6/24/03 Los Angeles Times: "Court Affirms Use of Race in University 
Admissions,"
    The Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan's 
undergraduate admissions policy because it gave 20 bonus points 
to "underrepresented" minority applicants, which the university said did 
not include Asian Americans.
    The University of Michigan Law School receives about 3,500 
applications for 350 seats in its entering class. It chooses from students 
who have outstanding grades and test scores. It also seeks a "critical 
mass" of "underrepresented minority" students who are black, Latino or 
Native American.
    In recent years, 13% to 20% of its entering class has been made up of 
minorities. The proportion would have dropped to about 4% had the law 
school been required to admit students strictly based on their grades and 
test scores, O'Connor said.
    Barbara Grutter, the white plaintiff, was rejected despite a 3.8 grade-
point average and a score of 161 on the Law School Admissions Test. 
This was better than many of the minority applicants who were admitted, 
O'Connor noted.
    Someday, she said, the nation should revert to a strictly "race-neutral 
admissions formula" at all colleges. But that time has not arrived, she 
added.
    Requiring a "race-blind admissions policy" now would exclude most 
of the black and Latino students at the nation's most selective schools, 
she said.
    Still, affirmative action should not continue forever, she concluded.
    "Enshrining a permanent justification of racial preferences would 
offend [the] fundamental equal protection principle" set by the Constitution, 
O'Connor said. "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial 
preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved 
today."
    In dissent, Rehnquist called the focus on attaining a "critical mass" of 
minority students "a naked effort to achieve racial balancing." Justices 
Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy agreed with him.

Feb. 2003 The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: "How Bans on 
Race-Sensitive Admissions Severely Cut Black Enrollments at 
Flagship State Universities,"
    California, Florida, Georgia, and Texas prohibit their state 
universities from considering race as a positive factor in the 
admissions process.
    In 2001 the University of Georgia began to use a race-neutral 
admissions policy. This year 65% of all applicants to the University 
of Georgia were accepted for admission. Only 46.5% of black 
applicants were admitted.
    Affirmative action was prohibited in 2001 for admission to the 
University of Florida at Gainesville. That year black first-year 
enrollments dropped to 460 from 829 a year earlier when 
race was still considered in the admissions process.  Black first-year 
enrollment dropped 45%.
    In the 2002 entering class there are 659 black students, up 43% 
from a year earlier. Blacks made up nearly 10% of the first-year class 
at the University of Florida, up from 7.1% the year before. Blacks 
were slightly more likely to be accepted than whites at the University 
of Florida this year. More than 65% of all black applicants were 
admitted compared to 58% of white applicants. Black enrollments at 
the University of Florida remain 21% below the level of two years 
ago when affirmative action was used.
    In 1996 voters in California passed Proposition 209 which banned 
racial preferences in admissions in the state university system. The 
ban took effect for graduate programs in 1997 and for undergraduate 
students in 1998.
    For applicants for the fall 1998 entering class, the number of blacks 
admitted to the University of California at Berkeley was down more 
than 57% from a year earlier. Only 95 black freshmen enrolled in 1998, 
down from 258 black first-year students the year before when 
affirmative action was still permitted. This was a drop of more than 63%.
    This year there are 142 black first-year students at Berkeley, and 
they make up 3.9% of the freshman class. The number of black students 
at Berkeley is up 49% from the low of 95 black freshmen in 1998. The 
number of black freshmen at Berkeley is down 45% from the level that 
prevailed before the ban on affirmative action was instituted in 1998.
    In March 1996 in the Hopwood case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for 
the Fifth Circuit ruled affirmative action at the University of Texas law 
school violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment 
of the U.S. Constitution. When the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear 
an appeal in the case, Texas' attorney general issued an opinion that 
all state universities should abolish affirmative action admissions plans.
    In 1996, 501 black students were admitted to the undergraduate 
program at the University of Texas at Austin. The next year, there were 
419 black admits. In the fall of 1997, there were 163 black enrollees, 
one more than had enrolled a year earlier. Because of a large increase 
in white enrollments, the black percentage of the freshman class at the 
Austin campus dropped from 2.9% in 1996 to 2.5% in 1997.
    In the current 2002-03 academic year there are 271 black first-year 
students at the Austin campus. This is 67% more than was the case in 
1996 before the Hopwood decision was announced. In 1996 blacks 
made up 2.9% of all entering students. Today, blacks make up 3.4% of 
the freshman class. The black student graduation rate at the University 
of Texas at Austin is 51%.
    The University of Texas law school did not graduate its first black 
student until 1954. By 1974, 22 blacks had graduated from the law 
school. In the mid-1970s, an affirmative action admissions program 
was set in place. By 1979 there were 17 blacks in the graduating class. 
In 1986 there were 44 black graduates. From 1986 to 1996, there was 
an average of 36 blacks in each first-year law class.
    In 1996, immediately before the Hopwood ruling that year, 65 black 
students were admitted to the University of Texas law school. The next 
year, after the ban on affirmative action went into effect, only 11 black 
students were admitted to the law school, a drop of 83%. There were 31 
black students in the first-year law school class in 1996. In 1997 there 
were four black first-year students, a drop of 87%. This year, the sixth 
entering class since the Hopwood decision, there are 21 black first-year 
students. Black enrollments are only one half the level that prevailed 
in 1992.
    As late as 1994, 31 black first-year students enrolled at the Boalt 
Hall law school at the University of California at Berkeley. The next year 
the regents imposed the affirmative action ban, which went into effect 
in 1997. In 1996, the last year of race-sensitive admissions at Boalt 
Hall, 20 first-year black students enrolled, a drop of 35% from the 
previous year.
    In 1997 the regents' ban on affirmative action went into effect for 
graduate programs at the University of California. That year black law 
school admits dropped from 77 to 18, a decrease of 76.6%. Black first-
year enrollments dropped from 20 in 1996 to one in 1997. In each of the 
past two years 14 black first-year students have enrolled. Today first-year 
enrollments are less than one half the level of black enrollments that 
prevailed when Boalt Hall practiced affirmative action.
    In 1994, black enrollments at the UCLA law school reached a high of 
46. The next year, after the affirmative action ban was announced, black 
enrollments dropped by more than one half to 20. In 1997, when the ban 
took effect, there were only 10 black first-year law students at UCLA. 
In 1999 only three black first-year law school students enrolled at UCLA. 
Since 1999 black enrollments have edged up each year. This past fall 
13 black students enrolled, less than one third the total black first-year 
enrollments that existed eight years ago in 1994 when affirmative action 
was still practiced.

12/18/02 Wall Street Journal: "Law Schools Hatch Rebellion Against
U.S. News Rankings: Group of Law Schools Weighs Plan To Deny
LSAT Scores to Magazine,"
    For years, college and university administrators have griped about the
influential U.S. News & World Report rankings of their institutions. Among
their complaints: The magazine's standings stoke the competitive frenzy over
college admissions and inflate the importance of applicants' test scores.
    Under a concept being developed by the Law School Admission
Council, a nonprofit organization of 185 U.S. law schools and 15 in Canada
that administers the Law School Admission Test, member schools would no
longer be told the actual LSAT scores of their applicants -- and so couldn't
provide schoolwide scores to the magazine.
    Under the proposed change, when a law school asks the council for an
applicant's LSAT score, the council would disclose only how that student's
score ranks among all the school's applicants. For example, it might say
that the student's score was in the 63rd percentile of applicants, or in
the 55th percentile of students whom the school admitted the previous
year. But the council wouldn't divulge the applicant's individual score.
    The change "would take some pressure off the use of this test in
the admissions process, which we believe is desirable," says
admission council President Philip Shelton. As a result, he contends,
LSAT scores would fade in importance for admissions compared
with other credentials, such as grades and leadership ability.
Nearly every law school requires applicants to take the LSAT,
which measures reading comprehension as well as reasoning ability
and is scored on a 120-180 scale. 
    In 2001-2002, the council administered 134,251 LSAT tests to more 
than 100,000 students; about 20% of students take it twice. Once a 
school receives an application, it contacts the council for the applicant's 
score.
    A year ago, the council appointed a group headed by Richard
Geiger, dean of admissions at Cornell University's law school, to
brainstorm ways of reducing the reliance on the LSATs. Mr. Geiger
describes the plan that resulted, which includes the new way of
handling LSAT scores, as "a solution that seems to have wheels."
    Mr. Shelton says the plan is still "embryonic," and would require
approval from the council's 18-member board. Among unresolved
questions are whether the applicant would be told his or her
numerical score, and whether participation in the plan would be
compulsory for all law schools. At the very least, he says, "some
solid number" of the nation's top 25 law schools would have to buy
into the idea for it to succeed. If all goes well, he says, the council,
based in Newtown, Pa., would test the plan on a sample of students
entering law school in 2004, and then implement it for 2005.
    Since whites significantly outscore minorities on the LSAT,
Mr. Shelton adds, law schools that de-emphasize the test would
also have the "flexibility" to admit more minorities -- pending the
outcome of a case before the U.S. Supreme Court on the
legality of race preferences at the University of Michigan law
school.

12/8/02 New York Times: "Using Synonyms for Race, College Strives for 
Diversity,"
    When a federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled in 1996 that the 
University of Texas Law School could not legally consider race in admitting 
students, lawyers at Rice University, a highly selective private college here, 
reluctantly decided that the ruling applied to it, too. Almost overnight, the 
admissions officers at Rice stopped saying aloud the words "black," 
"African-American," "Latino," "Hispanic" or even "minority" in their 
deliberations.
    The next year, the proportion of black students admitted in the freshman 
class fell by half; the proportion of Hispanics fell by nearly a third. The 
university feared that openly defying the federal court could cost it $45 
million annually in federal aid, about 15% of its budget.
    But like other colleges, Rice says it remains fiercely committed to having 
a diverse student body, so in the years since, it has developed creative, 
even sly ways to meet that goal and still obey the court. Thus the admissions 
committee, with an undisguised wink, has encouraged applicants to discuss 
"cultural traditions" in their essays, asked if they spoke English as a second 
language and taken note, albeit silently, of those identified as presidents of 
their black student associations. 
    Those efforts, along with stepped-up recruiting at high schools with 
traditionally high minority populations, yielded a freshman class last year 
with a near-record composition of blacks and Hispanics. Of the 700 
freshmen, 7% are black, 11% Hispanic.
    The experience of Rice provides a preview of the subtle ways that life 
would most likely change inside the admissions offices of colleges like 
Yale, Princeton and Stanford should the Supreme Court decide to impose 
strict restrictions on affirmative action. Those restrictions could be issued 
next year, when, the court said this week, it intends to consider two cases 
challenging racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan. 
At issue is the court's 1978 Bakke decision, which has been widely 
interpreted as permitting public and private colleges to consider an 
applicant's race a "plus" in assembling a class.
    Public universities - including those in Texas, Florida and California - 
have responded to lower-court decisions and other efforts to roll back 
Bakke by automatically accepting a set percentage of students ranked at 
the top of each public high school in their states. Because some of those 
high schools have heavy minority populations, a minority presence in the 
university system is assured.
    But private colleges like Rice have long shunned such formulas as too 
mechanical and impersonal and have instead adopted a more nuanced 
approach that colleges elsewhere see as a blueprint, should they face a 
prohibition like that imposed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, whose 
jurisdiction is Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana.
    "You can no longer say to the committee, `This is a great African-
American from New York,' " said Julie M. Browning, the dean for 
undergraduate enrollment at Rice. "You have to drop a lot of language 
associated with affirmative action." Instead, Ms. Browning said, the 
admissions team at Rice has developed a whole new vocabulary - 
including the overarching goal of achieving "cultural inclusiveness" in the 
student body - to justify its admissions decisions.
    That new lexicon was evident this morning as the seven-member 
admissions committee met under a vaulted stucco ceiling here to winnow 
the list of nearly 500 students who have applied for early admission to the 
Class of 2007.
    One of the first candidates under consideration had an obviously 
Hispanic last name, but no one on the committee mentioned it. Though 
other colleges affix color-coded stickers to the folders of minority 
applicants, Rice blots out students' answers to questions on their 
application about race or ethnicity. (Office assistants who are sworn to 
secrecy first record the answers for later use to make a statistical profile 
of applicants.) While there were obvious clues that this applicant was 
Hispanic - a recommendation from a teacher noted his "desire to 
represent his Hispanic heritage" - the members of the committee found 
other ways to support his case, including his good grades in hard 
courses. "He is first-generation college," said Jamila Mensa, the 
admissions officer charged with making the presentation. "The teacher 
described him as altruistic."
    Another committee member, noting problems in the student's family, 
used admissions' shorthand to describe the candidate as "an overcome," 
and later said, "I just like the `overcome' here." In the committee's 
opinion, these qualities helped the student rise above an SAT score 
more than 150 points below the 1400-point median at Rice in recent 
years. After just a few minutes of discussion, he was unanimously 
admitted.
    For opponents of affirmative action, who have long argued that 
colleges have different standards for white and nonwhite applicants, the 
vote on this student would have provided little comfort. In response to 
a reporter's question, university officials refused to release statistics 
that they have gathered comparing the SAT scores of minority 
applicants accepted to Rice to those of non-minority applicants. They 
said only that the scores of minorities are generally lower nationally, 
and in the Rice pool as well.
    Partly by engaging in delicate minuets like those danced by the 
committee this morning, Rice has faced no legal challenges in the six 
years since the lower court ruled in the case known as Hopwood v. 
Texas.
    "You can't be using race or ethnicity as a factor in admission," said 
Richard Zansitis, the university's general counsel, in explaining the 
ground rules of Hopwood, which could serve the Supreme Court as a 
blueprint. "On the other hand, if a student has shown leadership - it may 
be in the black students association, it could be the chess club - that's 
something to look for in assessing that student as an individual. 
Whether it's leadership in an ethnic or racial organization is irrelevant."
    The timing of the Hopwood decision was especially inopportune for 
Rice, which generally receives about 7,000 applications for a freshman 
class of about 700. Founded by a wealthy cotton trader in the early 
1900's as an exclusively white institution, the university went to court in 
1965 to change its charter so that minority students would be welcome 
to study on its campus of gingerbread buildings. By 1996, the 
proportion of blacks (7.7%) and Hispanics (11%) in the freshman class 
was among the highest of any top college in the nation. Six years later, 
the Class of 2006, which arrived on campus this fall, was 7.1% black 
and 11% Hispanic. The percentage of Asian-Americans was 16%.


