington in 1998 as a state law...
...To appreciate what this level of diversity means, visualize the UCLA campus in 2006: there were 25,431 students in all, and 756 of them were African American...
...The promoters of statewide bans on affirmative action carefully manage the language of their referenda...
...Circuit Court of Appeals (Hopwood v. University of Texas Law School) in which the justices not only struck down the law school's admission policy, they rejected diversity as a legitimate goal...
...Diversity is a tortuous way of getting to racial preferences, and racial preferences are an inadequate way of constructing equality, but for now we're stuck...
...Admission officers went down the list, filling places in the freshman class, which was over six thousand students in 1996...
...they were adjusting the assignment of some students to schools in order to prevent racial resegregation during the years of compulsory education...
...FI VEN AT THE peak of their use, racial preferences never produced anything near equal representation for African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans at the more selective colleges and universities in the United States...
...That's extremely significant if by no means sufficient...
...Underrepresentation is still a fact of campus life...
...In addition, the higher the admission standards of a college or university are, the more its minority representation is likely to shrink when racial preferences are banned...
...An early condemnation of percent plans came in the form of a dire prediction that they would wreck admission standards, leading directly to the devastation of the great institutions of higher learning in the United States...
...Did the student's school offer advanced placement courses...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate page...
...As for privately funded, race-based scholarships, some universities assume they are safe as long as they are also privately administered...
...This is empty rhetoric: an allwhite Colorado State, for example, will not suddenly reorder voters' priorities and trigger the political pressure needed to improve poor schools...
...The conservative justices compared the two integration plans to the admission process used at the University of Michigan Law School and found the Seattle and Louisville plans wanting: the plans, they argued, didn't make race just one of many factors in a holistic evaluation of each individual student, and the school districts didn't try raceneutral methods first...
...Texas lawmakers can bring up the measure again, so survival of the percent plan is not secure...
...Both schools use expanded recruitment to maintain minority representation...
...In the real world, however, a percent plan produces some racial diversity only because so many American high schools are still racially segregated...
...The institution needn't exhaust every conceivable race-neutral alternative first, but it must give "serious, good faith consideration" to workable race-neutral policies...
...They did this by approving the admission process of the University of Michigan Law School and then making it the national model...
...DISSENT / Spring 2008 n 5 5 AFFIRMATIVE ACTION Holistic evaluation is clearly a flexible art...
...They have no more interest in helping low-income people than they do in redistributing resources and wealth to finance that help...
...yet they were 27 percent of all black freshmen at the twenty-eight selective universities investigated in the study and 41 percent of black freshmen at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania...
...Their presence dropped to 2.7 percent in 1997 but rose incrementally to 4.5 percent by 2004...
...The U.S...
...Naturally, supporters of affirmative action in higher education were relieved: they had feared an even more sweeping decision that would have outlawed any use of race nationwide once and for all...
...And finally, there's no doubt that lowincome people in the United States should get support in many domains, including education, but because class can't replace race-based affirmative action, we need to use both...
...In the last decade, conservatives, too, have been plugging class-based affirmative action as the constitutionally acceptable alternative to racial preferences...
...In "How I Learned to Love Quotas" (New York Times Magazine, June 1, 2003), legal affairs commentator Jeffrey Rosen wrote that "if the courts order colorblindness, America's finest public and private universities won't hesitate for a moment in choosing diversity as the second goal, allowing rigorous admissions standards to go out the window...
...The plan works this way: students in the top 20 percent of their graduating class apply to schools in the state university system like everyone else and must meet each school's specific requirements...
...Curiously, percent plans "prefigure" what you might expect to find in an ideal democratic society where all students can attend equally excellent primary and secondary public schools: a college freshman class selected by a percent plan would resemble this society's overall population mix...
...Using the Freedom of Information Act, they get the grade point average and high school test scores of every student in a college freshman class and then run the numbers to see if black or Latino applicants had an appreciably better chance of being accepted...
...Anticipating this problem, the most selective campuses in all three states quickly expanded minority recruitment and academic enrichment programs for high school students...
...Given this 50 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 goal, using a proxy for race (such as class) would have been not only a complete sham but also much less effective because race and class don't correlate sufficiently across large school districts...
