Creating a diverse college class without affirmative action (NY Times)

Gift link: We Tried to Create a Diverse College Class Without Affirmative Action - The New York Times. It presents four different methods that schools can employ to have a more racially and socioeconomically diverse class, and walks through the advantages and disadvantages of each.

(I’m posting this in the general “Applying to College” forum (not “Politics”) because I think it’s interesting, informative, and relevant to CC posters in general. Please don’t introduce political discussions to this thread.)

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Another ‘study’ focused only on highly rejective universities. Sigh. I basically checked out of this article when the authors said this:

Throughout, we use SAT scores as a simplified measure of academic merit

Many in higher ed do NOT believe that. But I persevered on.

No where did the authors make the point that most low income/disadvantaged students don’t take an SAT/ACT test, and if they do, they are unlikely to send any score below the school’s published ranges (often with direction from a college counselor). Meaning they will only apply to test blind/test optional colleges…of which 80% of 4 years colleges are.

The article also doesn’t address John Roberts quote (which seems like a large oversight): “Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.”

That opening, in addition to partnerships with Questbridge, Posse, and the like, seems to be the most likely way schools will still be able to get FGLI/URM students, no?

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I agree everything they looked at was really too crude to be an actual admission policy in that form, and I am sure colleges will be considering a lot more policies than just those.

But I do think it was sufficient to illustrate some basic points about how policies of those general forms would increase ethnic diversity in fact.

And completely aside from the test-required/test-optional discussion itself, one thing coming out of that discussion is how committed these colleges are to implementing what they sometimes call contextual review.

And so I think this is sort of illustrating how contextual review, among other things, is likely to help these colleges maintain, or possibly even increase, their ethnic diversity even without having affirmative action as a tool.

But yes, contextual review is only one of the tools still in their toolbox. Partnerships, permissible diversity/community supplemental essays, outreach, and many other things are also still legal, and we will likely see more of all of it.

As a final thought, although I also don’t love the focus on just highly-selective wealthy privates, I do think there is likely going to be an issue in the sense those tend to be the most nimble sorts of colleges when it comes to admissions policies. Publics are potentially restrained by state laws, regulations, and oversight. Less selective and/or less wealthy privates may have all sorts of practical, including budgetary, constraints on how far they can actually change policies.

So we’ll probably see a lot of this stuff happen most rapidly in the wealthy/highly-selective private sector.

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Exactly. No need to take the view that SAT is a proxy of merit and perform a bunch of assumptions using those data. Especially if a school is TO and many FGLI/URM students aren’t sending test scores, those analyses aren’t relevant.

Yes, these various methods do increase the percentage of Black and Hispanic students admitted to a selective college. I won’t say highly selective, because a 1300 SAT score is really way below the bar for highly selective colleges, unless the applicant is in a boosted/hooked category. For other applicants, the bar is more like 1500. But for students whose SAT scores are below 1300, below 1200, as low as 1000, do they even have the overall preparedness for college level math, or preparedness to write a college level research paper? Admitting students who are not ready to perform at the level expected by highly selective colleges does them no favor.

We’ve already got “holistic” admissions, where colleges can take whomever they want, for whatever reason they like, without having to justify it. Applications to highly selective colleges are individually reviewed - the admissions committee knows that the applicant to Yale with the 1300 SAT who is the valedictorian of an inner city high school, is the editor of the newspaper, who founded the debate team, etc, has gotten whatever they could out of their limited educational/socioeconomic environment, and merits admission when compared to the applicant with the 1400 SAT who is 60th% in their class at Choate, and whose home address is New Canaan, CT.

For these schools, do we need another formula, designed to be a proxy for race, which these formulas suggested by this article most definitely, obviously, and declaredly intentionally are, to replace the one in which colleges simply added a percentage to the applicant’s credentials based upon their race?

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They probably did that because SAT scores are easily comparable across students, high schools, and colleges, even if they may not be the best predictors of college admission or college success. (This is probably at least part of the reason why some favor increased emphasis on the SAT, or overemphasize the value of the SAT in predicting college admissions or college success.)

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The article cites the increased percentage of Black and Hispanic students at UC Merced - which just happens to have a nearly 90% acceptance rate!

The only mention of UC Merced in the linked page is this:

Undergraduate students at UC Merced are about 55% Hispanic or Latino, 21% Asian, 8% White, and 5% Black. (Consider in context of the demographics of recent California high school graduates, as well as its Central Valley location.)

Probably because admission thresholds are at or not much higher than baseline UC eligibility (3.0 (3.4 out-of-state) recalculated GPA in a-g course requirements). Any effect on undergraduate demographics there is likely mostly from who gets interested in applying and matriculating (i.e. recruitment).

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UC Merced’s acceptance rate is slightly misleading. Students who are accepted to Merced under the statewide or ELC guarantee, but who didn’t actually apply to Merced, are included in the number of accepted students, but not in the number of applications. In previous years, this led to the posted acceptance rate at this campus being over 100%.

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You are correct - I jumped from the statement by the previous vice chancellor for enrollment at UC Merced, the most “diverse” school in the UC system, saying that outreach to recruit Black and Hispanic students to her, is everything, having anything to do with the fact that her prior institution has a very high percentage of Black and Hispanic students, when the reality is that it is not a selective institution! It admits nearly 90% of applicants! It has a high percentage of URM students not because of outreach, but because it is essentially a non-selective school.

