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raveneye · 03-28-2005, 08:09 AM

Well I am a person who has been employed to enforce AA in a college admissions setting, and I can add several points to this discussion.

(1) It is entirely possible and indeed easy to admit college applicants blind. You simply have the admissions secretary fill out an excel spreadsheet with all the grades and test scores, names replaced by a code, and separate the essays from the rest of the application, and she emails the spreadsheet to everybody on the admissions committee. The "quality" of the applicant is determined close to 100% by the grades, test scores, and essays, and these are easy to evaluate without ever seeing the person's name, picture, country of origin, or knowing the person's race, gender, or ethnicity.

(2) If you do this, then the proportion of minorities admitted (blacks and Hispanics mainly) drops by about 50% below what it would have been under a racial quota system.

(3) Most colleges and universities have female majorities, so AA in favor of females is no longer an issue in college admissions. In fact, many places actually (secretly) practice preferential admissions for males, to counter the ongoing trend of increasing proportion of females.

(4) The Regents of the University of California voted in 1995 to abandon quotas in college admissions for the University of California. Their reasons were essentially the standard conservative argument: discrimination in and of itself is wrong because it is an injustice to the individual impacted, regardless who that individual is. In fact the most vocal UC Regent in support of ending quotas was a black regent (by the name of Ward Connerly).

(5) My feeling based on my own experience in admitting underqualified minorities to university is that this practice does not benefit these students. Most either drop out in shame, or are allowed to go through the system under a substantially lower standard of evaluation than everybody else. These students often become socially stigmatized.

(6) And it is worth pointing out that numerical quotas are unconstitutional. There have been several Supreme Court rulings now that have established that.

If explicit numerical quotas are unconstitutional, I think it is legitimate to ask: why should a nod and a wink then be constitutional? Why should a secret and unstated magnitude of preference be constitutional while an explicit, concrete preference is not?

03-28-2005, 08:09 AM	#42 (permalink)
raveneye Born Against	Well I am a person who has been employed to enforce AA in a college admissions setting, and I can add several points to this discussion. (1) It is entirely possible and indeed easy to admit college applicants blind. You simply have the admissions secretary fill out an excel spreadsheet with all the grades and test scores, names replaced by a code, and separate the essays from the rest of the application, and she emails the spreadsheet to everybody on the admissions committee. The "quality" of the applicant is determined close to 100% by the grades, test scores, and essays, and these are easy to evaluate without ever seeing the person's name, picture, country of origin, or knowing the person's race, gender, or ethnicity. (2) If you do this, then the proportion of minorities admitted (blacks and Hispanics mainly) drops by about 50% below what it would have been under a racial quota system. (3) Most colleges and universities have female majorities, so AA in favor of females is no longer an issue in college admissions. In fact, many places actually (secretly) practice preferential admissions for males, to counter the ongoing trend of increasing proportion of females. (4) The Regents of the University of California voted in 1995 to abandon quotas in college admissions for the University of California. Their reasons were essentially the standard conservative argument: discrimination in and of itself is wrong because it is an injustice to the individual impacted, regardless who that individual is. In fact the most vocal UC Regent in support of ending quotas was a black regent (by the name of Ward Connerly). (5) My feeling based on my own experience in admitting underqualified minorities to university is that this practice does not benefit these students. Most either drop out in shame, or are allowed to go through the system under a substantially lower standard of evaluation than everybody else. These students often become socially stigmatized. (6) And it is worth pointing out that numerical quotas are unconstitutional. There have been several Supreme Court rulings now that have established that. If explicit numerical quotas are unconstitutional, I think it is legitimate to ask: why should a nod and a wink then be constitutional? Why should a secret and unstated magnitude of preference be constitutional while an explicit, concrete preference is not?