11/20/02 Associated Press: "Rights panel: Diversity lags under UC plan. 
Admissions policy adopted to replace race-based system is called 
ineffective. UC disputes that."
    The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported fewer blacks and 
Hispanics were admitted and enrolled in the University of California 
graduate law and medical programs in 2001 than in 1995. The state 
voted to end race-based admissions in 1996, although the ban did not 
take effect until 1998-99.  Fewer blacks enrolled as undergraduates in 
2001 than in 1995, as well.  The number of Hispanics who enrolled grew 
slightly in that period. But they made up a smaller portion of the student 
body.
    The University of California said last month that minority enrollment 
at the medical and law schools is lower than it was before the passage 
of Proposition 209.
    In Texas, the report showed fewer blacks and Hispanics were 
admitted and enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001 than 
in 1996, before a federal court outlawed affirmative action in 
admissions at public universities.

10/22/02 The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: "The Progress of 
Black Student Enrollments at the Nation's Highest-Ranked Colleges 
and Universities,"

10/02 The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: "The Expanding Racial 
Scoring Gap Between Black and White SAT Test Takers"
    Under an admissions system in which race can no longer be used as a positive factor in the admissions process, standardized test scores will 
almost certainly become a more important component in deciding who is admitted and who is rejected at our leading colleges and universities. 
    The latest statistics on standardized test scores for college admissions 
show clearly that if the race-neutral admissions policies now in place in 
California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Washington State are applied nationwide, blacks will be almost totally excluded from admission to the 
nation's highest-ranked colleges and universities. The reason for this is 
that only a very tiny percentage of college-bound black students score at 
the top of the SAT scale. 
    Under the SAT scoring system, students hoping to qualify for admission 
to any of the nation's 25 highest-ranked universities and 25 highest-ranked 
liberal arts colleges need to score at least 700 on each portion of the SAT. 
    For admission to the very highest ranked, brand-name schools such as Princeton or MIT, applicants realistically need scores of 750 to be 
considered for admission. Yet, as we shall see, only a minute percentage 
of black test takers score at these levels. Thus, in a race-neutral admissions environment, high-ranking colleges and universities will choose their first-
year students from a pool in which there will be very few blacks. 
    Let's be more specific about the SAT racial gap among high-scoring applicants. In 2002, 122,684 African Americans took the SAT test. They 
made up 9.2% of all SAT test takers. But only 838 African-American college-bound students scored 700 or above on the math SAT and only 
822 scored at least 700 on the verbal SAT. Nationally, 83,689 students of 
all races scored 700 or above on the math SAT and 59,662 students 
scored 700 or above on the verbal SAT. Thus, in this top-scoring category 
of all SAT test takers, blacks make up only 1% of the students scoring 700 
or higher on the math test and only 1.4% of the students scoring 700 or 
higher on the verbal SAT. 
    If we eliminate Asians and other minorities from the statistics and 
compare just white and black students, we find that 5.1% of all white SAT 
test takers scored 700 or above on the verbal portion of the test. But only 
0.7% of all black SAT test takers scored at this level. Therefore, whites 
were more than seven times as likely as blacks to score 700 or above on 
the verbal SAT. Overall, there are more than 43 times as many whites as 
blacks who scored at least 700 on the verbal SAT. 
    On the math SAT, only 0.7% of all black test takers scored at least 700 compared to 6.2% of all white test takers. Thus, whites were nearly nine 
times as likely as blacks to score 700 or above on the math SAT.  Overall, 
there were 51 times as many whites as blacks who scored 700 or above 
on the math SAT. 
    If we raise the top-scoring threshold to students scoring 750 or above 
on both the math and verbal SAT - a level equal to the mean score of 
students entering the nation's most selective colleges such as Harvard, 
Princeton, and CalTech - we find that in the entire country 195 blacks 
scored 750 or above on the math SAT and 218 black students scored 
750 or above on the verbal portion of the test. Nationwide, 26,838 students scored at least 750 on the math test and 20,160 scored at least 750 on 
the verbal SAT. Therefore, black students make up 0.7% of the test takers 
who scored 750 or above on the math test and 1% of all test takers who 
scored 750 or above on the verbal section.  
    Once again, if we eliminate Asians and other minorities from the 
calculations and compare only blacks and whites, we find that 0.18% of all 
black test takers scored 750 or above on the verbal SAT compared to 
1.7% of all white test takers. Thus, whites were nearly 10 times as likely 
as blacks to score 750 or above on the verbal portion of the test. Overall, 
there were 54 times as many whites as blacks who scored at or above the 
750 level. 
    On the math SAT, only 0.16% of all black test takers scored 750 or 
above compared to 1.8% of white test takers. Thus, whites were more than 
11 times as likely as blacks to score 750 or above on the math SAT.  
Overall, there were 65 times as many whites as blacks who scored 750 
or above on the math section of the SAT. 
    In a race-neutral competition for the approximately 50,000 places for 
first-year students at the nation's 25 highest-ranked universities, high-
scoring blacks will be buried by a huge mountain of high-scoring nonblack students. Today, under prevailing affirmative action admissions policies, 
there are about 3,000 black first-year students matriculating at these 25 high-ranking universities, about 6% of all first-year students at these 
institutions. But if these schools operated under a strict race-neutral 
admissions policy where SAT scores were the most important qualifying yardstick, these universities could fill their freshman classes almost 
exclusively with students who score at the very top of the SAT scoring 
scale. As shown previously, black students make up at best between 
1% and 2% of these high-scoring groups. 
    If the nation now insists on race-blind college admissions, it must face 
the near certainty that the percentage of black students at the nation's highest-ranked colleges and universities will drop from the present 
average of about 6% to 2% or less.

10/02 The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. 
	In 1997, prior to the ban on race-based admissions, 515 black students 
were admitted to the University of California at Berkeley. This spring 290 black 
students were admitted to Berkeley, a drop of more than 43%.
	At UCLA 32% fewer black students were admitted this year than was 
the case in 1997 when race-based admissions were permitted at the University 
of California system.
	The medical school of the University of California at San Diego has only 
one black student currently enrolled, down from 14 black students three years 
ago.
	At the medical school of the University of California at San Francisco, 
black enrollments are down 31% over the past three years.
	At the UCLA business school, black enrollments are down 42% from 
three years ago when race-based admissions was allowed.
	At Berkeley's Haas School of Business, black enrollments have 
dropped 29% over the past three years.

10/10/02 Sacramento Bee: "Diversity rises at UC med, law schools. The university says efforts to lure underrepresented students are 'beginning to
show success.'"
    The percentage of underrepresented students enrolling in the University
of California's medical and law schools went up this year, UC officials said Wednesday.
    At UC's five medical schools, the proportion of first-year American Indian, African American and Latino students rose to 16.5% in fall of 2002 from
11.9% in 2001.
    Such enrollments also climbed at UC's three law schools, to 16.2% this
year from 11% in 2001, UC officials said in a statement.
    The number of underrepresented students in the law and medical schools
fell after voters passed the anti-affirmative action initiative Proposition 209. Before the 1996 initiative, the proportion of underrepresented minorities consistently was greater than 20%, UC officials said.
    Earlier this year, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante called on the UC regents to implement a new comprehensive admissions-review policy approved for undergraduates. On Wednesday, Bustamante said "we need to have
admissions based on merit, through comprehensive review, at medical
schools, law schools and graduate programs in the UC system."
    The number of first-year underrepresented students in medical school went
up at all campuses with that program: Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego
and Berkeley. UC statistics did not separate the numbers by race or ethnicity.
    At UC law schools, the numbers were broken out. At UC Davis, the
percentage of underrepresented American Indians stayed at 0.5%. The percentage increased among African Americans to 4.2% from 1.9% and
rose among Latinos to 11.6% from 6.5%. UC Berkeley showed increases
among American Indians and Latinos, but not African Americans. UCLA saw
increases in the percentage of African Americans, but lost ground among American Indians and Latinos.

10/3/02 The Dartmouth: "Steinberg '88 examines the admissions process,"
Jacques Steinberg (Dartmouth '88) takes a sympathetic view of the college admissions process in his new book, The Gatekeepers. Steinberg spent 
the 1999-2000 school year shadowing the work of Ralph Figueroa, an admissions officer at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. Steinberg acknowledged that the admissions process could often be "personal" and "idiosyncratic," even "arbitrary." Steinberg's account of Figueroa's reactions 
to the applications of Tiffany Wang and Aggie Ramirez nicely demonstrates 
this idiosyncrasy. Wang scored a 1470 on the SAT I, well above Wesleyan's average, and has taken six Advanced Placement courses to date. Ramirez scored 1090 and received a smattering of C's and D's in her senior year. Nonetheless, Figueroa, after much deliberation, assigned Wang a "deny 
plus" and Ramirez an "admit minus." He sensed -- from Tiffany's relatively 
low class ranking and a teacher's recommendation saying she was surprised 
that Tiffany made National Merit Semifinalist -- that Tiffany had not challenged herself as she should have in high school. By contrast, Ramirez had already 
won a scholarship to a private boarding school in Maryland, been elected president of her class and thrown herself into extracurricular activities. 
Ultimately, both Wang and Ramirez made Wesleyan's wait list.

5/18/02 Associated Press: "Vanderbilt recruitment produces unease," 
	Jews account for about 4% of Vanderbilts enrollment of 10,500, 
compared with more than 20% at Ivy League schools. About 2% of the US 
population is Jewish. 
	Last year's college-bound Jewish seniors averaged 1,161 out of a 
possible 1,600 on the SAT, second only to Unitarians among 35 religions, 
according to the College Board, which administers the exam. 
	As recently as the 1960s, some top universities used quotas to hold 
down Jewish enrollment. During the 1970s, Jewish enrollment at Vanderbilt 
was 9% or 10%, but it slipped as Ivy League and other prestigious 
universities abandoned the quotas. 

4/9/02 washingtonpost.com
    The number of African American and Hispanic students being offered admission to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in September has more than tripled from a year ago, from nine students to 30.
    Officials mailed letters of acceptance last week to 449 eighth-graders across Northern Virginia for what could be the largest freshman class ever at Jefferson, a regional magnet school in the Alexandria section of Fairfax.
    African American and Hispanic students make up 25% of all eighth-graders.
    Jefferson is ranked among the nation's best public high schools. Admission 
to Jefferson is as competitive as it is for an Ivy League university. Students must take a multiple-choice test and submit grades, teacher recommendations, a list of extracurricular activities and an essay. An estimated 800 semifinalists are selected from test results and grades, and 15 members of the admissions committee read each application before the finalists are offered admission. 
This year, a record 3,000 students from Arlington, Loudoun, Prince William, Fauquier and Fairfax counties and Falls Church applied.
    Ten African Americans and 20 Hispanic students have been admitted to Jefferson's Class of 2006. The current freshman class -- the Class of 2005 -- 
has two blacks and seven Latino students.
    In recent months, several changes have been made in Jefferson's admissions process. Officials gave every applicant a 16-page booklet of sample test questions and test-taking tips. The school's PTSA diversity committee held a reception for all minority applicants and organized two test-prep courses for them.
    Not all minorities are in short supply at Jefferson: 130 Asians were offered admission last week. No Native Americans were, however.
    Next year, the school district will offer a test-prep course for about 225 students, and several School Board members have said they hope preference will be given to students from Fairfax middle schools that don't typically send many students to Jefferson.
    Officials expanded the freshman class for September and have offered admission to 29 students from these underrepresented middle schools. One of those students is black, none is Hispanic.