I would say that it has a high proportion of URM students because the majority of California HS grads (at least in the public system) are URM.

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That logic would then apply to UCB or UCLA.

Yep…so why is the proportion of URM at those two schools not more in line with the state’s makeup, the state those schools serve? Lots of people asking questions like that, which in the end is off topic for this thread…you know low quality K-12 education and such.

Maybe I didn’t explain myself clearly above. Although Merced is not a highly selective campus, its posted admission rate doesn’t tell the whole story.

As some background: When a student applies to UC, they check a box for each campus they are applying to, at a cost of $80 per campus.

If a student is eligible for the statewide guarantee (top 9% in the state) or ELC guarantee (top 9% in the student’s high school), the student knows that they will automatically be offered admission to a UC campus, if they aren’t admitted to any of the campuses they choose. Therefore, many students feel that they don’t actually have to apply to Merced and pay the $80 fee. Merced acts as an automatic safety school for them, without even applying, as long as they applied to at least one other UC campus.

Also, many students in CA who are applying to OOS or private schools have a tendency to apply to just a couple of reach campuses in the UC system, for example, to UCLA and UCB, or perhaps to those two along with UCSD, etc. These students may not be interested in Merced at all, but if they are not admitted to the reach campuses where they applied, they will be auto-admitted to Merced (there is no way to “turn this option off” in the UC application).

All in all, over 200,000 students apply to UC each year, but only about 25,000 of these students are paying $80 to explicitly apply to Merced.

Students who are auto-admitted to Merced, but did not apply to Merced, are counted in the numerator, but not the denominator, of the posted acceptance rate. This artificially increases the posted acceptance rate, which is why the rate can go over 100%.

(Note that at this time, my understanding is that some students are being offered Riverside instead of Merced, so this is also going to affect the Riverside acceptance rate. However, in the past, the guarantee meant that you would be offered Merced.)

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I understand what you’re saying. My point is that the high percentage of Black and Hispanic students attending the least selective UC is not a result of outreach - it’s a result of it being less selective!

University of California is our state flagship system that primarily serves students in the top 9% in the state (locally and statewide). Encouraging and enabling URM students to become qualified, to apply, and to attend UC, including the “least selective UC,” is a form of outreach.

Merced’s very existence in the San Joaquin Valley is in itself a form of outreach to the largely URM residents of this area. In addition, Merced has many specific outreach, education, and admission preference programs that specifically target the SJV area. Would it be helpful to start listing them?

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This is a reductive and, tbh, slightly offensive take.

As others have already pointed out, there are minimum qualifications for UC applicants which are quite respectable. Students aren’t applying if they know they don’t qualify, and Merced accepts most who do qualify, so the acceptance rate isn’t particularly meaningful… and it’s even less meaningful when you take into account that they’re accepting many students who didn’t apply.

However, the UC’s aren’t the only public universities in California. There are many fine schools in the CSU system. Let’s compare Merced to another primarily-residential campus (avoiding bias based on local commuter demographics) in the Central Valley, Chico State. Chico has a similar range of programs, and is even easier to get into than Merced is. So by your reasoning it would have even more Black and Hispanic students, right?

But no. Chico has double the percentage of white students, compared to Merced, half the percentage of Black students, 35% fewer Hispanic students, and over 70% fewer Asian students.

Any student who qualifies for UC Merced also has other choices in the CA public university system. Students of color are choosing Merced more often than comparably-qualified white students are. What drives that trend is an interesting question (although IMO it may be more about why white students reject the choice, than about why students of color embrace it.) But at any rate, “Because it’s easy to get in” is not a helpful (or really, respectful) answer.

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I do think part of this is due to location. Upper Sacramento Valley where Chico is located has very different demographics than the San Joaquin Valley where Merced is located. Chico State has demographics that pretty much match the Upper Sacramento Valley area (about 70% non-Hispanic white).

I’m sure that’s a factor, although I don’t think the majority of students at either school are local residents. (The distance from the SF Bay Area is similar; it would be interesting to be able to compare the demographics and stats of Bay Area students who end up at each school.) UC Merced’s student population has significantly lower white representation, and higher Black and Asian representation, than its local population.

So perhaps what you’re describing is what I hinted at - a “white flight” effect, where white students will choose a majority-white school in a majority-white area over a majority-nonwhite school in a (barely) majority-nonwhite area, even if you control for “reputation” (which is a subjective measure in itself and not immune to demographic-related biases). But this is probably veering into discussion that belongs in the “race” forum.

Instead of “white flight” attracting students to Chico State, I was actually wondering whether there may be an effect where some URM students may choose UC Merced over a majority white CSU like Chico, or over another UC where the overwhelming majority is White / Asian, because of greater perceived fit with the demographics of the university and its region?

Merced also bills itself as a great place for first generation college students (72% of students at UC Merced are FG according to their web site). If you go to their admissions web page you’ll see a popup, “First in your family to attend college? You won’t be alone here.” It leads to a web page which goes into detail about the great support that UC Merced offers for FG students.

This message, “You won’t be alone here,” may be aimed at FG students, but I wonder if it would also resonate for URM students even if they aren’t FG.

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