New Duke study shows UC Berkeley gives the most preferential treatment to URMs among all UCs

Colleges & Universities University of California - Berkeley
1

In a new study by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono (http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/aa.pdf), the author finds that among the UCs, Berkeley seems to favor URMs the most in admission decisions. In other words, white applicants (the author didn’t show data on asians) have the most disadvantage as compare to URMs in admissions to Berkeley. The author has an interesting graph in the paper, which shows that the academic index distribution of URM admits has a lower mean than that for the white rejects, while the white admits have a mean of more than one standard deviation higher than that for the URMs. The author did some further comparisons for other UCs and found that Berkeley seems to the the one campus that seems to favor the URMs the most.

A previous study by the same author on affirmative action by Duke University admissions generated considerable controversies on the Duke campus, which resulted in angry URM students surrounding the economics department and demanding the retraction of the paper by the professor.

2

Seems like things haven’t changed much at Berkeley since this 1999 PBS Frontline story, a few years after Prop209.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/who/

3

The study uses an academic index of SAT rescaled to a 0-600 scale plus GPA rescaled to a 0-400 scale. Such an index is no longer used in admissions, and SAT is no longer weighted as heavily today.

The figure 3 and 4 graphs are based on 1995-1997 (pre-proposition 209) applicants and admits. It looks like the study’s focus is not about current admission procedures (which are significantly different from 1995-1997, when URM preferences were quite heavy and probably a contributor to the politics leading to the passing of proposition 209), but about the subsequent effects of fit or mismatch resulting from affirmative action policies.