4/7/02 New York Times: "Admission Up for Minorities in California,"
    Offers of admission to black, Hispanic and American Indian students in the University of California system have rebounded to levels above where they 
were before race and ethnicity were banned from the selection process.
    The university voted in 1995 to prohibit consideration of race, ethnicity and 
sex in admissions. The policy took effect in 1998. California voters approved a broader prohibition in 1996 covering hiring, contracting and university admissions.
    Before comprehensive review, campuses used a two-tier process in which 
the first 50% to 75% of the freshman class was admitted based solely on grade-point averages and test scores. The second tier took into account factors like the number of advanced courses available to the student in high school, participation in extracurricular activities and leadership skills.
    Admission of blacks, Hispanics and American Indians, categorized as underrepresented minorities because of their low proportion in the system's eligibility pool, had fallen off drastically as consideration of race and ethnicity 
was eliminated from the review process.
    The University of California changed expanded the factors used in the selection process to include information like a student's success in overcoming economic and educational disadvantages. The policy, known as comprehensive review, was criticized by some as bringing affirmative action in through a back door.
    In recent years, minorities numbers had begun to increase. For those minority students recently offered admission for next fall, the number reached 19.1%, compared with 18.8% in the fall of 1997. The number fell to 16.7% in 1998.

4/6/02 Associated Press: "Calif. minority admissions top level reached in 
1997,"
    San Diego - For the first time since it abolished affirmative action, the University of California system has admitted more minority students than it 
did during the last days of its race-based admissions policies. Of the 
48,369 students admitted to this fall's freshman class, 19.1% were from Hispanic, black, or American Indian backgrounds. That is up from 18.8% in 
1997, the last year the public university system used race as a factor in admission.
    The University of California, San Diego, saw the greatest leap in 
admissions of minority students, from 11.5% last year to 14.4% in 2002.
    Officials also gave credit for the gains to an investment by the state in 
targeting underrepresented students. Critics of affirmative action embraced 
the figures as proof that race has no place in the admissions process. ''I 
don't mean to gloat, but I told you so,'' said Ward Connerly, a regent at the University of California, who is black. ''We've been saying for a long time 
that these kids don't need any special treatment to get into the UC system.''
    Following the ban on race-based admissions policies in 1998, the level 
of underrepresented students admitted dropped sharply. Since then, the 
numbers have returned to 1997 levels at some campuses. Despite the 
gains for the system as a whole, the number of minority students admitted 
to the university's most competitive campuses has not had the same 
rebound. At UCLA, for example, the new freshman class has more black 
and Hispanic students than last year, but its total number of minority 
admissions, 1,675, is still below the 2,010 the campus accepted in 1997. Berkeley and Irvine also have not returned to 1997 levels.

4/5/02 Daily California (Berkeley):  "Berkeley Admits First Class Using Comprehensive Review: Percentage of Underrepresented Minorities
Admitted Increases Slightly,"
   For the fourth year since racial preferences were banned from the UC admissions process, the number of underrepresented minorities admitted to
UC Berkeley remained below levels established during the affirmative action
era.
   The percentage of admits belonging to underrepresented minority groups increased slightly over last year, continuing a trend of gradual increase that
began after underrepresented minority admittance sharply fell in 1998.
   In 1997, 22% of admits were American Indian, African American or Latino.
In 1998 that number fell to 10%. At 15.9%, the statistic slightly increased this
year over last. But with significant changes to university policy taking effect
since last year's class was admitted, some officials had hoped for a more marked increase in minority enrollment.
   The 2002 admits were the first class selected using the comprehensive admissions process that replaced a two-tiered system that accepted some students solely based on academics. And last summer, the UC Board of
Regents repealed the university provisions that banned affirmative action,
a move that had only symbolic significance because racial preferences
are still banned in state agencies by Proposition 209.
   Assistant Vice Chancellor for Admissions and Enrollment Richard Black
said the numbers were not surprising. He also said that despite expectations
by some that the new admissions process would greatly boost minority enrollment, UC Berkeley admissions officials did not expect comprehensive review would significantly alter demographics. "This is really the fairest and
most thorough review we have ever had," Black said.
   But because of constraints on the campus's growth, UC Berkeley officials reduced the number of students admitted from last year, accepting 8,492 students, 215 fewer than the previous year. The reduction ends a three-year
trend of slow growth that is needed to accommodate an influx of students born
of baby boomers, called Tidal Wave II.
   With a record number of students applying for admission to UC Berkeley
and fewer being accepted, the campus became more competitive this spring. This year, only 23% of applicants were admitted.
   Because fewer students were admitted, a move also required because
more and more students are accepting the offer to attend UC Berkeley, the numbers of students admitted in all ethnic groups declined. The largest
decline by percentage of the class was among American Indians, as only 42
were admitted.
   The UC system as a whole grew 4.9% this year, despite the decline in the number of admits at its flagship campus. Slots as undergraduates at the eight
UC campuses were offered to 48,369 students. In the system over all, the
number of underrepresented minorities did increase by 648 admits.
   Latinos saw the biggest boost, with 515 additional acceptance letters
being sent to members of the ethnic group.
   UC spokesperson Hanan Eisenman said comprehensive
review had only a "modest impact" on the minority enrollment increase, and instead credited outreach efforts for the gains.
   Black said he hoped the regent's repeal of their affirmative action ban also played a role in greater minority acceptance. The regents' repeal was intended
to replace a welcome mat for minorities that some said had been yanked out along with affirmative action. The number of UC applications from minorities
did increase this year as they did the previous year.
   The number of applications from whites also climbed. The Berkeley campus also received more applications from all ethnic groups except American Indians.

4/2/02 washingtonpost.com: "College Applicants Urged to Take Cue From SAT Scores Pick School With Comparable Students Or Risk Falling Behind, Educators Say"
    George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams is concerned about the impact on minority students recruited to competitive schools despite mediocre scores. "It is an academic mismatch," said Williams, who is also a columnist and radio commentator. "You say to me, 'Mr. Williams, teach me to box,' and the first match I get for you is with Lennox Lewis. You are going to get your brains beaten out."
    Substandard scores on the SAT or the rival ACT do not necessarily reflect on a student's intelligence, Williams and other experts say. Rather, lower scores often signal less preparation for the literary and mathematical demands of college. Several studies show that students with lower SAT scores, on average, tend to have lower rates of graduation at very competitive colleges. Experts say low scores might also affect students in a different way, creating a psychological burden for all but the most self-confident teenagers.
    Williams cites the work of fellow economist Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who has been critical of affirmative-action policies that admit more minorities despite academic weaknesses. In his 1992 book "Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas," Sowell asks, "What was accomplished by admitting more black students and graduating fewer?"
    Williams, who also opposes affirmative-action programs, says students will be happier and more productive in schools at their level, and other experts agree. Harvard University historian Stephan Thernstrom cites a 1996 report in the journal Research in Higher Education showing that African Americans appear more likely to earn doctorates if they attend historically black colleges or urban universities, such as Wayne State in Detroit, that are less selective but have large minority enrollments. "The explanation, I think, is that you don't decide you're going to become a political scientist, historian or chemist unless you are one of the top students in that field in your college," Thernstrom said.
    Some universities say they are working to bolster the academic strengths of the lower-SAT-scoring students they admit. At the University of Virginia, the average SAT score of African American undergraduates entering in 1995 was 1036, nearly 200 points below the 1227 average of that entire entering class. But the percentage of African Americans in the class graduating six years later was high, 83.3% compared with 92.1% for the class.


1/1/02 Orange County Register: "Hispanics Under-represented in Gifted-
Student Programs," 
    Latinos were nearly 15% of Orange County's 37,759 gifted students last year, about the same as the year before, though they were 42% of enrollment overall, the largest group in the county's public schools, according to the state Department of Education.
    Anglo students were 57% of the gifted enrollment, and 41% of students overall. Asians were 24% of the gifted, double their total enrollment in public schools.
    Gifted programs aim to serve students with superior academic achievement or a skill in the arts, offering them a curriculum that allows them to excel and expand their skills at their own pace instead of forcing them to work at the level of their classmates.
    Statewide, Hispanics are nearly 21% of gifted students and 43% of the overall population. 
    In Orange County, the gap persists even in 10 of the 14 districts where Hispanics outnumber Asians or Anglos.  In Fullerton's high school district, 1,423 of the 2,488 Asians, or 57%, are listed as gifted in the state report. Hispanics are the district's largest group overall, but 590 of the 6,824 are gifted.
    In Fullerton's elementary and middle schools, which are 43% Hispanic, the main gifted programs are at schools that serve mostly white or Asian students. The district has 5,677 Hispanic students, but last year 12 were classified as gifted, compared with 202 Anglos and 175 Asians.

11/13/01 Washington Post: "Thomas Jefferson To Expand Admissions,"
    Fairfax County school officials, trying to increase diversity at the elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, agreed last night to increase the freshman class by 20 qualified students from underrepresented middle schools in the county.
    The proposal, by School Board Chairman Jane K. Strauss (Dranesville), would keep admissions procedures essentially the same until an estimated 400 students are selected. Then the admissions committee would admit 20 more semifinalists who live in the Route 1 corridor and other areas that typically don't send students to Jefferson. Strauss said the change would add diversity to the student body while maintaining the school's high academic standards. "We want to open doors for all children," Strauss said.
    The change would not go as far as School Superintendent Daniel A. Domenech's plan to address the lack of diversity. His idea -- to sort qualified semifinalists by middle school to ensure more geographic diversity -- was denounced by many parents in the McLean and Great Falls areas as a quota system. It was considered but rejected at a work session last night.
    Fairfax school administrators are under pressure to address what local officials have called an embarrassing decline of some minority groups at Jefferson. This year, only two blacks and seven Hispanics are among the school's ninth-graders -- an all-time low.
    For years, admissions committees would admit black and Hispanic students who failed to make the pool of 800 semifinalists but seemed otherwise qualified, according to Domenech. In the past, as many as 39 black students and 23 Latino students have been added to the yearly list of semifinalists. Last year, students benefiting from that procedure had a grade-point average of 3.58 as seniors at Jefferson, the superintendent said.
    School attorneys advised administrators to abandon the practice in 1998 after federal court rulings ended several affirmative action and school desegregation programs nationwide. Afterward, minority enrollment at Jefferson began to decline.

8/30/01 Washington Post: "Reporting of SAT Scores Revamped,"  Fairfax County, VA school officials have changed their method of reporting SAT results in a way that raises overall scores and gives a clearer picture of how minority students are faring.  Fairfax officials  double-checked the ethnic identity of each test-taker because they said the College Board figures consistently undercount the number of minority and ethnic students.  Fairfax data show the district average was 552 on the verbal section of the test and 564 on the math segment.  National scores were 506 and 514.  Average scores for Asian-American students were 523 in verbal and 582 in math.  Average scores for Latino students were 492 verbal and 497 math.  Average scores for African American students were 473 in verbal and 468 in math.  Average scores for white students were 574 in verbal and 468 in math.

8/28/01 Associated Press: "SAT Scores Similar to Last Year,"
    Average scores on the SAT college entrance tests taken by this year's high school graduates improved by a single point from the year before, in keeping with a general trend toward slowly rising scores over the past decade, the College Board reported Tuesday. 
    Some 1.3 million students averaged 506 on the SAT's verbal portion, one point higher than last year and the highest since 1987. The average score this year on the math section was 514, same as last year's 30-year high.     
    Women, now 54% of test takers, have made gains toward score-equality with men over the last 10 years but only very small ones. This year, women averaged 502 on verbal to the men's 509; women averaged 498 on math against the men's 533. In 1991, when women were 52% of students who took the SAT, they scored 495 on verbal against the men's 503. On math, women then scored 482 to the men's 520. 
    About a third of test-takers belong to racial and ethnic minorities. Blacks this year scored an average of 433 on verbal, 426 on math. A decade ago, they averaged 427 verbal, 419 math. 
    This year's graduates from various Hispanic groups scored an average of 456 on the verbal section, 460 on the math. In 1991, they averaged 452 on verbal, 457 on math. 
    Students who identified their backgrounds as Asian or Pacific Islander scored an outstanding 566 on the math section and 501 on verbal this year. By contrast, whites scored 531 in math and 529 on the verbal section. 


