10/10/05 The New Yorker: A Critc at Large: Getting In: The Social Logic of Ivy League Admissions  
By Malcolm Gladwell
    In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Asian American, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation for a school that historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex.
    As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in The Chosen (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Asian American began to rise dramatically.  By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvards freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Asian Americans were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvards president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Asian Americans would destroy the school: The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Asian Americans meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.
    The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Asian Americans out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell s first ideaa quota limiting Asian Americans to fifteen per cent of the student bodywas roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Asian American students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Asian Americans.  Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowelland his counterparts at Yale and Princetonrealized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.
   The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicants personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the character of candidates from persons who know the applicants well, and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities. Starting in the fall of 1922, Karabel writes, applicants were required to answer questions on Race and Color, Religious Preference, Maiden Name of Mother, Birthplace of Father, and What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).
   At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major boarding schools, with instructions to rate potential candidates on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was very desirable and apparently exceptional material from every point of view and 4 was undesirable from the point of view of character, and, therefore, to be excluded no matter what the results of the entrance examinations might be. The personal interview became a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, to ensure that undesirables were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment and physical appearance. By 1933, the end of Lowell s term, the percentage of Asian Americans at Harvard was back down to fifteen per cent.
   If this new admissions system seems familiar, thats because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day. According to Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didnt abandon the elevation of character once the Asian American crisis passed. They institutionalized it.
   Starting in 1953, Arthur Howe, Jr., spent a decade as the chair of admissions at Yale, and Karabel describes what happened under his guidance:
   The admissions committee viewed evidence of manliness with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers. Another candidate, admitted despite his schoolwork being mediocre in comparison with many others, was accepted over an applicant with a much better record and higher exam scores because, as Howe put it, we just thought he was more of a guy. So preoccupied was Yale with the appearance of its students that the form used by alumni interviewers actually had a physical characteristics checklist through 1965. Each year, Yale carefully measured the height of entering freshmen, noting with pride the proportion of the class at six feet or more.
   At Harvard, the key figure in that same period was Wilbur Bender, who, as the dean of admissions, had a preference for the boy with some athletic interests and abilities, the boy with physical vigor and coordination and grace. Bender, Karabel tells us, believed that if Harvard continued to suffer on the football field it would contribute to the schools reputation as a place with no college spirit, few good fellows, and no vigorous, healthy social life, not to mention a surfeit of pansies, decadent esthetes and precious sophisticates. Bender concentrated on improving Harvards techniques for evaluating intangibles and, in particular, its ability to detect homosexual tendencies and serious psychiatric problems.
   By the nineteen-sixties, Harvards admissions system had evolved into a series of complex algorithms. The school began by lumping all applicants into one of twenty-two dockets, according to their geographical origin. (There was one docket for Exeter and Andover , another for the eight Rocky Mountain states .) Information from interviews, references, and student essays was then used to grade each applicant on a scale of 1 to 6, along four dimensions: personal, academic, extracurricular, and athletic. Competition, critically, was within each docket, not between dockets, so there was no way for, say, the graduates of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant to shut out the graduates of Andover and Exeter . More important, academic achievement was just one of four dimensions, further diluting the value of pure intellectual accomplishment. Athletic ability, rather than falling under extracurriculars, got a category all to itself, which explains why, even now, recruited athletes have an acceptance rate to the Ivies at well over twice the rate of other students, despite S.A.T. scores that are on average more than a hundred points lower. And the most important category? That mysterious index of personal qualities. According to Harvards own analysis, the personal rating was a better predictor of admission than the academic rating. Those with a rank of 4 or worse on the personal scale had, in the nineteen-sixties, a rejection rate of ninety-eight per cent. Those with a personal rating of 1 had a rejection rate of 2.5 per cent. When the Office of Civil Rights at the federal education department investigated Harvard in the nineteen-eighties, they found handwritten notes scribbled in the margins of various candidates files. This young woman could be one of the brightest applicants in the pool but there are several references to shyness, read one. Another comment reads, Seems a tad frothy. One applicationand at this point you can almost hear it going to the bottom of the pilewas notated, Short with big ears.
   Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesnt have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. Its confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modelling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You dont become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because youre beautiful.