...Michigan is the third state in the nation to take this step...
...Conversely, a percent plan might penalize students who take difficult courses at competitive schools and, as a result, don't quite reach the cutoff point...
...They now come from a larger number of high schools and from further afield in the state...
...By far the most important ruling after Bakke was the Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger (a case in which an applicant sued the University of Michigan Law School for discrimination...
...The naysayers who predicted the collapse of academic standards were wrong...
...In 2003, an unexpected twist in events changed Texas policy again: the Grutter decision invalidated Hopwood and the regional ban on race-based affirmative action...
...UT-Austin reported that in fall 2002 (the latest available survey), nearly 90 percent of all classes with five to twenty-four students had no African Americans or just one...
...In 2006 Chicanos and Latinos made up 34 percent of the state's population but just under 11 percent of all undergraduates at Berkeley...
...In the freshman class, black representation collapsed...
...Meanwhile, the demographics have been changing...
...At the last minute, a united front of representatives from rural and predominantly minority districts defeated the bill, 75 to 64...
...If the numbers say yes, they will write a threatening letter or sue...
...Yet more black students apply to UCLA than to any other branch of the university...
...WHAT HAPPENED on June 28 has a backstory, which, very briefly, goes like this...
...This will affect the elite institutions the most...
...Along with more recruitment and scholarships, the new system produced the desired results: 203 African Americans opted to enroll at UCLA...
...he still serves as its chairman and key spokesperson...
...It's also been a genuine justification for colleges and universities because diversity undoubtedly does enrich an educational environment...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...A 2003 Los Angeles Times poll surveyed attitudes about admissions in higher education and found Democrats evenly divided: 46 percent thought colleges and universities should consider only a student's academic record...
...Perhaps it's true that some elite institutions now pursue diversity for its own sake, with no special concern for this nation's history of racial oppression...
...In their perverse reasoning, the conservatives did end up reaffirming Grutter and the admission procedure of the University of Michigan Law School as the only legal method for considering the race of applicants to selective institutions (nonselective institutions have open admission or use a lottery...
...UCLA saw comparable losses...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...I and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education—were settled in a joint decision...
...In 2006, UCLA's administration acknowledged that black enrollment had reached a "crisis point...
...JOANNE BARKAN is a writer living in New York City and Truro, Massachusetts...
...It makes them appear compassionate and inclusive and reassures everyone that something better could happen if only we'd give up race...
...Democracy depends on universal, high-quality public education, and constructing it belongs at the top of the nation's agenda...
...IN FLORIDA, "Talented 20," which is the state's percent plan (for public school students only), took effect in 2000...
...The Supreme Court's conservative majority managed in one ruling to undermine racial integration in primary and secondary education across the country, twist the milestone civil rights case, Brown v. Board of Education, inside out, but also uphold what little remains of a policy they've always opposed— racial preferences in higher education...
...COLLEGES AND universities are under attack from the other side as well: for several years, supporters of race-based affirmative action have accused them of outsourcing preferences—that is, giving preference to blacks of immigrant origin rather than to blacks whose history includes slavery in the United States...
...A study published in the February 2007 issue of the American Journal of Education confirmed that a disproportionately large number of black students at selective schools were immigrants (mostly from the West Indies and Africa) or had at least one immigrant parent...
...In 2006, they accounted for 71 percent of the freshman class...
...Connerly knows he's on a roll...
...As soon as one school accepts the student, the guarantee is fulfilled whether or not the student wants to enroll there...
...The larger category is rarely broken down into its constituent groups...
...true even if the Supreme Court never again revisits the issue of racial preferences in higher education...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...The study revealed one unexpected fact, which I don't think attracted enough attention: the socioeconomic backgrounds and the academic preparation of immigrant and native black freshmen at selective schools were virtually identical...
...Of course, the opposite is true...
...it distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant Constitutional principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by the state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public schools, it threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation, and it undermines Brown's promise of integrated primary and secondary education that local communities have sought to make a reality...