8/28/01 New York Times: "U. of Georgia Cannot Use Race in Admission Policy, Court Rules,"
    A federal appeals court panel ruled unanimously today that the admissions policy of the University of Georgia, which gives a slight preference in bonus points to nonwhite applicants, was unconstitutional.
    The three judges on the panel said the university failed to prove that having more nonwhite students on campus would lead to a more diverse student body.  Under some interpretations of the United States Supreme Court ruling in the landmark 1978 Bakke case, the creation of a more diverse student body might have justified the university's giving black students extra points in its
admissions calculations. 
    But the federal appeals court rejected that logic.
"Racial diversity alone is not necessarily the hallmark of a diverse student body," the judges on the panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit wrote, "and race is not necessarily the only, or best, criterion for determining the contribution that an applicant might make to the broad mix of experiences and perspectives" that create diversity.
    The court added that the university "did not even come close" to making the case that a greater variety of races automatically equals diversity.
    Today's ruling is the latest of several court decisions barring race as a factor in school admissions. A federal appeals court banned the practice in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi in 1996, and earlier this year a federal judge struck down the University of Michigan's race-conscious admissions policy used in its law school. But advocates of affirmative action took heart last December when a federal judge in Detroit upheld the University of Michigan's affirmative action policy for undergraduate admissions.
    The conflicts in rulings and differences in legal reasoning are widely expected to send the issue of race- based admission policy back to the United States Supreme Court for the first time since 1978.
    Although the University of Georgia is likely to appeal the decision, possibly  up to the Supreme Court, the force of the ruling is a severe blow to a policy strongly supported by a succession of state and university leaders.
    Having admitted no black students for its first 160 years, the University of Georgia has been more tenacious than most of its peers in maintaining its
system of assigning bonus points to nonwhite students to increase their chances of admission.
    In a statement issued this afternoon, the university's president, Michael F. Adams, gave no indication that he was ready to change that policy, although he did not specifically say what his next step would be. The university could appeal to the full 11th Circuit of 12 judges, and then to the Supreme Court.
    "Sometimes you are defined by the battles in which you engage rather than by those you win," Mr. Adams said. "We are clearly disappointed in the court's decision. We certainly respect the court, but may have a differing opinion about whether the university's admissions program is narrowly tailored.  I would hesitate to say anything further until we have had in-depth consultation with legal counsel, the chancellor and the governor's office."
    Lee Parks, the Atlanta lawyer who represents the three white women who became plaintiffs in the case after being rejected for admission in 1999, said
he considered the opinion the definitive legal statement striking down the notion that diversity is related to race.
    "What the court said is that diversity isn't about race, it's about the individual backgrounds of students," said Mr. Parks, who has long been active in working against racial preference systems. "For so long, the civil rights groups have tried to create a linkage between race and diversity, but now we can see that it's really nothing more than a racial quota system."
    In the opinion, written by Judge Stanley Marcus, the court said that if the university wanted to create a community where students were exposed to different backgrounds and experiences, there were times when a white student might contribute more than one who was nonwhite. A white applicant from rural Appalachia may contribute more to the student body than a nonwhite applicant from suburban Atlanta, the judges said.
    Judge Marcus, appointed to the court in 1997 by President Bill Clinton, was joined in the opinion by Judges Stanley F. Birch, appointed in 1990 by
President George Bush, and Harlington Wood Jr., a visiting judge from the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit who was appointed in 1976 by
President Gerald R. Ford.
    Race can be considered as a factor in encouraging diversity, but it cannot be assumed that every nonwhite student will automatically contribute more to a diverse campus than white students, the opinion said.
    Therefore, the university's system of adding points to the admissions score of every nonwhite applicant violates the equal protection clause of the 14th
Amendment, the opinion said, because the university is required by previous Supreme Court decisions to show that race-based systems must achieve a clear
public purpose.
    The admissions policy, which is now on hold, applied to about 10 percent of the freshman students who were admitted on a basis other than grades and test scores. Despite the university's efforts, black students were never attracted to its main campus at Athens, where they constitute less than 6 percent of the student body in a state that is almost a third black.
    In its landmark 1978 decision in the University of California Regents v. Bakke, the swing vote on the court, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote that diversity could be a legitimate goal of a university's admissions policy.  Today's ruling was unusual in stating that Justice Powell's opinion was not necessarily binding.  But
even assuming that diversity is a compelling goal, the court wrote, it still does not necessarily justify a rigid racial preference policy.
    If the university "wants to ensure diversity through its admissions decisions, and wants race to be part of that calculus," the judges wrote, "then it must be prepared to shoulder the burden of fully and fairly analyzing applicants as individuals and not merely as members of groups when deciding their likely contribution to student body diversity."

7/18/01 Associated Press/AsianWeek.com: "Top Magnet School Struggles with Minority Enrollment,"
    Jefferson School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia, a magnet school with a national reputation, may have the smartest student body of any high school in the country. Last year, 153 students were named National Merit Scholar semifinalists, the most of any school in the nation. The average SAT score at the school is above 1400. 
        Four years ago, the school took race into account as it considered the thousands of applications it receives for the 400 or so spots available in each class.  As a result, the just-graduating class of 2001 was 5.8% black and 5.6% Latino.
    But subsequent court rulings led administrators to believe that the admissions process must be race neutral, so the school system changed its policy, said regional superintendent Michael Glascoe.  Once that changed, the numbers of blacks and Latinos dropped off considerably, Glascoe said.
    Asian-Americans constitute 21% of the incoming freshman class, blacks represent 0.5% and Latinos 1.6%: two African Americans and seven Latinos in a class of 430. 
    Blacks represent 11% and Latinos 13% of the 158,000-student school district system.  
    The Governor's School for Government and International Studies in Richmond, which along with Jefferson is one of only three magnet schools in the state to carry designation as an elite Governor's School, has also seen its number of blacks and Latinos drop. The incoming freshman class of 139 has only eight blacks and one Latino.  Four years ago, the freshman class had no Latinos, but 21 blacks in a class of 149. 
    The third all-day Governor's school, the Appomattox School in Petersburg, has been in existence for only two years, and enrollment figures were unavailable for incoming students.  At the Richmond school, the admissions process has always been race neutral.  But it still makes an extra effort to get minority students to apply. To begin with, it provides proportional representation to the 11 localities it serves, which ensures that the city of Richmond, which has a large black population, does not have to compete with wealthier suburban counties like Henrico and Chesterfield to place its students at the school. In addition, guidance counselors make sure to visit middle schools with high minority populations to encourage students there to apply, said admissions director Mike Geiger. 

7/13/01 San Jose Mercury News: "District Request To Use Racial Quotas Denied," 
    A federal judge has denied an attempt by the San Francisco Unified School District to bring back the controversial use of race in school admissions but has agreed to continue providing more than $37 million in desegregation funds, which were supposed to end next year.
    In a tentative agreement reached Wednesday, which must still be approved this fall by a federal judge in San Francisco, the district settled lingering issues in discrimination lawsuits filed by the NAACP in 1978 and by Chinese-American families in 1994.
    San Francisco schools have operated since 1983 under a consent decree that capped enrollment of any one racial or ethnic group in a school at 45% and required that at least four racial groups be enrolled at each campus.  In 1999, a federal judge ordered the racial quota system abolished as a result of a successful lawsuit brought by Chinese-American families.
    But the district, which has acknowledged it still has a long way to go with racial segregation and under-performing minority students, asked Judge William H. Orrick to reverse the ban on quotas.
    Orrick rejected the district's request. He did, however, agree to extend the district's desegregation funds through the 2005-06 school year. Lawyers for the district and the NAACP had argued that continued desegregation funds are still needed to remedy racial discrimination and segregation in city schools.

6/26/01 Los Angeles Times: "Focus on Affirmative Action in Mich."
    In March, U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman struck down the Michigan law school's affirmative action policy saying the admissions criteria were not clearly defined and relied too heavily on race. The university is continuing to use the policy pending appeals.
    Michigan's law school relies on grades and exam scores but considers applicants who have low scores but "may help achieve that diversity which has the potential to enrich everyone's education."
    Applicants are graded on a 150 -point scale. Blacks, Hispanics and American Indians get 20 points for their race -equal to raising their grade-point average a full point on a 4 -point scale.     

6/11/01 UCLA Daily Bruin Online: "SP-1 didn't limit access, it preserved UC quality," by Ward Connerly, a Regent of the University of California and Chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute.
    Admissions numbers presented us with a tremendous challenge. The number of underrepresented minorities (URM) admitted to the UC's undergraduate campuses continued the downward trend begun in 1995, when race preferences were still in use.  In 1995, the UC admitted 8,125 URM students.  By 1997, that number had dropped to 7,605.  With the end of the UC's preference policies in 1998 (the effective date of SP-1), URM admissions fell again to 7,187.  
    Since then, however, URM admissions have rebounded significantly.  In 1999, UC admitted 7,608 URM students, and in 2000 the UC's 8,221 URM admissions actually exceeded 1995's high-water mark. And, significantly, everyone admitted can lay legitimate claim to having earned the right to attend the nation's best public university system on his or her individual merit.  No longer can anyone else question whether attendance at the UC was distributed on simply refused to check off a racial or ethnic box. 
    Those who "declined to state" numbered 1,738 in the last year of race-based admissions (1997).  The following year, that number rose to 7,556, the largest group outside of those who self-identified as "white" or "Asian American."  While that number has dipped a bit since 1998, this year's batch of applications include 4,636 who object to being classified, sorted or tracked by racial group membership.

5/17/01 Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "Minorities still taking a pass on applying 
to U.of Washington: Efforts redoubled to attract them without using affirmative action," 
    In November 1998, Washington voters passed Initiative 200, which banned 
the consideration of race in university admissions, and government contracting and hiring. 
    In the fall of 1998, 1,108 or 25% of the freshmen at the University of Washington were Asian-American. 
    1999    1,163    5% increase
    2000    1,268    9% increase
    2001    1,382    9% increase (Newspaper says 9% increase but lists 1,378).
1999    141    31% decrease
    2000    116    18% decrease
    2001    205    77% increase


2/22/01 and 4/3/01 Brown Daily Herald
Brown University Class of '05
16,500 applicants
Asian Americans: 20.3% of the applicants, 16% of the acceptances
African Americans: 6% of the applicants, 9% of the acceptances
Latino Americans: 7.1% of the applicants, 9% of the acceptances
Whites and others: 66.6% of the applicants, 66% of the acceptances

2/12/01 The Daily Pennsylvanian (www.dailypennsylvanian.com): Asian American applicants represent 31% of the 19,086 applicants for the University of Pennsylvanias Class of 2005 but only about 23% of the acceptances.  UP accepts Asian Americans at a lower rate than any other group.

5/17/01 Seattle Post-Intelligencer Reporter: "Minorities still taking a pass on applying to UW: Efforts redoubled to attract them without using affirmative action,"
    In November 1998, Washington voters passed Initiative 200, which banned the consideration of race in university admissions, and government contracting and hiring.
    In the fall of 1998, 122 or 2.8% of the freshmen at the University of Washington were African Americans.
In the fall of 1999, their numbers dropped by 39% to 74.
In the fall of 2000, their numbers increased by 42% to 105.
In the fall of 2001, their numbers increased by 8% to 113.
    In the fall of 1998, 205 or 4.6% of the freshmen at the University of Washington were Hispanic/Latino.
In the fall of 1999, their numbers dropped by 31% to 141.
In the fall of 2000, their numbers dropped by 18% to 116.
In the fall of 2001, their numbers increased by 77% to 205.
    In the fall of 1998, 1,108 or 25% of the freshmen at the University of Washington were Asian-American.
In the fall of 1999, their numbers increased by 5% to 1,163.
In the fall of 2000, their numbers increased by 9% to 1,268.
In the fall of 2001, their numbers increased by 9% to 1,382. (Newspaper lists increase of 9% but lists 1,378).
    In the fall of 1998, 2,415 or 54.5% of the freshmen at the University of Washington were Caucasian.
In the fall of 1999, their numbers increased by 8% to 2,608.
In the fall of 2000, their numbers increased by 6% to 2,764.
In the fall of 2001, their numbers increased by 3% to 2,847. (Newspaper lists increase of 3% but lists 2,829).

