Flashbacks re Michigan's Affirmative Action vote

Parent Cafe
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<p>I think there’s a mistake being made in focusing so exclusively on SAT scores. Affirmative action is much more nuanced than that.</p>

<p>Let me give you an example: Swarthmore typically has to pay attention in admissions to enrolling enough Engineering majors. There is no such need to fill the Economics department. So let’s say we are getting down the final slots in the freshman class. We have two students left: one with a background and interest in engineering with 1400 SATs. The other a future Economics major with 1550 SATs. Both are valedictorians from comparable high schools. Guess who is getting accepted?</p>

<p>That, folks is affirmative action. When a campus has a unfilled defined “slot”, they make an affirmative effort to fill that slot. Simple as that.</p>

<p>In my hypothetical above, they even “lowered their standards” to fill that slot.</p>

<p>Is there anyone who doesn’t believe that Georgia Tech or MIT acts affirmatively to enroll as many women as they can? There’s nothing sinister in any of this.</p>

102

<p>So in your opinion AA = slots = quota.</p>

<p>Someone had pointed out early that AA = equaland fair opportunity, but not equal to equal outcome.</p>

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<p>Yes, of course. All college admissions are slot based.</p>

<p>Slots for high-SAT students. Slots for full-pay students. Slots for recruited athletes. Slots for muscians. Slots for science geeks. Slots for internationals. Slots for URMs. </p>

<p>Every good selective college admissions office in the country goes into each cycle with general targets for these and many other categories of students. What do you think they mean when the first thing they say in admissions info sessions is, “We aren’t looking for well-rounded individuals, we are looking for a well-rounded class”?</p>

<p>The allocation of slots is often determined by top-level management. For example, I recently read a strategic plan for a well-known LAC. For fiscal reasons, they have decided to reduce enrollment by 100 students. Furthermore, their plan is to make those reductions in high-need financial aid students, while leaving the number of full-pay students unchanged, i.e. a redistribution of targeted slots.</p>

<p>Of course, the word quota is taboo, in part because the colleges have assured the Supreme Court that they use “targets” not “quotas”. That’s probably a fair distinction. The slots are targets, not such hard and fast numbers that a college would do anything to hit them. For example, many of the most selective colleges rejected 2 out of every 3 Af Am applicants this year, so obviously they could enroll more if they were trying to hit a hard quota and were willing to relax their admissions standards.</p>

<p>In the case of URM admissions, most colleges haven’t needed hard targets because they are still at the stage where the goal is “as many as we can get” within the constraints of their particular admissions standards (i.e. the targeted number and distribution of SAT slots). </p>

<p>A key point to remember: the lower stat “slots” have always been there. The colleges aren’t lowering their standards; even the most selective schools have always enrolled portions of each class with “stats” significantly lower than they could get in a pure stat-based merit system. The difference is that they are now using these slots to increase diversity rather than admit less stellar students from their traditional good old boys’ network. For example, George W. Bush’s gentleman’s C slacker slot at Yale might well not be available to him today. That slot has been redeployed to increase diversity at Yale – a redeployment that hasn’t had any impact on top white students from Andover getting into Yale. </p>

<p>(note: I’m using Bush hypothetically. His family is so well-connected that he might very well still get into Yale, C’s at Andover notwithstanding).</p>

<p>Of course, that redistribution of slots angers the good ol’ boys’ network. After all, the wealthy, white, less than stellar academics students are the big losers in this redistribution of slots. They thought that selective college admissions were their birthright…and they were right.</p>

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<p>interesteddad, that may be how it is practiced at many places. I want to say that U-M doesn’t work that way. Maybe it’s as much application volume as anything else, but there are no slots here. U-M does set hard targets for residents and nonresidents, including internationals. They set targets for individual schools within the U. There are no targets for minorities. There are no targets for aid/no aid. There are no targets by county or high school or legacy. </p>

<p>You’re right about the “as many as we can get” attitude (within reason) about populations of interest–such as underrepresented minorities, lower socioeconomic status, MI residents from underserved counties, and so on. Admissions work hard to solicit good apps from these groups, admits the ones it can, and takes its lumps if not that many end up enrolling, (and celebrates if a lot do). </p>

<p>Thus you can hope for a steady enrollment level (or for an upward trend) but it may not happen. Fall 2006 was a less-than-stellar year for URM enrollment. If U-M worked with a target (or quota), maybe things would be different–at the first sign that the enrollment number would fall short, they’d have dipped even lower into the pool to take another 10 or 20 or 50 however many. But it doesn’t work that way, and I think it’s a good thing.</p>

<p>(oh, a caveat–the School of Music does have slots for instruments because it absolutely, positively needs a certain number of strings and tubas, but they’re sort of the oddball example)</p>

