The Black Informant

Affirmative-action workaround: Holistic approach

Some background:

(newsroom.ucla.edu) Prior to the enactment of Proposition 209, which banned the use of race, ethnicity and gender in admissions, UCLA had the highest number of African American freshmen admitted in the UC system. For fall 1995, when UCLA was still allowed to use affirmative action, 1,450 African American students applied, the campus admitted 693 African American applicants and 289 expressed their intent to enroll. Following the passage of Proposition 209, which went into effect for fall 1998, admissions numbers for African Americans declined significantly at UCLA and other UC campuses, including UC Berkeley.

In November 2001, the UC Regents adopted the comprehensive-review admissions policy for freshman admissions, effective for fall 2002. The policy was designed to provide equitable treatment of all students. Under the policy, UCLA, like other UC campuses, considers academics, personal achievements and life challenges in evaluating applicants.

Prompted in part by last year’s severe decline in the number of African American students admitted to the freshman class, the UCLA faculty accelerated its review of UCLA’s process for implementing comprehensive review and decided to adopt the holistic process in use at UC Berkeley and many Ivy League institutions, beginning with the fall 2007 freshman class. The UCLA Academic Senate made the change because the faculty believed a more individualized and qualitative assessment of each applicant’s entire application would better achieve the goals of comprehensive review. Under the holistic model, each application is now read and considered in its entirety by two trained readers; in previous years, two readers reviewed student academic records while a third reviewed life challenges and other achievements. In addition, the holistic approach emphasizes student achievements in the context of opportunities available and how students have maximized these opportunities. (more…)

Here is a recent update on UCLA’s “holistic” approach”.

(dailybruin.ucla.edu) When UCLA announced its decision last year to adopt a holistic admissions process, some expressed hope that the new system would help increase the number of underrepresented minorities admitted to the university.

Officials said at the time that holistic review was intended to make admissions more fair by placing more emphasis on students’ personal qualities and achievements.

And while the number of underrepresented minorities admitted did increase overall, there is still a significant gap between the SAT scores and high school GPAs of black and Latino students compared to white and Asian students.
The persisting gap left some questioning whether the switch to holistic review had really improved UCLA’s admissions process.

In fall 2006, before UCLA switched to holistic admissions, black and Latino applicants’ average SAT scores were 255 and 246 points lower than the average for their white and Asian counterparts.

That gap seemed largely unaffected by holistic review – in fall 2007, black applicants’ SAT scores were on average 293 points lower than those of white and Asian students, and Latino applicants’ scores came up 249 points short.

Applicants’ GPAs told a similar story. In both fall 2006 and fall 2007, black students’ GPAs were about two-10ths of a point lower than white and Asian students’, and Latino students’ were about one-10th lower.

[…]

…admit rates for minority students from lower-performing high schools did increase after the implementation of holistic admissions.

High schools in California are rated according to the Academic Performance Index, a 10-point scale with higher scores awarded to higher-performing schools.

From fall 2006 to fall 2007, the admit rate for black students coming from high schools with API scores of 1 or 2 jumped from 12 percent to 27 percent.

The rate for Latino applicants from these schools rose from 25 to 27 percent in the same time frame.

[…]

But at the same time, the admit rates for white and Asian students from low-performing high schools fell.

In fall 2006, 35 percent of Asian students and 41 percent of white students from California high schools with API scores of 1 or 2 were admitted to UCLA.

In fall 2007, those numbers dropped to 31 percent and 33 percent, respectively.

[…]

(Ward) Connerly said he was not surprised by the latest admissions figures.

“I’ve had my suspicions that UCLA was going to try and find a proxy for race to get the pressure off their backs,” he said. “As you look at the underperforming schools in California, … Asian kids are going to those schools to almost the same extent as black kids are.”

(source)

I think that these two articles speak for themselves. The first one boasts of how lowering standards for certain individuals will create a happy rainbow campus that reflects the ethnic demographic of California. The second exposes the academic reality of creating that rainbow.

In short, it is not the job of colleges to make amends for failing public schools and/or low parental involvement for kids going to these schools. Again, our history is full of examples of Black kids who were not only able to excel in a failing school district, but were able to demonstrate their ability to be admitted into colleges and universities based on academic performance alone. Anything that resembles affirmative action waters down those inspiring achievements.

Folks who are fired up about the possibility that millions of illegals will be given the green light to stay here in the US–replacing legal employees who been in their position for years yet are pro-affirmative action should take note. Both of these ideologies stem from the same root.