College Admissions Examined Affirmative-Action Critics Seek Data on School Policies College Admissions Examined Affirmative-Action Critics Seek Data on School Policies
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20040324/6037229s.htm
By Mary Beth Marklein
Mar 24, 2004; Page 7A
Three national groups critical of affirmative action are invoking state open-records laws to demand that public universities disclose whether and how race and ethnicity are considered in admissions decisions.
Organizers of the effort said Tuesday that they have contacted presidents of selective public universities in 20 states asking for detailed admissions information, such as the extent to which an applicant's race or ethnicity factors into decisions, and whether targets or quotas have been set for certain racial or ethnic groups. They plan to extend the inquiries to universities in most, if not all, states.
One goal is to ensure that universities comply with a Supreme Court ruling last summer in a case involving the University of Michigan, says Bradford Wilson, executive director of the National Association of Scholars in Princeton, N.J., whose members are making the requests. Also, he says, taxpayers ''have every right to know precisely how applicants are being treated'' by public institutions.
So far, universities that have responded say the requests are too broad. An official at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign wrote in a letter that the request is ''unduly burdensome.'' Lewis Morrissey, freedom of information officer at the University of Michigan, said the request does not describe a ''public record sufficiently to enable the public body to find the public record.''
Wilson says his group expects the requests to be ''met with delay and evasion,'' but ''we intend to persevere.''
Other groups participating in the effort plan to analyze the schools' policies as they are collected. If any policies appear questionable, the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Virginia-based group, will consider filing complaints against specific universities with the Justice Department or the civil rights office of the Education Department. The Center for Individual Rights, which represented rejected white students in the University of Michigan legal case, says an analysis of the data gathered through the requests may lead to more lawsuits.
The Supreme Court ruled in June that universities can consider race as one of many factors in admissions. But it said certain University of Michigan undergraduate policies, including awarding points based on an applicant's race or ethnicity, were unconstitutional.
Since then, a number of schools have dropped or expanded access to recruitment programs or scholarships once available exclusively to certain minorities. At least three institutions -- Michigan, Ohio State University and the University of Massachusetts -- revamped admissions policies effective last fall. Applications are still being processed, but Michigan reported drops in minority applications this year, and Ohio State has reported a drop in applications from blacks. Minority applications in Massachusetts appear to be up slightly.
Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education, a group for higher education leaders, calls the new demand for data unnecessary. ''We're talking about a complex process that does not lend itself to simple quantification.''
But Curt Levey, director of legal and public affairs for the Center for Individual Rights, says colleges that resist the requests send the message that they have something to hide -- that ''they want to use (racial) references and they don't want the public to know.''
Copyright © 2004 USA Today, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
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