How are admissions decisions actually made?

nick_scheu
Mon, 31 May 2010 01:56:40 +0000

How can that allow for an exciting, diverse student body?



What do you mean by “diverse?” If you mean simple racial diversity, that is a violation of California law. A UCLA professor wrote a report on the issue, saying that UCLA may have violated the law in unofficially giving preference to racial minorities who identify themselves as such in their personal statements.

http://images.ocregister.com/newsimages/news/2008/08/CUARSGrosecloseResignationReport.pdf

Note that, later in his report, he says he is in favor of affirmative action; he is not in favor of violating current law.

Still, I agree with his suggestion to deal with current law while promoting true diversity (i.e., a group of individuals who are wealthy, raised in Bel Air, with the same political stands, but who happen to be different races, is not truly diverse). He suggests adopting parameters to account for socioeconomic status during the admissions process.

Examples I might suggest would be the applicant’s family’s income, the median income of the area where the applicant lives, the relationship between the family’s income and the median income, the number of successful applicants from the area where the applicant lives, the strength of the schools in the area, etc.

These factors, if weighted to increase a student’s chances of admission, would increase true diversity while likely also increasing racial diversity.

(Also, note that he compliments we transfer students, and recommends increasing the number of spots for transfer students. He says this, too, will promote diversity, since the acceptance rates between the various racial groups are much closer among transfers than among freshmen, and he finds transfers to be as capable as freshmen entrants.)