Race-Neutral Plans Have Limits In Aiding Diversity, Experts Say
washingtonpost.com
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 17, 2003; Page A12
Some selective state universities have achieved a significant level of racial diversity using the race-neutral admissions programs advocated by President Bush, but those approaches have proven far less effective at integrating graduate schools, experts said.
The race-neutral plans also probably would fall short of maintaining current levels of diversity at the nation's private colleges and universities, almost all of which could be affected if the Supreme Court adopts Bush's posture on affirmative action when it rules in two closely watched cases later this year, they said.
In announcing his administration's opposition to the University of Michigan's race-conscious admissions policies, Bush said colleges and universities can achieve significant levels of racial diversity without considering an applicant's race. The administration was scheduled to file legal papers yesterday laying out its position in the two affirmative action cases that the Supreme Court will review.
"Systems in California and Florida and Texas have proven that by guaranteeing admissions to the top students from high schools throughout the state, including low-income neighborhoods, colleges can attain broad racial diversity," Bush said. "In these states, race-neutral admissions policies have resulted in levels of minority attendance for incoming students that are close to, and in some instances slightly surpass, those under the old race-based approach."
In Texas, students are guaranteed a spot in the state university of their choice as long as they graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class. California guarantees admission to students who graduate in the top 4 percent, while any Florida student who graduates in the top 20 percent is guaranteed a place at a public university.
In addition to instituting "percentage plans," public universities in Texas and California are also giving more weight to an applicant's socioeconomic status. Students are given a leg up in the admission process if they come from poor neighborhoods, have parents who did not attend college or are from low-income families. More schools also have intensified their recruiting and student preparation efforts to try to maintain racial diversity.
They have opened recruitment centers in minority communities, forged partnerships with high schools and started summer academies for promising high school students. "There is no better way to guarantee a certain percentage of the student body is minority than by taking race into account," said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has studied alternatives to race-based affirmative action.
"But having said that, we've seen, in a number of states where there was a large drop-off in minority enrollment when the consideration of race is banned, a strong rebound when states put some of these race-neutral programs in place." At the University of Texas, for example, black students accounted for 3.7 percent of the school's entering class, and Hispanics comprised 12.8 percent of the class, in the year before race-conscious admissions were outlawed. Last fall, just under 3 percent of the freshman class was black and 12.4 percent was Hispanic.
Public universities in California also have reported a sharp rebound in the number of black and Hispanic students enrolling, although fewer have been going to the university's most prestigious branches -- Berkeley and Los Angeles. "That matters, because people get better opportunities when they graduate from flagship schools," said Mary Frances Berry, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which recently completed a report that concluded that percentage plans are a weak substitute for race-conscious affirmative action.
Race-neutral plans have also proven unsuccessful at restoring old levels of racial diversity at many graduate and professional schools. At the University of California at Los Angeles Law School, for example, the 2002 entering class was 13 percent black, Hispanic and Native American. In the last class admitted under a race-conscious policy, members of "underrepresented" minorities accounted for 22.5 percent of the student body. Higher education officials said percentage plans -- and even class-based affirmative action programs -- would probably not be effective in maintaining current levels of racial diversity everywhere nationwide.
Percentage plans rely on segregated high schools to produce racial diversity in colleges, and class-based affirmative action is likely to help mainly white students, because, numerically, whites make up the largest share of the nation's poor. Almost by definition, percentage plans would not apply to selective private universities, the vast majority of which have race-conscious admissions plans.
But private schools could be affected by the Supreme Court ruling because almost all receive federal funding. Critics of the percentage plans said that selecting students simply by their high school class rank is not sound educational policy. "It only looks at one dimension of the student," said Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan. "One of the things we like about our system is that it considers factors beyond grades and test scores."
Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Virginia-based think tank that opposes race-conscious affirmative action, said that while the percentage plans are better than "racial preferences," they still amount to a thinly veiled system of selecting students by race. "I think these plans are very vulnerable to a legal challenge," he said.
The University of Michigan admissions plan now before the Supreme Court rates undergraduate applicants on a 150-point scale. As many as 110 of those points are earned through purely academic factors -- a student's grade-point average, standardized test scores, the rigor of a student's high school and a student's high school curriculum.
The school also assigns a maximum of 40 points for other factors, including 20 points to students who belong to an underrepresented minority group or are socio-economically disadvantaged; 16 points to state residents who live in rural areas and 4 points to children of alumni. By considering race among a variety of admissions factors, the plan is similar to those used by virtually every selective college and university in the country.
"I don't have a problem with anybody trying economic, class-based affirmative action programs," Berry said. "They don't substitute for race, but they have important effects in overcoming wealth disparities. But it seems to me that if racial diversity is a worthy goal, rather than people squirming around to address race, they should acknowledge there is nothing wrong with giving a preference for race."
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