5/17/01 UCLA Daily Bruin Online: "Admissions policy may change: Newest plans allow Academic Senates to recommend revisions,"  In 1995 the University of California Regents passed SP-1 and SP-2, which prohibited the use of race, gender and ethnicity in admissions and hiring.  Yesterday, the Regents passed RE-28, a resolution which rescinded SP-1 and SP-2.  After the adoption of SP-1 and 2, African American and Native American enrollments dropped by more than 50% between 1995 and 2000.  RE-28 counters SP-1 by giving Academic Senates the opportunity to recommend revisions to UC admissions policies.  RE-28 may comply with Proposition 209, a state law which prohibits the use of race or ethnicity by state agencies, but it could still provide a back door for UC's Academic Senates to modify admissions criteria in order to increase the number of African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans admitted.  The SAT I, Advanced Placement scores and minimum GPAs in admissions could theoretically be eliminated.  Many view RE-28 as merely symbolic since Proposition 209, a California initiative which bars affirmative action, is still in place.  However, Board of Regents spokesman Trey Davis said race would not resume its place in admissions criteria, but RE-28 gives faculty the prerogative to challenge UC's traditional number-crunching criteria.  Under SP-1, admission based on "academic achievement" was largely reliant on an applicant's GPA and SAT I scores. RE-28 struck out the UC's guidelines to admit 50 to 75% of applicants based on this criteria, leaving faculty free to define their own terms. Chancellor Albert Carnesale said UCLA admits 55% of students under academic achievement, but other factors such as socioeconomic hardships are also taken into consideration.

Many non-Asian-Americans favor reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans.  The Committee of 100, a Chinese-American group, commissioned a survey about attitudes toward Chinese-Americans.  Here is an excerpt from the report.  http://www.committee100.org/amer-att/summary.htm
    #9. A discussion about the educational success of Asian-America teens indicated that this issue has the potential to create some tension among non-Asian middle-class parents with college-bound kids. 
    The educational success of Asian American teens was well understood in the focus groups. The participants were very much aware that Asian American teens have won a disproportionate share of college admissions at the best schools in the country. 
    It is also clear this is a potentially divisive issue that is slowly moving to the surface and may have already begun to create some tensions among middle-class parents with college-bound kids. Several parents of college students spoke ruefully about the experience of their own kids struggling to compete against these Asian American academic superstars; a few expressed their strong disapproval of admission policies that so strongly favored one ethnic group. 
    In every focus group, there was a sizeable group of participants that adamantly favored merit-based admissions exclusively. "Wouldn't you want the very best brain surgeon operating on you?" was a question raised in more than one focus group. 
    The underlying issues about college admissions were not top-of- the- mind for the focus group participants and after a brief explanation, we began several extended debates on the issue. 
    On first consideration, a majority of the focus group participants were strong supporters of merit-based college admissions. However, when confronted with the reality of Asian American acceptance rates at the best schools, some of the non-Asian focus group participants became increasingly troubled about this imbalance and began to more carefully consider the merits of 
admission policies that also attempted to recruit racially representative classes. 
    Nevertheless at the end of lengthy discussions about merit-based acceptance policies verses admission policies that also strive to reflect the general 
population, a narrow majority of the participants continued to believe that college-based admissions should be based exclusively on merit. 
    However, most African Americans and Hispanics believed that colleges and universities have an obligation to make sure their student bodies reflect the 
general population. 

5/7/01 US News and World Reports: Editorial "Making the Grade," by Mortimer B. Zuckerman editor-in-chief.
    The achievement gap between whites and Asian- Americans on the one hand, and African-Americans, Latinos, and American Indians on the other begins widening as early as second grade, when intellectual foundations are laid. It persists as kids progress through school. Rich or poor. Minority students fall behind at all socioeconomic levels. Academic achievements of blacks of middle- and upper-middle-income families lag behind those of comparable whites. On some tests, black children from middle-class and wealthier families have done no better than white kids living in poverty.  Some data suggests that, at higher family achievement levels, the gap between the performance of black and white students is even wider than at lower levels.
    The easy thing is to attack the use of standardized tests, which reveal these gaps. But that's just shooting the messenger. How on Earth can we begin to reward talent and effort without some kind of an objective standard to test the qualifications of the millions of students who apply to our colleges each year? Of course, the standardized tests can't be the sole criterion for admission. They have to be considered in relation to other indicators of ability and energy. Indicators like a student's record in a variety of academic subjects over a course of time, the character and attitude of the applicant, and his or her record of involvement in nonacademic activities, like volunteer work. Eliminating the SATs will not make the underlying obstacles in educational achievement disappear. So, clearly, it has to be a priority to address the performance of all these minority kids.

Affirmative action is not permitted in University of California admissions, while private universities in California may still use affirmative action.  As the statistics below indicate, the private universities may be engaging in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans.  Another possibility is that public universities in California are less expensive for in-state residents, so the disparity may reflect the fact there are more Asian-Americans living in California than in other states, and they are choosing to attend less expensive schools.  
5/1/01 Daily Bruin Online: "Stanford, USC better reflect California demographics than UC".
Stanford and USC are each about 48% white, and about 24% Asian American.  At both UCLA and UC Berkeley, Asian Americans outnumber whites.  UC-wide, whites make up 36.7% of students and Asians 32.2%.  UC Santa Barbara is 63% white.  Stanford and USC have slightly higher percentages of African Americans than UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara.  Stanford and USC are each about 6% African American, while the three UC schools are all less than 4.4% African American. The three UC schools, each with about 15% who identified themselves as either Latino or Chicano, have about the same percentage of Latinos as the private schools. American Indians make up 1% or less of each of the five schools.  Many students do not disclose their ethnic background. Last year, nearly 6% of UCLA students declined to state an ethnic identification on their applications.  

4/28/01 Associated Press: "Study: SAT Good Grades Predictor." New research says the SAT is a good forecaster of grades throughout college, and whether students graduate. The research confirmed the SAT was a good predictor of grades the first year of college, in particular the first semester. It also forecast a grade-point average through the fourth year. It was also effective, if weaker, in forecasting study habits, whether students stayed enrolled at the school and graduated in four or five years.
    Earlier this year, University of California President Richard Atkinson, a testing expert, called for dropping the SAT I, proposing instead the SAT II subject tests of what students learned. The University of California system reviewed 50,000 of its own students and found high school grades and SAT II subject tests better than the SAT I at predicting academic performance.
    The College Board, which owns the SAT, paid about $250,000 for the three-year study by University of Minnesota graduate students. Sarah Hezlett is the study's lead author and a doctoral student. The College Board is a non-profit membership organization which also sells test-preparation materials. The researchers looked at existing findings, involving more than 1 million students. Using a technique called meta-analysis, the study culled its results from more than 1,700 previous studies. The various studies ranged from the 1940s to 1999. The vast majority was College Board studies correlating SAT scores with first-year results. The rest were independent, published and unpublished studies linking SAT scores to other outcomes. The meta-analysis is expected to be finished at the end of the year, when it will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals.

4/11/01 Stockton, CA Record: "UC asked to explain drop in minorities: Outreach spending questioned,"
In the three years since UC implemented SP-1 -- an action by the UC Regents that eliminated consideration of race and gender in the admission of students to University of California the numbers of African-American, Latino, and American Indian students are down 1% systemwide, and as low as 45% at UCLA and 42% at UC Berkeley. Admissions figures released last week for those who have applied and been accepted; the figures found that all ethnic groups showed increases over last year. According to the UC category designations, there were 18.5% more Chicanos admitted, 17.2% more Latinos, 13.6% more African-Americans and 6.3% more American Indians. An additional concern of lawmakers is the "two-tiered" admissions process used by all but two of the UC's campuses. This system, an offshoot of SP-1, makes campuses distinguish between students who are already eligible for UC and hold them to an even more stringent standard for admission. Santa Cruz and Riverside -- the only two campuses that don't use the two-tiered system and admit all UC-eligible students -- have seen increases in minority enrollment since 1995 of 27% and 87%, respectively.

    Athletes who are recruited, and who end up on the carefully winnowed lists of desired candidates submitted by coaches to the admissions offices of those selective institutions, now enjoy a very substantial statistical "advantage" in the admissions process. That advantage -- for both male and female athletes -- is much greater than that enjoyed by other targeted groups, such as underrepresented minority students and alumni children. For example, at a representative non-scholarship institution for which we have complete data on all applicants, recruited male athletes who applied to enter with the fall 1999 class had a 48% greater chance of being admitted than did male students at large, after taking differences in SAT scores into account. The corresponding admissions advantage enjoyed by recruited female athletes in 1999 was 53%. The admissions advantages enjoyed by minority students and legacies were in the range of 18 to 24%.
    The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values (by Shulman and Bowen) studied 30 academically selective colleges and universities: Columbia, Princeton, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Wellesley, Denison, Wesleyan, Hamilton, Kenyon, Oberlin, Swarthmore, Williams, Duke, Georgetown, Northwestern, Rice, Stanford, Tulane, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Miami University of Ohio, Pennsylvania State University at University Park, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Emory, Tufts, and Washington (Mo.) universities.
Excerpts from April 2001 Yale Alumni Magazine, "A Gladiator Class?" by James L. Shulman '87, '93PhD, an officer of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and William G. Bowen, president of the Foundation and a former president of Princeton.

April 6-12, 2001 AsianWeek.com: "Affirmative Action on Trial" In the end, 85% of the student body was white or Asian American, and 15% black or Hispanic. Without affirmative action, the class would have been just 4% African American and Latino, experts said in the trial.

4/4/01 Daily Bruin: "Minority admits at UC near pre-SP-1 levels: Latinos cause of recent rise; number of African Americans drops," Underrepresented minority freshman admits to the University of California system have increased to levels comparable to when affirmative action was in use, but with only modest increases at UCLA and UC Berkeley. Underrepresented minorities made up 18.6% of the UC admits for fall 2001, close to fall 1997's 18.8%. That was the last class to be admitted under affirmative action, which was ended in 1998 because of the UC Regents' policy SP-1, and the state voter initiative Proposition 209. Minority admits are still down at the most competitive UC schools, namely UCLA and UC Berkeley. Most of the increase in under- represented minorities overall can be attributed to rises in Latino admits. At UCLA, Latino admits rose from 11.7% of total admits to 12.6% over the past year, but is still below 15.4% in fall 1997. The percentage of African American admits in the fall class dropped from 3.1% last year to 2.8%. This is also far below the high of 5% from fall 1997. Native Americans admits stayed about the same, with 43 students admitted this year and 44 last year, but far below the fall 1997 number of 79. UCLA sent out 10,735 admission letters, down from 10,945 last year, and expects about 4,200 students to enroll for fall 2001. At UC Irvine, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, underrepresented minority admits are just slightly below their 1997 levels, and at UC Riverside they have actually risen, from 20.6% of the admitted class to 25.3%. Statistics are from in-state applicants and do not reflect out-of-state and international students, and are preliminary. Transfer admissions will be announced in May. The decline in African Americans at UCLA, according to Rae Lee Siporin, director of Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools, is due to many factors, including the increase in the number of total applicants, and the small eligible pool of African Americans. Admits to UCLA continued the trend of increasing academic achievement. The average GPA of admitted students is 4.23, up from 4.16 in fall 2000. The average SAT score, 1328, is about the same as last fall's average of 1327.