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<p>“Of course, that redistribution of slots angers the good ol’ boys’ network. After all, the wealthy, white, less than stellar academics students are the big losers in this redistribution of slots. They thought that selective college admissions were their birthright…and they were right.”</p>

<p>I doubt that’s true at our common alma mater, which is less economically diverse today than 25 years ago (and I think in the main that is true at most private prestige colleges) - just the wealthy have to be wealthier.</p>

<p>But I don’t think that’s really the issue. I see no particular reason why a state institution should be under any obligation to be narrowly “meritocratic” in a way which is defined by a group of private prestige institutions. There CAN be higher values, like ensuring that the state does not have to shoulder the expense of a permanent economic underclass (or, more accurately, caste), or that places are equitably distributed across school districts statewide (regardless of how good the high schools are), or simply considering financial support of one’s family while still in high school to be the highest form of “merit”.</p>

106

<p>“Is there anyone who doesn’t believe that Georgia Tech or MIT acts affirmatively to enroll as many women as they can? There’s nothing sinister in any of this.”</p>

<p>I think at least in the case of MIT they make a real effort to look at applications more holistically. It’s not so much that women get in with lower numbers as that they’ve determined minimum numbers and then look at other aspects of the application. I’m pretty sure Mollie at some point said that they did a study of women at MIT and found they did just fine once they were at MIT even if their stats were a little lower.</p>

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<p>I think that’s basically how AA works, Mathmom. The result is that URM’s with numbers that above the minimum are more likely to get the nod than some other student who may be a little more above the minimum, numbers-wise. And I don’t find that to be sinister, either, although apparently there are some who do.</p>

108

<p>I think the issue of women in engineering is more about interest than ability. Once one has the requisite math abilities, everything is just teachable. I have two sisters with engineering degrees, and neither seemed to have any more trouble with the courses than their male peers. The affirmative action may just be due to the fact that fewer girls apply with such a major in mind, which provides them with a “hook.”</p>

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<p>Yes, the scale of admissions can lead to some variations. However, U-M setting hard targets for each school is conceptually the same thing as a small college like Swarthmore allocating slots for potential Engineering majors. If anything, large publics with restrictions on jumping between the various schools are actually setting harder targets than a place like Swarthmore where there are absolutely no impediments to moving between departments. I don’t think Swarthmore places much weight on department slots because they know that what a kid thinks he or she is interested in as a high school senior is an imperfect predictor of what he or she will actually choose to major in two years later.</p>

<p>Also, some of these “slots” are implicit in the applicant pool. For example, Swarthmore has standing Board approval to increase the financial aid budget as necessary to cover the full need of all enrolled students (the true definition of “need-blind”). So, there is no hard number of slots for full-fare versus aid. However, historically, the applicant pool produces a well-anticipated and highly consistent ratio of full-fare versus aid students from year to year. It is that precisely that predictability that allows the Board to give standing approval to adjust the aid budget as necessary and that allows admissions to operate without fixed targets in that area. Even with an endowment approaching $800,000 per student, an overnight 50% increase in tuition discounts would be a fiscal shock.</p>

<p>Without that predictability, there would have to be mechanisms in place to deal with the fluctuations. Obviously, no college can live with an aid budget that doubles from year to year. For example, Haverford has a mechanism in place such that, if the tuition discount rate exceeds a specific threshold, an automatic Board level review of on-going financial aid policies is triggered. In the past, when the trigger has been hit, the Board has opted to increase the trigger threshold. But, at some point in the future, repeated triggering could result in a modification of the need-blind policy. All schools have a mechanism – either explicitly stated or implicit in the budgeting process – for similar reviews. They have to. The bugets are based on certain expectations for tuition revenue.</p>

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<p>BTW, I think the true indictment of the U-Mich points system was not the affirmative action part, but the fact that the system was so mechanical in nature. As I understand it, most large public universities are forced to use mechanical, numeric formulas…at least in the intial stages of culling the appliant pool down to a manageable size. From a legal standpoint, the mistake UMich made was giving the courts a quantifiable affirmative action preference, applied across the board, based solely on ethnicity. Colleges try to be more nuanced and offer up trickier pitches for the anti-affirmative action legal action folk to swing at.</p>

<p>From a pragmatic standpoint, I was happy to have UMich’s point system and the ability to run my daughter’s “numbers”. It was a handy reference point, as are the AI Index formulas on this website.</p>

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<p>Absolutely. It’s all about the number of applicants who have a particular interest. </p>

<p>This is true across the board. The reason there is ethnic affirmative action is because there just aren’t very many URMs expressing an interest in elite college enrollment, not as many as the colleges would like to have on campus. So, those who express such an interest receive a preference in admissions, just like women who express an interest in engineering receive a preference, just like varsity caliber quarterbacks receive a preference.</p>

