Guess who is hurt most by affirmative action college admissions?
Asians, not whites, hurt most by race-conscious admissions
By Peter Schmidt
usatoday.com
The long-running debate over affirmative action in college admissions just got more complicated, thanks to a new study that challenges the common assumption that whites are hurt most when colleges take applicants’ race and ethnicity into account.
The study, published by the University of California-Los Angeles last week in the scholarly journal InterActions, suggests that it is mainly Asian-Americans � not whites � who are held to a higher standard when top colleges use affirmative action.
Where such institutions have been banned from considering applicants’ race, the study finds, enrollment of Asian-Americans has increased while admissions of whites remained flat or, in some cases, declined. The study, an analysis of long-term enrollment trends at several exclusive public universities, found that the Asian-American share of enrollment increased:
•More than 15% at the University of Texas at Austin after a 1996 federal court ruling barred consideration of race in admissions.
•More than 15% at the University of Florida after Gov. Jeb Bush persuaded the state university system’s governing board to vote in 2000 to end race- and ethnicity-conscious admissions.
•More than 20% at the University of California-Berkeley, more than 10% at UCLA and more than 30% at the University of California-San Diego after that state’s voters passed a 1996 ballot measure barring the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and other state agencies.
Although David Colburn and his two co-authors consider themselves advocates of affirmative action, he acknowledged their numbers show “Asian-Americans were discriminated against under an affirmative-action system.”(more…)
I believe it’s time to separate Affirmative Action from the use of race as a factor in college admissions, for there’s a different purpose with each policy.
AA is simply a way to enforce civil rights by remedying current patterns of discrimination against a group or class. College admissions are used to determine how the limited resources of higher education will be distributed. As any college administrator worth their salt will confirm, there’s a lot more to ‘merit’ than high GPAs and SAT scores. Conversely, GPA and standardized testing don’t reveal much about aptitude, talent, or character, among other things.
Therefore, should ‘race’ be a legitimate consideration in college admissions? Given how colleges and universities strive for acadmic vigor by way of cultural diversity, it would seem that race is a valid admissions criterion. Admissions officers, then, would be compelled to strike a balance among several factors, including race.
The statistics in this study and Schmidt’s article are disinformative.
Comment by MIB | February 21, 2008