Newsletter

September 2013

Cheating at colleges-by admissions officers

Michael Barone

What
is the most intellectually dishonest profession around? My nomination: the
admissions officers at highly selective colleges and universities.

Evidence in support of this comes from, of all
places, a recent article in the New York Times. The writer is Ruth
Starkman, and the subject is her experience as a reader of applications to the
highly selective University of California, Berkeley.

“Admissions officers were careful not to mention
gender, ethnicity and race during our training sessions,” she notes. But when
she asked one privately, “What are we doing about race?” she was told it was
illegal to consider it, but that they were looking at “the ‘bigger picture’ of
the applicant’s life.”

Racial discrimination in state universities was made
illegal in 1996 when California voters by a 55 percent margin passed UC regent
Ward Connerly’s Proposition 209.

At first UC admissions officers enforced the law, as
Richard Sander (a UCLA law professor) and Stuart Taylor report in their book,
Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and
Why Universities Won’t Admit It.

The
result was that fewer blacks and Hispanics were admitted to the most
selective UC schools, Berkeley and UCLA, but more were admitted to and graduated
from less selective UC campuses.

But then admissions officers started to cheat. They
declared that they were using “holistic” criteria, trying to gauge from
students’ applications the “bigger picture” of their life.

In practice, this meant racial discrimination in
favor of blacks and Hispanics, and against Asians and whites Starkman’s job was
to read applications and rate them on a numeric scale, with 1’s being the most
desirable. She “was told I needed more 1’s and referrals. A referral is a flag
that a student’s grades and scores do not make the cut but the application
merits a special read because of ‘stressors’ — socioeconomic disadvantages that
admissions offices can use to increase diversity.”

It’s not hard to imagine what “stressors” might
include. A Spanish surname. A home address or high school in a heavily black
neighborhood. An essay recounting “the hardships that prevented the student from
achieving better grades, test scores and honors.”

So the admissions officers were tipping the scale
heavily in favor of certain students — and heavily against others.

“When I asked about an Asian student who I thought
was a 2 but had received only a 3, the officer noted, ‘Oh, you’ll get a lot of
them,’“ Starkman writes. “She said the same when I asked why a low-income
student with top grades and scores, and who had served in the Israeli Army, was
a 3.”

What’s extraordinary about this is that you have an
organization every member of which is well aware of its main purpose — illegal
racial discrimination — but in which no one will say so out loud. A willingness
to lie and break the law are job requirements.

Now I am aware that there are arguments against a
college’s just admitting the students with the highest test scores. It does
probably serve some educational purpose to bring together people with different
interests and different strengths.

Preferences to offspring of alumni and talented
athletes May be warranted for schools that need private
contributions to thrive.

But
racial discrimination is unlawful and has been rightly repudiated by the
American people. The corrupt silence concerning such discrimination in college
and university admissions suggests that at some level these people know they are
doing something for which they should be ashamed.

Unfortunately they are doing their intended
beneficiaries no favors. That’s proved beyond demur by Sander and Taylor’s
Mismatch. Black and Hispanic students tend to drop out of schools when they
find themselves less well prepared than their schoolmates.

Those intending to major in science and engineering
tend to back out of those fields. Many do not graduate yet are stuck with mounds
of student-loan debt.

Meanwhile, there appears to be a ceiling on the
number of Asians in selective private schools, similar to the ceiling imposed on
Jews there from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Just 19 percent of students at Stanford and 16
percent in the Ivy League are Asian — numbers that have remained static for two
decades despite increasing numbers of Asian applicants.

This is, in my American Enterprise Institute
colleague Charles Murray’s phrase, “discrimination against hardworking,
high-achieving young people because of the color of their skin.” His word for
it: “despicable.”

Michael
Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington
Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor, and a co-author of The
Almanac of American Politics.
© 2013 The
Washington Examiner

The Washington Examiner, August 9, 2013.