03-30-2007, 05:46 PM
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| Software creates 'clusters' based on demographics
According to a list provided by the College Board, forty-one other colleges - primarily private schools - currently use Descriptor Plus. Michigan State University and Northwestern University are the only other Big Ten schools using it. While some universities (Brandeis, for example) currently use Descriptor Plus to target and recruit prospective students deemed most likely to apply and accept offers to attend, the U-M decided the program would be best used as part of its admissions process: Quote:
Students from underprivileged neighborhoods and high schools will get a boost in the admissions process now that the University is using a new demographics service offered by the College Board.
The service, called Descriptor Plus, sorts students into "neighborhood clusters" and "high school clusters." It provides the University with demographic information about the socioeconomic, educational and racial breakdown of the applicant's neighborhood or high school - information that University officials say will help them select diverse freshman classes without considering race.
The University's undergraduate admissions office began using the service at the beginning of the current admissions cycle in September.
University officials said they hope the service will help the University maintain ethnic diversity after the passage of Proposal 2, which banned the use of affirmative action.
But Proposal 2 wasn't the reason for the implementation of the system, said Chris Lucier, director of recruitment and operations for the University's undergraduate admissions office.
"It's not a device that's oriented solely at social or ethnic diversity," Lucier said. "It's another tool for us to identify populations that might not have the same access to higher education as other populations."
But Lucier said Descriptor Plus is legal under Proposal 2 because it's based on geographic and educational information - the consideration of which Proposal 2 didn't outlaw. Admissions officers and the College Board don't use ethnic information when grouping students into clusters.
He said Descriptor Plus is one of many factors taken into account when considering applications.
Using demographic characteristics like annual income, ethnic breakdown and college attendance, Descriptor Plus groups neighborhoods into one of 30 "Educational Neighborhood Clusters." It also forms "High School Clusters" by measuring factors that show a school's academic quality and its students' racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Alan Foutz, an attorney for The Pacific Legal Foundation, a California-based law firm that opposes affirmative action, said it would be hard to challenge the University's use of Descriptor Plus in court.
"They would have to establish that the criteria they are using are subterfuge for actual racial profiling, which would be a difficult case to establish," he said. "If they are in fact taking into consideration the whole panoply of demographics that are attached to a particular geographic area, that is most likely not a violation of Michigan's Proposal 2."
The number of students at the University from each cluster varies dramatically. Five of the 30 neighborhood clusters produced about three quarters of the students that make up the University's class of 2008 and class of 2009, according to data from the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.
These five clusters range from middle-class to very affluent. About 90 percent of students in each of the five groups are white.
Ted Spencer, executive director of the University's undergraduate admissions office, said the University hopes Descriptor Plus will prevent the sharp drop in minority attendance that was seen at the University of Texas and the University of California system after their states banned the use of affirmative action...
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