<p>The degree of preference may vary, but conceptually, these things are the same. They are all affirmative action (with lower case spelling). Hooks and tips and nudges and preferences are nothing but efforts by admissions offices to get more of something in the enrolled class than they would be able to get otherwise.</p>

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<p>“The reason there is ethnic affirmative action is because there just aren’t very many URMs expressing an interest in elite college enrollment”</p>

<p>where do you get that? Elite colleges are wooing URMs.</p>

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<p>Well not always. Sometimes kids are admitted with very low stats from terrible schools and they don’t do well without a lot of handholding. I don’t mind this sort of AA either BTW. But I think there’s a difference between making artificial distinctions between a kid who gets 700 vs 800 on the SAT vs. the very real one between a kid who gets 450 and 800, such as Cedric Jennings whose story is told in Hope in the Unseen by Ronald Suskind. <a href=“http://www.ronsuskind.com/hopeintheunseen/[/url]”>http://www.ronsuskind.com/hopeintheunseen/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>I’d forgotten about that book, mathmom–it was really moving. I didn’t realize until I went to read the update just now that Cedric was enrolled here at U-M at the School of Social Work (he has since graduated).</p>

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<p>Right. And, even with extreme woo’ing, the number of Af Am applications at elite colleges falls below the percentage of Af Ams in the general population and the yield rates of those accepted falls significantly below the yield of white students. These are the numbers that elite colleges fight in order to fill a reasonable number of Af Am slots. These are the numbers that result in higher acceptance rates (when your yield decreases, you must start out accepting more students) and dipping lower into the application pile to achieve those higher acceptance rates. It’s all just a numbers thing.</p>

<p>Look at it in a different context. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton don’t have significantly more applications per slot in the freshman class than other elite colleges, so why is their acceptance rate so low? Simple. Their yield rate is much, much higher; therefore, they don’t have to mail as many acceptance letters to fill the freshman class.</p>

<p>The number of applications and the yield rate drives everything in college admissions.</p>

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<p>“Is there anyone who doesn’t believe that Georgia Tech or MIT acts affirmatively to enroll as many women as they can? There’s nothing sinister in any of this.”</p>

<p>Actually, here are the admissions stats for Georgia Tech for 2003. Accepted female applicants had higher grades and SAT scores than the overall average:</p>

<p>Admitted Class
1337 SAT
3.79 GPA</p>

<p>Women
1507 Admitted
1344 SAT
3.84 GPA</p>

<p>Blacks
334 Admitted
1286 SAT
3.70 GPA</p>

<p>Hispanics
237 Admitted
1349 SAT
3.75 GPA</p>

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<p>“Why is it only ethnic diversity that is good? I
dont understand why ethnic diversity is so precious that we should suspend equal rights to acheive it.”</p>

<p>Interesting that you should say that, since equal rights is such an infant concept in America. Certainly, it was one much maligned and prohibited by law when I was denied access to the all-white schools in my town. Back then, nobody (white) seemed to wrestle with the inherent unfairness of Jim Crow, or the fact that the considerable percentage of black Virginia taxpayers were supporting schools to which their children had no access (UVA. William and Mary, Virginia Tech, James Madison, George Mason, et al.). Then as now, diversity was not deemed in any way “precious” by the majority of whites. Interesting that “equal rights” is only now deemed so important, coinciding as it does with the AA bogeyman, and the fear is that the historical advantages (centuries long) enjoyed by whites seem as if it might made slightly less.</p>

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Yup, true story – women graduate from MIT at higher rates than men, and with higher GPAs at graduation, too.</p>

<p>Ben also told me at some point that the female applicants were more likely to have high class rank than male applicants, although I don’t remember what the exact statistic was.</p>

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<p>Poetsheart, nobody is saying equal rights have been around forever. But you don’t see the irony of battling towards a point where race is not the deciding criterion for things, all the while using race as the deciding criterion for things?</p>

<p>And it’s not whites who will be the beneficiaries of banning AA–it will be Asians.</p>

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<p>Yes, the world is full of irony. For example, it’s ironic that the politicians battling so hard to reduce black enrollment in selective colleges are the same politicians who fought equal rights for black people at every step along the way for the last half century and who now want to build a 700 mile fence on the border with Mexico and arrest 12 million undocumented aliens.</p>

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<p>ID, it’s quite a stretch to conclude that people who are against using race as a factor are “trying to reduce black enrollment.” The civil rights movement was all about not using race as a factor. It wasn’t about stopping the use of race as a factor favoring THIS group just so it could be used as a factor favoring THAT group. (By the way, my kids could qualify as Hispanic, so I’m not going to benefit from Prop 2 passing, except that I’ll be living in a state where URMs are treated like people who are fully capable of competing and succeeding, as opposed to people who are so helpless they need the patronizing colleges to lower the bar for them.) </p>

<p>And what part of “undocumented” don’t you understand?</p>