...The majority suggested using class instead of race...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...These three minority groups always remained seriously underrepresented compared to their actual presence in the total student population.* In 1995, for example, the underrepresented minorities accounted for 38.3 percent of all graduates from California public high schools but only 21 percent of freshmen at the University of California as a whole...
...In a separate process, they used racial preferences to increase the diversity of the class...
...The formula for holistic evaluation combined the "academic index" (class rank, completion of UT-required high school curriculum, courses beyond those required, and test scores) and the "personal achievement index" (scores on two essays, leadership, extracurricular activities, awards/honors, work experience, service to school or community, and a subcategory called "special circumstances," which included family's socioeconomic position, single-parent home, language spoken at home, family responsibilities of the student, socioeconomic status of the school attended, and average test scores at the school attended in relation to student's own test scores...
...The school districts weren't trying to choose a limited number of "winners" based on merit from a large pool of voluntary applicants...
...The mean grade-point average earned by ten-percenters during their freshman year at UT-Austin has DISSENT / Spring 2008 n 53 AFFIRMATIVE ACTION been higher than that of freshman non-tenpercenters every year since the percent plan began...
...UCLA had lined up the largest freshman class in its history for fall 2006, but of 4,852 students set to enroll, only 96 were African Americans—the smallest number since 1973, the year when the federal government first required documentation...
...So race-based affirmative action combined with more outreach, better recruitment, and a student-gets-to-choose-the-campus percent plan produced the best results so far at UT-Austin...
...They also identified a possible solution: Berkeley's holistic evaluation procedure...
...UCLA and Berkeley have been struggling to maintain a minimally acceptable presence of underrepresented minorities on campus...
...the student population of the Los Angeles Unified School District is 10 percent black...
...And on it goes, with valuable time and millions of dollars lost in litigation...
...over 40 percent of the classes had no Hispanics or just one...
...Percent plans have other shortcomings: they don't work for graduate programs or professional schools, and they might encourage high school students to take easier courses or transfer to less rigorous schools...
...Critics assumed that standards at the state's two most selective schools—the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A & M—would drop because the least talented of the "ten-percenters" could attend...
...But Connerly's assertion is not just empty, it is unscrupulous...
...Of course, most institutions assume that increasing diversity will serve exactly those original purposes...
...The university argues that it has too little say over who is going to study there and too many students with impressive test scores can't get in...
...So diversity has been, in part, a proxy justification for racial preferences since 1978...
...This backlash developed as the proportion of ten-percenters in each freshman class grew larger year after year...
...Over the last several decades, they have generally been the most committed to increasing minority representation: a lily-white population in the halls of ivy is no longer morally or socially acceptable, and the elites have had the resources— personnel and time—needed to give comprehensive evaluations to individual applicants...
...Once the presence of an underrepresented minority falls below a certain level (call it the critical mass for that campus), the drop accelerates because the school looks uninviting to prospective students...
...Each application includes a "read sheet" which summarizes statistics comparing the student's school to other high schools...
...A third reader evaluated the student's "personal achievement and life challenges profile" and ranked it without conferring with the other readers...
...Connerly's victories have all come in "blue" states, but the Michigan vote was his most impressive feat...
...But the reprieve will be temporary for two reasons...
...The four liberal justices (Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens) plus Sandra Day O'Connor upheld Bakke by reaffirming that colleges and universities have a compelling interest in a diverse student body and that diversity requires not token representation but a "critical mass" of minorities...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...According to those who believe that racial preferences 56 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 should not go to relative newcomers, the universities have abandoned their commitment to the descendants of American slaves...
...Private institutions conform because as soon as they accept federal money for research grants or student aid, they become vulnerable to lawsuits...
...But in the last decade, the failure of racial preferences to help the most underprivileged has become a key argument for switching from race-based to class-based affirmative action...
...They have no choice: using racial preferences explicitly for the original purposes of affirmative action—to remedy past racial injustices, promote equality of opportunity, and develop minority leadership— is illegal...
...If you are submitting to Dissent electronically, our e-mail address is submissions@dissentmagazine.org . Please include a postal address and phone number...
...In their decision, the justices compared the Seattle and Louisville plans to the limited use of racial preferences in university admissions—a spectacularly inapt comparison (more on that later) but one that affirmed the policy at the university level...