3/28/01 NY Times: "U.S. Court Bars Race as Factor in School Entry,"
   A federal judge in Detroit ruled yesterday that the race-conscious admissions system of the University of Michigan's law school is unconstitutional, contradicting a December ruling in a parallel case that upheld the university's affirmative action policy for undergraduate admissions.    
    The earlier ruling, by another judge on the same court and now on appeal, was seen as a flicker of hope for a movement fallen out of vogue while the new ruling joins a string of defeats for affirmative action over the last six years.
    The undergraduate approach is far more explicit about using race, yet the law school's more subtle system was struck down, as the judges offered sharply divergent views of the importance of diversity in higher education.
    "All racial distinctions are inherently suspect and presumptively invalid," Judge Bernard A. Friedman of the United States District Court in Detroit wrote in his decision yesterday. "Whatever solution the law school elects to pursue, it must be race-neutral."
    The current push against affirmative action began in 1995, when the Regents of the University of California banned the use of race in admissions. A federal appeals court outlawed the practice in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana the next year, and since then, voters in California and Washington have rejected affirmative action in both higher education and state contracting.
   The debate over race-conscious policies is one of the most contentious in higher education today, and the closely watched Michigan cases are widely expected to send the issue back to the United States Supreme Court for the first time since 1978.
   The class that entered the law school, one of the nation's most competitive, last fall was about 85 percent white and Asian, 15 percent black and Hispanic. Lawyers from the Center for Individual Rights, the Washington organization that brought the Michigan lawsuits on behalf of white applicants who had been rejected, celebrated the ruling as a "vindication" and a "clear repudiation" of affirmative action. They noted that Judge Friedman's decision came after a 15- day trial, whereas the previous ruling by Judge Patrick A. Duggan (both are Reagan nominees) was on summary judgment, meaning he heard no witness testimony.
   The crucial question in both Michigan cases is whether racial and ethnic diversity in higher education is, in legal parlance, a "compelling state interest" that demands a race- conscious remedy.
    The dueling decisions by the federal judges in Detroit turn on contrary interpretations of the landmark 1978 Supreme Court decision in University of California Regents v. Bakke, which struck down the admissions policy at the Davis medical school, but said universities could consider race as one of several "plus factors" in selecting applicants. The tricky part is that Bakke was a 5-to-4 decision in which Justice Lewis Powell broke a deadlock by agreeing with four of his colleagues on some issues and the other four on others. In declaring that diversity "clearly is a constitutionally permissible goal for an institution of higher education," Justice Powell stood alone.
    Universities have based their admissions decisions on his rationale ever since, and Judge Duggan in December relied on it to embrace Michigan's use of affirmative action.
    But Judge Friedman said yesterday "the diversity rationale is not among the governing standards to be gleaned from Bakke."
   Jeffrey S. Lehman, the dean of Michigan's law school, said the two opinions are "completely irreconcilable." (Judge Friedman's echoes the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit's 1996 decision in Texas v. Hopwood, which the Supreme Court declined to review, that affirmative action is unconstitutional.) The law school plans to appeal the decision.
   Beyond the question of the importance of diversity, Judge Friedman said the law school's admissions system would be illegal in any case because it was "indistinguishable from a straight quota system." The "haphazard selection of certain races is a far cry from the `close fit' between the means and the ends that the Constitution demands," he wrote, noting that the policy favored African-Americans and mainland- born Puerto Ricans but not Arabs or Eastern Europeans.
   "If the law school may single out these racial groups for a special commitment today, there is nothing to prevent it from enlarging, reducing, or shifting its list of preferred groups tomorrow without any reasoned basis or logical stopping point," Judge Friedman wrote.
    The split decisions in the Michigan cases are surprising because the undergraduate admissions system uses race more blatantly than the law school's and therefore seemed more vulnerable to attack. In admitting freshmen, the university gives black and Hispanic applicants a 20-point boost on a 150-point scale; the law school's approach is more subjective, with only vague guidelines about the importance of having a "critical mass" of minority students.
    While white students have been more likely to gain admission to the law school than their minority counterparts - 38 percent of white applicants were accepted last year compared with 35 percent of African- Americans - a comparison of students with similar grades and test scores shows the advantage given to minorities. For example, in 1995, all four African-American applicants with an undergraduate grade point average between 2.75 and 2.99 and scores on the Law School Admissions Test of 161 to 163 were accepted, while none of the 14 white applicants in those ranges were admitted. Among those with a G.P.A. between 3.25 and 3.49 and L.S.A.T. scores of 154 or 155, four of five African-Americans were admitted, compared to just one of 51 white applicants.
   "The evidence indisputably demonstrates that the law school places a very heavy emphasis on race in deciding whether to accept or reject," Judge Friedman wrote. As to the testimony showing that without affirmative action far fewer black and Hispanic applicants would likely gain admission to the law school, Judge Friedman suggested alternate routes to diversity, including paying less attention to grades, test scores, and whether an applicant's parents had graduated from the school. Judge Friedman also dismissed the case presented by the intervening students, who testified at length about the discrimination they had experienced in inner-city high schools, white-dominated colleges, and in taking standardized tests. "The effects of general, societal discrimination cannot constitutionally be remedied by race-conscious decision-making," he wrote.

"Washington's War On Standardized Tests," by Edward Blum and Marc Levin.  Blum is chairman and Levin is executive director of the Campaign for a Color-Blind America Legal Defense and Educational Foundation. 5/26/99 Wall Street Journal:  After hundreds of studies and countless hours of debate, one fact about these tests remains irrefutable--they are a highly reliable predictor of academic success. In fact, no other variable--grades, essays, leadership qualities or overcoming hardships--so closely correlates to the likelihood of graduation from a particular college as does the SAT.  According to the College Entrance Examination Board, only 2,000 or so black high school graduates nationally score above 650 on both the verbal and mathematics sections of the SAT.  A 1994 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that just 49% of black medical students passed the first part of the National Board of Medical Examiners test, compared with 84% of white students. The bar exam for lawyers shows similar disparities. At the University of Texas, fewer than half of black graduates pass the bar exam on their first try, and many fail again upon retaking the test. (The Hopwood decision ended Texas's preferential admissions in 1997, but these figures for graduates reflect the performance of students admitted under the regime of preferences.).  Poor minority performance on standardized tests is a reflection of poor primary and secondary education in minority neighborhoods.  Rather than demand greater effort and commitment from minority students, teachers' unions and liberals are "demonizing the very principles--rigorous intellectual effort, skill mastery, grade and test performance--by which those who compete with black students are strengthened." 

"Law school struggles to up minority count" by Marjorie Hernandez, January 30, 2001 UCLA Daily Bruin Online
    The UC Board of Regents passed SP-1 in 1995, ending the use of affirmative action in admissions throughout the UC system.  A year later, California voters passed Proposition 209, which ended the use of affirmative action in public entities in the state, reaffirming the ban throughout the university. 
    Since the end of affirmative action, UCLA and other state law schools have seen considerable drops in African American and Latino enrollments. 
    At the law school, 1998 admission numbers experienced a 66% decline in Latino students and more than 87% decline in African American enrollment compared to 1990-1994 average admission numbers. 
    This year, 13 African American students were admitted, compared to 104 in 1996. Although the number of Latino students increased this year to 72 
from the previous year's enrollment of 58, it is still a substantial drop from 108 students in 1996. 
    The number of women and Asians and Pacific Islanders  have increased since the end of affirmative action.

"UC May Seek Diversity Via Admission Changes: Officials hope to increase minority enrollment," 12/15/00 San Francisco Chronicle
    University of California officials have developed
preliminary proposals for sweeping changes in
admissions policies that if adopted would allow the
university system to increase diversity without using
affirmative action programs. 
    The plan would eliminate the SAT requirement, give
extra weight to applicants who participate in the
university's outreach programs and give
consideration to educational and social factors. 
    The recommendations are in draft form and still
subject to months of extensive review by faculty.
Some may even need to be approved by the UC
Board of Regents. 
    After the regents passed a resolution in 1995
banning affirmative action, and California voters
followed suit with state Proposition 209, UC had to
abandon its practice of giving students preferential
treatment on the basis of race and ethnicity. 
    The ban went into effect in 1997, and enrollment of
underrepresented minorities such as African
Americans and Latinos dropped significantly at the
top campuses. 
    The proposals include eliminating the SAT
achievement test and instead allowing students to
submit other tests. One possibility cited is the
Golden State Exam, which is more closely aligned
with the curriculum in California schools. 
    Another proposal would take advantage of the
extensive outreach and academic preparation
programs the nine-campus UC system provides for
low- income and first generation students and those
from low-performing schools. About 65% of
the 90,000 students in the programs are underrepresented minorities. 
    Students participating in the programs would be
given extra consideration in admissions to give them
a more equal footing with their more privileged
peers. 
    The committee also recommended that UC
campuses admit more students based on factors
other than grades and test scores, considering a
student's educational opportunities and
socioeconomic background. 
    Under the proposals, campuses taking higher
numbers of educationally disadvantaged students
would receive financial rewards. 
    UC Berkeley, along with UCLA, already considers
an applicant's achievement in a broader context than
just grades and test scores. 
    University of California Regent Ward Connerly, an
opponent of affirmative action, said he needed to
see how the proposals all worked together before
commenting on specifics. But he said he believed
that university officials were responding to pressure
by minority advocates and should not accept
responsibility for their drop in enrollment. 

"U. of Michigan Defends Affirmative Action," by Jim Suhr (Associated Press), 12/8/00 AsianWeek.com 
    The University of Michigan's affirmative action policy in admissions is under attack in two lawsuits brought 
by the Washington-based Center for Individual Rights, a conservative legal group that brought down affirmative action at the University of Texas law school in 1996. The organization is suing on behalf of white students denied 
admission to Michigan.
    The university began a large-scale push for diversity in 1987, doubling minority enrollment in the decade that followed.  As late as 1997, Michigan used a grid that sorted applicants by grades, test scores and race. Now, the university grades applicants on a 150-point scale. 
Blacks, Latino or American Indians get 20 points for their race, equal to raising their grade-point average a full point on a 4-point scale.
    Of Michigan's 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students this semester, about 13% are "underrepresented minorities: 7.8% black, 4.3%
Latinos and 0.6% American Indian.  Whites make up 
66%, while Asian Pacific Islanders make up 12.3%, and are not considered underrepresented minorities by federal standards, according to Julie Peterson, a university spokesperson. "Others" make up 8.9% of 
the school's total population.
    "There's no turning back on the commitment to diversity," said Carol Geary Schneider, president of Association of American Colleges and Universities, which supports race-conscious admissions.
    "Our members strongly believe that it is no longer possible to provide an excellent education in a homogeneous environment, that students need to be prepared for diversity at home and abroad. There has to be diverse voices in the classroom."
    The plaintiffs counter that race illegally becomes a decisive factor that discriminates against whites.
    "The diversity rationale is simple touchy-feel psychobabble, and it ought to be rejected," said Roger Clegg, vice president and general counsel of the 
Center for Equal Opportunity, an opponent of race-based admissions.
    In California, voter-approved Proposition 209 in 1996, ended race-based affirmative action admissions policies at its universities. Its flagship school, U.C. Berkeley, saw a significant drop in Latino and black 
admissions the following year.


Letters from Ed Chin, M.D. (Columbia College '71):

11/15/00: Studies (done internally when charges of bias were presented) from Brown and Stanford have clearly disputed the stereotyped image of an Asian American applicant as being "one dimensional" with no extracurricular activities except for music.  This image only existed in the biased views of the some of the admission officers. These studies have shown that there was an unexplained bias in admissions and in fact, the Asian American group appeared better prepared by any standards used, yet had only a 60% to 70% admission rate compared to the white applicant group at Stanford. The President of Stanford could not explain the disparity, but at least she admitted that there was one. Many of the heads and admission officers of the elite schools don't even acknowledge that the problem even exists.  The Asian applicants were better prepared than the white group, yet have a lower admission rate. 

11/14/00: The Retreat From Race by Dana Takagi discusses the admissions controversy surrounding Asian-Americans in the 1980s.  Once the pool of Asian American applicants who were academically qualified began to increase markedly, colleges began to use other criteria, such as extracurricular activities, and 
it just so happened that few Asian Americans were strong in extracurricular activities, or if they were, they participated in a narrow band of activities like music, making it difficult to differentiate among them.