...THE NUMBER Of ways tO design a holistic evaluation is probably infinite, and the design determines what a freshman class will look like...
...A "pure" percent plan uses only class rank to determine admission...
...Now the court's June 2007 decision on public school integration in Seattle and Louisville comes into play...
...Latinos were 14.5 percent of UT-Austin's freshman class in 1996, 12.6 percent in 1997, and 16.9 percent in 2004...
...In California, Washington, and Michigan, the ballot proposals were called "civil rights initiatives," and they all proposed a ban on "preferential treatment...
...On election day, Michiganders reelected their Democratic governor and senator— both strong opponents of the ban—by very large margins, but they voted to outlaw affirmative action, 58 percent to 42 percent...
...The controversy moved to the state legislature where a law to limit ten-percenters to 50 percent of each incoming class (chosen by highest class ranks) almost passed in May 2007...
...At Berkeley, the presence of African Americans plummeted 66 percent...
...And please remember that we can't consider articles unless they're accompanied by a cover letter and stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...UT-Austin decided to add racial preferences to its holistic evaluation formula, starting with the 2005 freshman class...
...THE EDITORS DISSENT / Spring 2008 n 5 7...
...it used figures from the 1999 National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen...
...The plan has no impact on the two most selective state schools—the University of Florida and Florida State University—because a Talented 20 student doesn't have special access to them...
...This applies to Democrats as well as Republicans...
...It's not much of a deal: many of Florida's universities are relatively unselective, so almost all Talented 20 students can get into a school without using the guarantee...
...African Americans made up 6.8 percent of the state's population that same year but under 3 percent of all undergraduates at UCLA...
...Consider, first, the admission process...
...The acAFFIRMATIVE ACTION knowledged prime mover behind all three ballot initiatives was Ward Connerly, a wealthy businessman and former member of the Board of Regents of the University of California...
...they are 4.5 percent of the freshman class...
...they respond negatively to "preferential treatment" and "quotas...
...But given the resources that elite schools devote to outreach, recruitment, academic programs for underrepresented minorities, and holistic evaluation of applicants, I'm inclined to think they are still concerned about the legacy of racism but can't maintain the academic standards they've set and the number of black students they want without admitting immigrants...
...By 2006, that number had increased to 853 of the state's 1,518 high schools...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...The Texas plan is the most farreaching: it grants students in the top 10 percent of any high school graduating class automatic admission to the public university 52 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 AFFIRMATIVE ACTION of their choice...
...And of those 96 students, twenty were recruited athletes...
...His allies have been systematically undermining public education with voucher programs, the underfunded No Child Left Behind Act, suits like those brought against the Seattle and Louisville school systems, and an ideological campaign to peg public education as yet another failed Soviet-style experiment...
...Race has dropped off the list of factors used in college and university admissions statewide...
...Berkeley designed a more flexible and genuinely holistic procedure: one reader evaluates a student's entire application and looks at academic achievements in the context of the student's other achievements and life challenges (for example, did the student have a part-time job to help support the family...
...To a straightforward "no," he sometimes adds that if underrepresented minorities disappear from institutions of higher education, politicians might finally do something about the real problem—poor quality public schools...
...First, if inequality in the public schools continues to grow, the already tortuous efforts of some universities to include underrepresented American minorities will become well nigh impossible...
...So universities must actually increase the proportion of underrepresented minorities in their student bodies in order just to match the rate of underrepresentation once produced by racial preferences...
...The ban exempts only court-ordered affirmative action programs imposed to remedy specific prior acts of discrimination...
...Hispanic representation dropped 14.3 percent...
...Not surprisingly, the campus-level procedures are myriad, and they keep changing as the individual schools try to improve their "yield" of minority students...
...According to this paradigm, race can be only one of many plus factors in "a highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant's file, giving serious consideration to all the ways an applicant might contribute to a diverse educational environment...
...The plan does nothing to increase diversity because these top students would be admitted somewhere in the system anyway, and the most elite campuses— UCLA and Berkeley—aren't required to take them...
...And, predictably, their adversaries don't buy it and have been challenging admissions programs one by one...