10/29/00: Exclusive Boarding Schools Engage in Reverse Discrimination Against Asian-American Students
    Bronx High School of Science in New York City is one of the most prestigious and best secondary schools in the nation, either public or private.  More than 50% of the students come from Queens, 45% are Asian, 36% white, 10% black, and 9% Hispanic. Admission is granted based on standardized testing.  New York City's ethnic population is over 50% black and Hispanic and less than 6% Asian.  Bronx H.S. of Science is second only to Stuyvesant High School in N.Y.C., which is the "best" high school in the nation in terms of academic achievement.  
    At Stuyvesant, 51% of the students are Asian, 5% black and 5% Hispanic.  Admission is also granted based on the same standardized test. These percentages represent admissions numbers which are unfettered and undistorted by racial and ethnic quotas.  They represent the highest percentages of Asian-American students in any of the top schools in the nation both at the secondary and college levels. 
    Only students who reside in N.Y.C. are eligible for admission testing for Stuyvesant or Bronx Science. There are no upper limit quotas imposed on Asians for admissions to either school. The SAT 1 mean for Stuyvesant seniors is 1400, the highest mean in the nation for a class of over 700 seniors. The SAT 1 mean for Bronx H.S. of Science of 1350, also tops in the nation.
    Since opening in 1938, these schools' student bodies consisted mostly of an all white male Jewish population, mainly immigrants and sons of recent immigrants admitted after having passed a similar test.  Unfortunately few of these Jews were admitted to Yale or other colleges because of quotas placed on Jews at that time.  Admissions were based on "entitlement", mainly of WASP's and specifically, Episcopalians. 
    In the late 1960s, Yale adopted a meritocracy and subsequently Jews and Asians became the most populous minority groups on campus, each outnumbering Episcopalians.  
    Sources: Yale Alumni Magazine, "Birth of a New Institution" by G. Kabaservice, Dec. 1999 and The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, by Nicholas Lehmann, Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999.
    In contrast, the elite and private Phillips Exeter Academy, considered one of the top secondary schools in the nation, has an admissions policy today based on "goals" and/or "quotas" disguised as a mission of recruiting "youth from every quarter".  Exeter's entering class in 2000 is 21% Asian, 8% Black, and 4% 
Hispanic.  The Asian percentage of 21% is a decrease from 25% from previous years.  The Black percentage of 8% is an increase from 5% of last year's entering students.  Source: The Exonian, "Unprecedented Exeter Diversity for 2000-2001", June 11, 2000.     
    The decrease in the number of Asians was caused by Exeter's admissions policies, not by any decrease in the number or quality of Asian applicants, which have both increased year after year.  
    Of the "top ten" boarding schools, both Exeter and Andover have the highest SAT 1 scores with the exception of Groton School's average SAT 1 of 1400 which graduated only about 80 seniors in 2000.  Among boarding schools, Exeter and Andover also have the highest percentage of Asians in their student bodies.     Exeter's seniors had an average SAT 1 score of about 1370, the highest of any elite boarding school with over 300 graduates in 2000.  The seniors at Phillips Andover Academy, Exeter's chief rival, had an average SAT 1 score of about 1350.  18% of Andover's students are Asian.  
    The other top boarding schools' senior average SAT 1 scores include Choate's 1300, Hotchkiss' 1285, Taft's 1285, Milton's 1310 and Lawrenceville's 1310.  All students admitted to these schools had to take the SSAT, a standardized test similar to the SAT 1.  Other admission criteria include grades, talents, sports, alumni parents, and ethnic and racial backgrounds. 
    There is a direct correlation between the average SAT 1 scores, exclusive of all other college admission criteria used, of these boarding schools and the percentage of its seniors admitted to the Ivy League and to the U.S. News Top Ten Lists of colleges.  
    Groton, with average SATs of 1400, has 34% of its seniors going to the Ivies, whereas Exeter and Andover (average SATs of 1370 and 1350 respectively) have 30% of its seniors going to the Ivies in 2000.  Choate, with average SATs of 1300, has 20% of its seniors going to the Ivies.  Hotchkiss with average SATs of 1285 has 19% of its seniors going to the Ivies.  
    To the extent these exclusive prep schools are limiting the number of Asians they accept, they are limiting the number of Asians who attend Ivy League colleges and other top colleges.

9/30/00: Asian Americans are increasing their lead in SAT scores, based on tests in 1999 and 2000. 
    In 2000, 2% of Asian Americans achieved a perfect 800 score on the Math section as compared to less than 1% for whites. 28% of Asian Americans achieved a score of 650 and above as compared to the next best performing group, whites, of whom only 14% achieved a score of 650.      
    1% of Asian Americans achieved a perfect score of 800 on the Verbal section as compared to less than 1% of whites. This is quite remarkable given that nearly 40% of the Asian Americans did not have English as their first language.
    Despite these high scores, the percentage of Asian Americans in the incoming classes of elite colleges is slowly dropping over the last several years.
    For instance, the percentage of Asian Americans in the freshman class at Harvard dropped from 19% to 16% from 1996 to 2000.  At Cornell, the drop from 
1999 to 2000 was 16% to 15%.
    The elite colleges are treating Asian Americans unfairly. 


39% of all SAT 1 test takers in 1999 of the Asian American group did not have English as their first language.  This percentage is the highest among all ethnic and racial groups, including Latinos (only 29% of Puerto Ricans did not have English as their first language.)  Source: The College Board.  Of course, the predominant first language of Afro-Americans and white Americans is English.  If you view not being able to speak the English language at first as a disadvantage, then Asian Americans should be recognized as having a disadvantage, but Asian Americans have never asked for nor been given preferential treatment.  They merely overcame this obstacle even though over half the Asian American population is comprised of  immigrants or children of immigrants who also faced racial discrimination and poverty.  15% of  Asian Americans live under the poverty level,  comparable to the Latino- American group. Source: US Census Bureau,1997. 

It is a tribute to Asian Americans that a disproportionate number of them, compared to their percentage of the total population, score in the 700 and 750 ranges in both the Math and most notably, the Verbal sections of the SAT 1.

See The College Board's website and under "search", type: "

Among all Asian Americans test takers in the SAT 1 Math in 1999, 27% scored above 650 as compared to 24% for whites, 15% above 700 as compared to 6% for whites, and 6% above 750 as compared to only 2% for whites.

Among all Asian American test takers in the SAT 1 Verbal, 6% scored above 700 as compared to 5% for whites and 3% scored above 750 as compared to 2% for whites.  Less than a fraction of 1% of non Asian minorities (Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians) score above 700.

These numbers are remarkable for the Asian Americans, especially in the Verbal section, in view of the fact that 39% of the Asian Americans who took the test did not even have English as a first language.  If you factored out this 39% subgroup of Asian Americans and compare the rest of the Asian American group to the white group and all other groups on an "equal basis", the percentages of scorers above 700 in the Verbal would even be higher for the Asian American group.  This should also be true for the Math section, since it is also written in English, but to a lesser extent.

If this test is biased against minority groups, then it is most certainly biased against Asian Americans both in terms of culture and language.

For some reason, admissions officers and the College Board view the SAT 1 test as biased against non Asian minorities but not against Asian Americans.

The College Board, which administers and devises the SAT 1 Test, even proposes to add 200 additional points to the non Asian minorities" scores and call them "Striver's" points, reasoning that the test is culturally biased.  These "Striver's" points would not be given to Asian Americans, a ludicrous proposition.  If the test is culturally biased, it is surely also biased against Asian Americans! What is the point of even administrating  the test at all then?

I send the following article by you, Prof. Williams, even though the figures you used are incorrect and in fact, the gaps between the White, Black and Asian groups in SAT 1 Test scoring are even wider, as measured by the rate of scoring at these high levels or percentages of each group attaining these levels, than stated by you in the article. In spite of this, the points you made in the article are well taken and are valid.  In the book, "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible" by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, Simom and Schuster, 1997 in Chapter 14,  titled "Higher Learning", in Table 4 labeled, "Number and Percent of Black, White, and Asian Students with High SAT Scores, 1981 and 1995": Source; The College Board, Ethnic Data on Scoring, 1981 and 1995, the figures and percentages for each score level are charted.  

For example, in 1995, for 103,872 Black test takers of the SAT 1 Test, in the Math ,107 Blacks scored between 750 and 800, 509 Blacks scored between 700 and 749, 1,437 Blacks scored between 650 and 699. Total > 650 for Blacks was 2,053 or 2.0% of all Black test takers. Total > 700 was 616 or .6% or six tenths of 1 percent. Total > 750 was 107 or 0.1% or one tenth of 1 percent.
In 1995, for 103,872 Black test takers, in the Verbal, 184 Blacks scored between 700 and 800, 465 Blacks scored between 650 and 699, and 1,115 Blacks scored between 600 and 649. Total > 600 was 1,764 or 1.7% of Black test takers.  Total > 700 was 184 or 0.15% or less than two tenths of 1 percent.  

In 1995, for 674,343 White test takers of the SAT 1 Test in the Math, 9,519 Whites scored between 750 and 800, 29,774 Whites scored between 700 and 749, and 51,306 Whites between 650 and 699. Total > 650 for Whites was 90,599 or 13.4% of all White test takers. Total > 700 was 39,293 or 5.8%. Total > 750 was 9,519 or 1.4%.  In 1995, for 674,343 White test takers of the SAT 1 Test, in the Verbal, 8,978 Whites scored between 700 and 800, 19,272 scored between 650 and 699, and 36,700 Whites scored between 600 and 649. Total > 600 was 64,950 or 9.6%.Total > 700 was 8,978 or 1.3%.

In 1995, for 81,514 Asian test takers of the SAT 1 Test in the Math, 3,827 Asians scored between 750 and 800, 7,758 Asians scored between 700 and 749, and 9,454 Asians scored between 650 and 699. Total > 650 for Asians 21,039 or 25.8%. Total > 700 was 11,585 or 14.2%. Total > 750 was 3,827 or 4.7%.  In 1995, for 81,514 Asian test takers of the SAT 1 Test in the Verbal, 1,476 Asians scored between 700 and 800, 2,513 Asians scored between 650 and 699, and 4,221 Asians scored between 600 and 649. Total > 600 was 8,190 or 10%. Total > 700 was 1,476 or 1.8%.

Therefore, in reference to the above data for 1995, Asians out perform the other two groups at the highest levels of the SAT 1 scores in terms of rate of attainment or percentage of the total group at each score level above 650 and 700 and above in both the Math and the Verbal of the SAT 1 Test.  In fact, in the 1999 data given by the College Board: Performance by Ethnic 
Groups, the rate of attainment or percentage of the total group at each score level above 650 and 700 and 750 and above has risen for the Asian group both independent of and relative to the other two groups.  In 1995, there were only 107 Blacks with a Math score of 750 or above or 0.1% (one tenth of 1 percent) of the total number of Black test takers.  There were 9,519 Whites with a Math score of 750 or above or 1.4% of the total 
number of White test takers. There were 3,827 Asians with a Math score of 750 or above or 4.7% of the total number of Asian test takers.  Asians out perform Whites at 3.4 times the rate at which they score 750 or above (4.7% vs. 1.4%). Asians out perform Blacks at 47 times the rate at which they score 750 or above (4.7% vs. 0.1% or one tenth of one percent).

At the most selective colleges such as Caltech (average of 770 Math score), Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Harvey Mudd and others with 750 Math score averages, there simply are not enough Black applicants (107 in all) in the total Black test taker group who meet the average SAT Math score at these elite schools even to fill a fraction of one percent of their student populations, let alone a quota or a goal of 7 to 10 percent or more of the student bodies for all the elite colleges in the nation.  Consequently, there is a huge test score gap that exists between the Blacks and Whites and even a bigger test score gap between Backs and Asians at the most selective colleges.  The SAT 1 Test composite score for the most competitive or selective colleges are between 1450 to 1500 on average now in year 2000, 30 to 40 points higher than four to five years ago. This score rises upwards of 10 points for each of these schools for each subsequent year, therefore the test score gaps that exist between Blacks and Whites, and between Blacks and Asians are also increasing on a yearly basis because of increased competition amongst the highest scorers.


WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1999 
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Killing the messenger 
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In 1995, only 465 black high-school seniors, out of 103,872 taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), scored 650 or higher on the verbal portion.  On the math portion, 1,437 scored higher than 650. By comparison, out of 674,343 white test-takers, 36,700 scored 650 or higher on the verbal portion; 51,306 scored 650 or higher on the math part. Out of 81,514 Asian test takers, 2,513 scored 650 and higher on the verbal portion; 9,454 scored 650 and higher on the math portion. Upward of 75% of students admitted to the nation's 58 elite colleges such as Harvard, Yale, MIT and Stanford have combined SAT scores of 1200 or 1300 or higher. If black students were to be admitted to these elite colleges, on the same academic terms as white and Asian students, there'd be no more than 50 or so at each institution. 

Of course, there are many more. Harvard University, for example, hasn't admitted fewer than 100 black students in any given year since 1970.  That means these colleges admit black students whose academic achievement is lower than others who are admitted. That might partially explain why, nationwide, 74 percent of black students haven't graduated after five years. 

The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has issued the following dictum: "The use of any educational test which has significant disparate impact on members of any particular race, national origin, or sex is discriminatory, and a violation of Title VI and/or Title IX respectively, unless it is educationally necessary and there is no practical alternative form of assessment which meets the education institution's needs and would have a less disparate impact." 

That means colleges and universities using the SAT (or ACT) as a part of their admissions process, will be summoned to the Department of Education and given the third-degree. The Department of Education will strive to ultimately outlaw the use of SAT and the punishment at their disposal is cutting off federal research grants and tuition aid. 

That's just what we need -- more educational dumbing-down. And it's being done by stealth, out of the sight of the American people. Black people should raise hell about the U.S. Department of Education's demeaning arrogance.  Educational fraud has already made high-school diplomas held by blacks virtually meaningless. Now Clinton's Department of Education gang wants to begin a policy that undermines the credibility of college degrees held by blacks. 

SAT scores aren't meant to measure intelligence or whether one will ultimately be successful in life. The SAT is designed to predict a student's class standing at the end of his freshman year. So far as blacks are concerned, the SAT tends to overpredict -- predicts a standing higher than achieved. Low SAT scores are primarily the result of fraudulent public-school education and lower family values placed on education. The solution to the educational fraud is competition and parental choice. But the U.S. Department of Education, in cahoots with the education establishment, fights tooth and nail to maintain our corrupt education monopoly. 

As for choosing a college, what should a black parent, or any parent, do?  Don't allow your child to attend a college where the average student SAT score is 200 points or more higher than his. It's flattering to a parent to receive an acceptance letter from Harvard, Yale or MIT, but graduating from a second tier college is better than being academically mismatched and flunking 
out of a first-tier college. 

You say, "Williams, but what's Harvard, Yale and MIT going to do about racial diversity?" I say, "That's their problem. Black parents have no duty to provide school mascots." 
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WorldNetDaily contributor Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.  2000 Creators Syndicate, Inc. 

From Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus by Dinesh D'souza, 1990, Chapter 2 
"(Asians are) More Equal Than Others", p. 263 (Chap. 2 
footnotes):

"At Harvard in 1982 Asian Americans who were offered admission had a combined SAT average of 1,467; for whites, the average was only 1,355.  Thus Asians typically had to score more than 100 points higher (112 points in 1982) than whites to be admitted to Harvard.  Further, although Asian American application rates climbed rapidly between 1982 and 1987, Harvard 
continued to accept between 11 - 15% of Asians (Americans) in each freshman class, an "upper limit quota" in the minds of Asian activists.  Robert 
Klitgaard, "Choosing Elites, Basic Books, N.Y., 1985, pp. 134-41. See also Jon Bunzel and Jeffrey Au, "Diversity or Discrimination: Asian-Americans in College," "The Public Interest", Spring 1987, p. 55.

Stanford's Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid discovered, after an inquiry, that between 1982 and 1985 Asian Americans were 
one-third less likely than whites to be offered admission, even though they were on average better prepared than white applicants. Annual Report of CUAFA, Stanford University, 1986, reprinted in "Campus Report",  November 12, 1986.

Some admissions officials have complained that Asian Americans tend to be lacking in extracurricular and personal qualities, which universities consider along with grades to ensure that they get well-rounded individuals. 
But there is no systematic evidence to this; indeed a report by the Corporation Committee on Minority Affairs (CCMI) at Brown, established to investigate charges of anti-Asian discrimination, found such assumptions to 
be the result of "cultural bias and stereotypes which prevail in the admissions office."  In the early 1980s, these attitudes contributed to a 14% acceptance rate for Asians, who are on the average the best qualified applicants to Brown, compared to the other students who averaged an acceptance rate of 20%. See Report of CCMI, Brown University, February 1984. Between 1978 and 1986, there was a 430% increase of Asian Americans applying to Brown, but the number of these students remained fairly constant. Grace Tsang, "Equal Access of Asian-Americans", "Yale Law Journal", January 1989, pp. 659-78.'

In the book, Getting In: Inside the College Admissions Process by Bill Paul, Addison- Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1995, the author writes in his discussion on affirmative action and reverse discrimination against Asian Americans on pp. 200-202:  Thomas Kean, head of Drew University and former Governor of New 
Jersey, says some colleges have "invisible quotas" for Asian- Americans done in the name of "diversity."  "Nobody wants to talk about this," he told me in an 
interview, "but the word is very much around at the most 
highly-selective colleges. People are practicing that discrimination."

In Illiberal Education by Dinesh D'Souza (1990), D'Souza quotes from Brown University documents that indicate Brown instituted an upper-limit quota on the number 
of Asian students admitted.  From about the mid '70s to 1986, D'Souza shows that while Asian applicants to Brown increased by over 400%, the number of students admitted remained steady. 

"I refer you to the book, "Questions and Admissions", !995, Stanford U. Press, by Jean H. Fetter, former Director of Admissions at Stanford.  On page 97, she states, "The central fact was that while Asian Americans were being admitted to Stanford in numbers proportionally much larger than their representation in California and the U.S. population, the rate at which they had been admitted have been consistently lower than that for white students.  Generally similar conditions have prevailed at other universities.  Between 1982 and 1985. . . . . Asian Americans applicants to Stanford had admission rates ranging between 66 - 70% of the admission rates for whites ."

This could not be explained by academic/ non-academic ratings for Asian Americans, because the ratings were as good and in many cases, better than any other group, nor from interaction of ethnicity with other factors such as gender or geographic origin. Ms. Fetter denied that there was an implicit quota. 

It was troubling because Asian Americans as a group usually have higher academic ratings (i.e. test scores and grades) than all other groups on average. They have never been given preference as a targeted minority group.  Asian Americans were paying a penalty by having to have higher grades (the best indicator for future academic success) and higher SAT scores (at Harvard it was 65 points higher than the white mean in 1992; at Rice it was 70 points higher; at Stanford, 58 points higher; Columbia, 42 points; Williams, 36 points; Brown 36 points ; Dartmouth 49 points; Princeton 40 points; and Duke 38 points higher; Sources: Consortium on Financing Higher Education, 1992.

The SAT penalty against Asian Americans could not be explained, but there certainly seems to be an unstated or unconscious bias in the admissions process.  Asian Americans do not benefit from being alumni children (this will change in this and future generations), but this alone does not explain the existence of the penalty, except for reverse discrimination towards Asian Americans compared to the white majority, not to mention any other group, via certain "goals" and/or whatever you may call it (quotas).  University officials and admissions officers everywhere have been reluctant to confront this issue forthrightly and in many cases to admit that the issue even exists." 

Webmaster: They don't admit it because, as Woody Allen said, "I'm a bigot for the left".


Source for following statistics: 
The Dartmouth, February 26, 1999 and April 6, 1999.  Minority Acceptances/ Minority Applications to Dartmouth College Class of 2003
 = Acceptance rates for each:
Afro-American- 177/311 = 57% Admit Rate
Asian-American- 297/1007 = 29.5%
Latino-American- 192/423 = 45.4%
Native-American- 60/163 = 36.8%
The median SAT scores and grade point averages were not given for each group. Dartmouth did not release each individual group's statistics including the white group's alone, which is needed to evaluate the admission process's fairness in terms of objective data of academic achievement. The average SAT verbal score of all students applying for admission to Dartmouth's Class of 2003 was 677. Average math scores was 694. Out of the 10,261 students who
applied for admission overall, 20.6% were accepted. The average SAT scores for both verbal and math for accepted students were slightly above 700 for each section. Of course, one needs statistics both of objective and subjective criteria used in Dartmouth's admissions process to judge its fairness. As the above figures show, Asian- Americans have the lowest admittance rates of all of the minority groups. I suspect that the Asian- Americans would have higher SAT scores than the other groups as they did in 1992 (at Harvard it was 65 points higher than the white mean in 1992; at Rice it was
70 points higher; at Stanford, 58 points higher; Columbia, 42 points; Williams, 36 points; Brown 36 points ; Dartmouth 49 points; Princeton 40 points; and Duke 38 points higher; Sources: Consortium on Financing Higher Education, 1992). This is known as the Asian American penalty: admissions offices require them to score higher than that of the white group in order to gain admission. There is also a similar penalty in grade point average in which Asian Americans must have higher grades in order to gain admission to Dartmouth and similar elite colleges.

The following articles are from The Dartmouth, its daily newspaper:
Friday, February 26, 1999.
Number of black applicants fall 19%
Furstenberg says negative "ghetto party" publicity and national trend are to blame
by Heather Kofke-Egger, Staff Writer
Other Admissions Articles
College works to lure Native Americans

The overall number of applications to the College remained steady this year, but the number of African-Americans who applied to Dartmouth under the
regular decision program dropped by 19%, according to numbers released by the Office of Admissions yesterday.

The number of applications received by the Admissions Office this year remained steady at 10,239, but 73 fewer African- Americans applied for regular admission to the freshman class than did last year, Dean of Admissions
and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg said.

Only three African- American students were accepted under the College's early decision program this year. At that time, Furstenberg told The Dartmouth he worried national media attention the College received after the "ghetto party" and surrounding controversy during Fall term might hurt regular minority application numbers -- a prediction he said yesterday appears to have come true.

Three-hundred and eleven African- Americans applied for regular admission to the Class of 2003, compared to 384 last year for the Class of 2002. Between 400 and 420 African- American students applied for admission to the Class of 2001 and the Class of 2000.

Dartmouth attracted media attention -- including an article in the New York Times and mention on the late night talk show Politically Incorrect -- during the controversy which followed the co-sponsoring of the party by the Chi Gamma Epsilon fraternity and Alpha Xi Delta sorority.

The events took place in November -- too late to affect the early decision numbers but just more than a month before the regular decision deadline.

Furstenberg said he received about 15 questions from prospective students regarding the social atmosphere at the College and there were probably more people who did not call the Admissions Office and simply decided not to apply to the College due to the events Fall term.

Furstenberg said in addition to the negative publicity which affected Dartmouth specifically, growing anti-affirmative action sentiment in the nation may have discouraged African-Americans from applying to many
competitive colleges.

"My sense from other colleges and other Ivies, most of them are down in African-American applications," Furstenberg said. He said this suggests that the applicant pool could be smaller nationally and not just at
Dartmouth.

Director of Minority Recruitment Sylvia Langford said she is not happy with the declining applications but is encouraged by the strength of the minority applicant pool.

"'I'd like to see the numbers increase in every area," Langford said.

Langford and her staff work on encouraging minority students to apply and come to Dartmouth.

"We bear responsibility to put together a class that is diverse," Langford said. "One of the ways is to raise Dartmouth's visibility in the eyes of minority students."

New financial aid policies intended to help increase the economic and ethnic diversity of the student body did not affect application numbers significantly, but could impact which students decide to matriculate, Furstenberg said.

While the number of African-American applicants fell, the number of Native American applications significantly increased, however, from 132 last year to 163 for the Class of 2003.

Furstenberg said the 23 percent increase in Native American applications is due in part to increased minority recruiting efforts in both on campus and at
high schools around the country.

"We have been working for the last couple years in a very concerted way to reach out to Native American communities around the country," Furstenberg
said, adding that these efforts are made for all minority groups.

Although the number of Native American applications was a significant increase from last year's numbers, there were approximately 150 Native American applicants to the Class of 2001 and the Class of 2000.

Asian-American applications dropped from 1083 to 1007. The drop of seven-percent was something Furstenberg said is not a cause for concern.

"It's a really small change," Furstenberg said. "The pool of over 1000 [Asian-American] applicants gives us a large and strong pool to choose from."

There were 1,100 Asian-American applicants to the Class of 2001 and the Class of 2000.

Latino applications were similar to last year's, rising from 409 for the Class of 2002 to 423 for the Class of 2003.

Approximately 480 Latino students applied to the Class of 2001 and approximately 537 Latino students applied for admission to the Class of 2000.

Although minority application numbers are down, Furstenberg said this year's applicant pool is very strong in comparison to past years.

"I'd say this is probably the strongest applicant pool we've ever had," Furstenberg said.

The average SAT verbal score of students applying for admission to the Class of 2003 was 677, compared to 668 last year. Average math scores rose from 687 to 694.

Just under 400 students have already been accepted into the Class of 2003 under the early decision program.

Furstenberg said this year may be one of the most selective in the College's history due to housing shortages created by the large sizes of the classes of 2001 and 2002. The Class of 2003 is projected to include about 1,055 students.


4/6/99 Dartmouth News: "Record high number of minorities accepted.  Number of black applicants fall 19%.  College works to lure Native Americans"
    Despite the commotion over the small number of African-American students admitted via the early decision process, the Class of 2003's regular admissions are of a different stripe entirely, with the highest percentage of minorities ever admitted.
    The number of students admitted to the Class of 2003 comprised a record 35% minority students -- including 297 Asian Americans, 192 Latinos, 177 African- Americans, and 60 Native Americans, as well as 9 multiracial students. There were 110 Dartmouth legacies admitted, and the students represent 1,392 different high schools.
    "We worked awfully hard," Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg said of the Admissions Office's efforts to bring an increase in minorities to the College.
    The Class of 2003 also boasted an increase in the average SAT scores, and 90.8% of the admitted students graduated in the top 10% of their high school class.
    Out of the 10,261 students who applied for admission, 20.6% were accepted -- nearly one percentage point lower than last year, according to Furstenberg.
    He said the College has made efforts to increase personal contact with prospective students through interviews, so that each student's individual
questions are answered. Too often in the past, he said, the only contact students have with the College is when they send away for an application.
All in all, he said, "this is the most competitive year in a very long time."
    Of course, this is only the first look at the '03s. The makeup of the class can change drastically from the time the College accepts and the students decide.
    "We made them wait, now they make us wait," Furstenburg said, adding that he expected about 50% of the students admitted to accept.  Unfortunately, he said, many of the most qualified students choose to attend other schools.
    "They're lured, inappropriately I think, by status and prestige," he said.
    Furstenburg attributed the spike in minority acceptance -- and overall applications -- to a variety of factors, including more active recruitment and a retooled financial aid policy. Forty percent of the class is receiving financial aid with an average scholarship of $18,250.


9/9/96 The New Republic: "Angry Yellow Men,"