...It's true that the policy has not helped primarily the most disadvantaged members of minority groups to gain access to selective universities...
...A longtime opponent of racial preferences, Rosen concluded that the possible demise of the topnotch universities made him "grasp" for race-based affirmative action "eagerly, like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver...
...A high school counselor will request additional schools to review the student's transcript...
...The first major policy innovation was the state-mandated "percent plan": it guarantees admission to a state (public) university to every student in a designated top segment of the graduating class (say, the top 4 percent or the top 20 percent) in any public or accredited private high school in the state...
...Latino representation fell 53 percent...
...At the University of Texas at Austin—the flagship campus of the state system—African American freshman enrollment fell 33.8 percent in the first school year after Hopwood...
...This kind of limit could destroy the core feature of the plan—access for students who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise...
...The vote, according to most analysts, reflects the divided attitude of Americans on affirmative action: in surveys, they respond positively to the words "diversity" and "civil rights...
...California adopted a much more limited percent plan: only the top 4 percent of high school graduates gain automatic admission to the University of California, and the university decides which of the nine undergraduate campuses they will attend...
...California, too, designed a percent plan that's almost useless for underrepresented minorities...
...Nor did the underrepresentation of minorities get permanently worse...
...When a design fails, an elite institution can resegregate with dreadful speed...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...They also clarified for the first time what legal affirmative action in admissions should look like...
...As usual, the more elite the institution, the more skewed the numbers: immigrants and their children made up 13 percent of all eighteen- and nineteen-year-old blacks nationwide...
...of the top thirty research institutions in the nation, UCLA ranks twenty-ninth for African American admissions...
...To Our Contributors A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...it will benefit many fewer underrepresented minorities because these groups are a minority of the entire disadvantaged population...
...Supporters of the original goals of affirmative action, myself included, champion diversity for the same two reasons: it improves education, and it's the only remaining legal justification for racial preferences...
...Second, disadvantaged members of minorities tend to underperform disadvantaged whites academically and will lose out in the competition for class-based preferences...
...To be sure, Berkeley's procedure has not produced stellar results: the 2006 freshman class of 4,157 students included just 140 African Americans...
...Similarly, the administrators of Florida's top 20 percent plan decide which of the state universities students will attend...
...Applications with identical rankings were grouped together in a single "cell" in the "admissions matrix...
...The plan, called "Eligibility in the Local Context," gives all students in the top AFFIRMATIVE ACTION 4 percent of their graduating class who fulfill the standard requirements automatic admission to a University of California campus to be chosen by the university...
...In any case, the improved diversity numbers on paper don't really translate into noticeably diverse classrooms...
...The Texas ban resulted from a 1996 ruling by the Fifth U.S...
...Despite UT-Austin's impressive documentation, it's difficult to tell exactly how much the ten-percent plan accounts for diversity and how much other strategies contribute...
...She has written on affirmative action for several publications, including Dissent...
...And second, for the most aggressive opponents of affirmative action, the June decision proves that their best strategy is to make the courts irrelevant by getting states, one by one, to ban all forms of voluntary affirmative action...
...Connerly, who is one-quarter African American, founded the American Civil Rights Institute in 1997 to expand his California effort into a systematic nationwide campaign...
...Opponents of race-based preferences have challenged some minority outreach programs in court and managed to have them opened to all students...
...Under the Bush administration, the civil rights division regularly sends threatening letters to universities, and often that's enough to drive admission staffers back to the drawing board to design new plans...
...it stands in for advancing racial equality...
...He chose safer targets this time—all five states went for Bush in 2004—and barring some unforeseeable shift, he's likely to win...
...In the dissenting opinion, Justice Breyer wrote exactly what needs to be said about the conservatives' ruling...
...the school's admission officers selected the rest of the class using a holistic approach...
...State law determines the basic structure of a percent plan, but each school within a state university system designs its own outreach and recruitment programs as well as the specific features of its admission procedures (whether or not the application includes an essay, how many people evaluate each application, and so on...
...From 1998 through 2004, the admission process worked this way: the ten-percenters who chose UT-Austin automatically made up a large part of each freshman class (41 percent in 1998...
...rOUR STATES—California, Washington, Texas, and Florida—have accumulated a body of experience with alternative strategies as they've tried to compensate for bans on racial preferences...
...No one really knows: university administrators don't disclose the details of this balancing act...
...Race-based affirmative action in higher education is only a stopgap measure, but it requires support while we pursue the paramount goal...
...They've relied on holistic evaluations (which the university calls "comprehensive review"), and the results range from mediocre to disastrous...
...Admissions officers then decided which cells, not individual applicants, to admit to the freshman class...
...But one fact has emerged from the jumble of results: a percent plan alone cannot compensate for the loss of racial preferences...
...Politicians in both parties, clergy, labor unions, major businesses, educators, and scholars all campaigned against the ban, and some polls predicted its defeat...
...Florida's percent plan—once touted by Jeb Bush as the model for the entire nation—is pretty much irrelevant...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...Ward Connerly is often asked, "Doesn't it bother you that your campaign against racebased affirmative action could result in all-white colleges and universities...
...THE EFFORT that the more selective schools nationwide devote—or say they devote—to minority recruitment is impressive...
...The numbers for Native Americans are usually so small that they don't appear in a university's statistical analyses...
...46 percent thought "geographic location, ethnicity, and gender" should also be considered "to balance the student body...
...It's a moderately effective tactic and completely cynical...
...The university will counter that the challenge makes no sense because the admissions process includes many factors in addition to grades and test scores...
...If three schools in the system reject a student, he or she can then exercise the Talented 20 "guarantee of admission...
...This conveniently kept the controversial referendum off the ballot in November 2000 when it might have drawn more progressives to the voting booths and undermined Jeb's brother's reach for the presidency...
...Not every state in the nation will submit to a Connerly-type referendum, but in the coming years, more institutions of higher education will probably be forced to give up all consideration of race in admissions...
...In 1996, 622 Texas high schools sent students to UT-Austin's freshman class...
...First, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION class-based affirmative action doesn't work as a proxy for race...
...Supreme Court allowed the ruling to stand, and this outlawed all voluntary racial preferences in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi until 2003 when the University of Michigan case invalidated Hopwood...
...In Florida, Ward Connerly was gathering signatures in 1999 for a ballot proposal when Governor Jeb Bush preempted his effort and banned affirmative action in public education, hiring, and contracting by executive order...
...We know that race-based affirmative action is a flawed and feeble tool for creating more equal access to DISSENT / Spring 2008 • 49 AFFIRMATIVE ACTION quality higher education, but until all children in the United States can attend excellent primary and secondary public schools, it's one of the few tools we've got...
...In all three states, minorities constitute an ever-larger proportion of the total population, especially the school-age population...
...African Americans were 4.1 percent of UT-Austin's freshman class in 1996—the last class chosen before Hopwood...
...Then came Hopwood...
...The reasoning was nonsensical...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...This will be *The two cases—Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No...
...From 2001 through 2006, the admission process at UCLA went like this: two readers, working separately, evaluated a student's "academic achievement profile" (grade point average and standardized text scores...
...By choosing where percent-plan students go, the universities protect their most elite schools: they channel the weakest "percenters" to the less selective campuses...
...The long list of tools includes college preparatory classes, after-school and summer programs, close working relationships with high-school guidance counselors, outreach to churches, satellite recruiting offices in other cities, minority recruitment officers on staff, campus recruitment weekends, minority alumni recruitment networks, student recruiters, and, of course, more financial aid...
...From Clarence Thomas and Alberto Gonzalez in the courtroom to Jeb Bush and Ward Connerly on the stump to a slew of neocons in the media, conservatives fly the class banner whenever they're trying to dismantle racial preferences...
...But according to recent journalistic reports, blacks on selective campuses today still divide into two, often mutually wary groups—"immigrants" and "natives" (terms of convenience used in the study...
...But all these approaches are risky...
...THE ACCUSATION of middle-class bias has bedeviled race-based affirmative action in higher education from the start...
...After the affirmative action bans took effect, school administrators in California, Texas, and Florida took the mediocre preban results of racial preferences as the new goal to reach with their alternative strategies...
...But that proportion, 3.6 percent, looked much better than UCLA's figure of 1.99 percent...
...The more selective schools have faced the same dilemma since the early days of affirmative action in the 1960s: how do you maintain both high standards and more than a token representation for underprivileged minorities...
...that figure sank to 2.4 percent for the period 1997 through 2001...
...A study of the law schools at Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Texas found that African Americans accounted for 7.4 percent of the combined enrollments on average from 1993 through 1996...
...IRONICALLY, the triumphant "Michigan model" for creating diversity is now illegal in Michigan...
...The University of Texas at Austin produced somewhat better results under the ban than other schools, and they've documented the ups and downs quite thoroughly...
...Before the Hopwood decision, UT-Austin used what it calls the "classic model" which was "easy and efficient": standardized test scores and high school class rank went into a multiple regression equation which produced a list of all applicants in descending order of their predicted freshman grade-point average...
...In November 2006, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution "to ban affirmative action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes...
...Since then colleges and universities have designed their admission policies to conform to the diversity criterion...
...A statewide ban—in the form of an amendment to a state constitution or a law—does not conflict with any of the Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action...
...Latino representation rose to 18.7 percent...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...When the easiest, most straightforward method—racial preferences—is restricted or illegal, the elites need new strategies...
...Opposition to the Texas percent plan now comes from the UT-Austin faculty and admin5 4 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 istration...
...instead, they beef up their black enrollment numbers with middle-class immigrants and then tout the diversity of their schools...
...In California and Texas, banning affirmative action had an immediate effect on the enrollment of African Americans, Latinos, and DISSENT / Spring 2008 n 5 1 AFFIRMATIVE ACTION Native Americans in the freshman classes of the most selective state schools...
...When considered as a single category, Asian Americans are often an overrepresented minority at the more selective colleges and universities...
...Almost all elite colleges, graduate programs, and professional schools in the United States—both public and private—use Michigan Law School-type admission procedures...
...The study needs updating...
...Predictably, university administrators deny that they've shaped their admission procedures to bring in more African Americans and Latinos...
...I won't replay the back and forth of the race-based versus class-based affirmative action debate: it's well known and, in my opinion, the most convincing points and the most sensible conclusion are quite clear...
...Berkeley accepts more black students from Los Angeles than does UCLA...
...The justices struck down two voluntary (as opposed to court-ordered) local plans designed to prevent the resegregation of two public school systems—one in Seattle, Washington and one in Louisville, Kentucky, and its suburbs.* The plans were not identical, but both used race in assigning some students to schools in order to avoid extreme racial imbalances...
...The "feeder schools" include more rural white schools as well as inner-city, predominantly minority schools...
...But some groups within the category (for example, Filipino Americans and Vietnamese Americans) are underrepresented...
...It has, however, helped to expand and consolidate their middle classes and to break down long-standing barriers to upward mobility...
...Underrepresented minorities, so the argument goes, will still be helped because they are disproportionately poor...
...By early May 2007, he had personally launched new ballot initiatives for the November 2008 elections in five states: Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, and South Dakota...
...Studies published in June and September 2006 by the school's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies identified one immediate source of the problem: UCLA's holistic evaluation procedure...
...African American representation in the 2006 freshman class reached 5.2 percent...
...Texas, California, and Florida each instituted a different version of a percent plan for higher education shortly after banning racial preferences...
...The famous 1978 Supreme Court case—Regents of the University of California v. Bakke—cut the legal justifications for voluntary racial preferences in admissions down to just one: student body diversity for the purpose of enriching the academic environment...
...When you consider the context, the number 96 looks even worse, much worse: Los Angeles County has the second largest African American population of any county in the United States...
...each ranked that part of the application...
...In September 2006, UCLA adopted a Berkeleytype system with impressive speed and used it to select the 2007 freshman class...
...The Texas percent plan does get credit for improving the geographic diversity of the instate students at UT-Austin...
...If the immigrant beneficiaries of affirmative action are middle class (an extremely broad category), the same probably holds true for most native beneficiaries...
...Third, although polls show hypothetical support for income-based preferences, their actual widespread use might well generate a backlash...
Vol. 55 • April 2008 • No. 2