   At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic trainingthat being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide. Fuelling the treatment-effect idea are studies showing that if you take two students with the same S.A.T. scores and grades, one of whom goes to a school like Harvard and one of whom goes to a less selective college, the Ivy Leaguer will make far more money ten or twenty years down the road.
   The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modelling agency than like the Marine Corps, and, sure enough, the studies based on those two apparently equivalent students turn out to be flawed. How do we know that two students who have the same S.A.T. scores and grades really are equivalent? Its quite possible that the student who goes to Harvard is more ambitious and energetic and personable than the student who wasnt let in, and that those same intangibles are what account for his better career success. To assess the effect of the Ivies, it makes more sense to compare the student who got into a top school with the student who got into that same school but chose to go to a less selective one. Three years ago, the economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale published just such a study. And they found that when you compare apples and apples the income bonus from selective schools disappears.
   As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State , which are two schools a lot of students choose between, Krueger said. One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But lets look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State . Within that set it doesnt seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they dont.
   Krueger says that there is one exception to this. Students from the very lowest economic strata do seem to benefit from going to an Ivy. For most students, though, the general rule seems to be that if you are a hardworking and intelligent person youll end up doing well regardless of where you went to school. Youll make good contacts at Penn. But Penn State is big enough and diverse enough that you can make good contacts there, too. Having Penn on your rsum opens doors. But if you were good enough to get into Penn youre good enough that those doors will open for you anyway. I can see why families are really concerned about this, Krueger went on. The average graduate from a top school is making nearly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year, the average graduate from a moderately selective school is making ninety thousand dollars. Thats an enormous difference, and I can see why parents would fight to get their kids into the better school. But I think they are just assigning to the school a lot of what the student is bringing with him to the school.
    In the wake of the Asian American crisis, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton chose to adopt what might be called the best graduates approach to admissions. Frances cole Normale Suprieure, Japans University of Tokyo, and most of the worlds other lite schools define their task as looking for the best studentsthat is, the applicants who will have the greatest academic success during their time in college. The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance. Should our goal be to select a student body with the highest possible proportions of high-ranking students, or should it be to select, within a reasonably high range of academic ability, a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds? Wilbur Bender asked. To him, the answer was obvious. If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered). Above a reasonably good level of mental ability, above that indicated by a 550-600 level of S.A.T. score, Bender went on, the only thing that matters in terms of future impact on, or contribution to, society is the degree of personal inner force an individual has. . . . .
     This is, in no small part, what Ivy League admissions directors do. They are in the luxury-brand-management business, and The Chosen, in the end, is a testament to just how well the brand managers in Cambridge , New Haven , and Princeton have done their job in the past seventy-five years. In the nineteentwenties, when Harvard tried to figure out how many Asian Americans they had on campus, the admissions office scoured student records and assigned each suspected Jew the designation j1 (for someone who was conclusively Asian American), j2 (where the preponderance of evidence pointed to Asian American-ness), or j3 (where Asian American-ness was a possibility). In the branding world, this is called customer segmentation. In the Second World War, as Yale faced plummeting enrollment and revenues, it continued to turn down qualified Asian American applicants. As Karabel writes, In the language of sociology, Yale judged its symbolic capital to be even more precious than its economic capital. No good brand manager would sacrifice reputation for short-term gain. . . .
   The endless battle over admissions in the United States proceeds on the assumption that some great moral principle is at stake in the matter of whom schools like Harvard choose to let inthat those who are denied admission by the whims of the admissions office have somehow been harmed. If you are sick and a hospital shuts its doors to you, you are harmed. But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. lite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experiencean exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an lite and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.
    In the nineteen-eighties, when Harvard was accused of enforcing a secret quota on Asian admissions, its defense was that once you adjusted for the preferences given to the children of alumni and for the preferences given to athletes, Asians really werent being discriminated against. But you could sense Harvards exasperation that the issue was being raised at all. If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldnt be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldnt be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears.
   [except for the last paragraph, the webmaster has substituted "Asian American" in place of "Jew"]
   A very insightful article.  For the full text, see http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/051010crat_atlarge

11/8/06 Detroit News: Michigan voters outlaw race, gender preferences,
    A controversial proposal to ban affirmative action at public colleges and
governments was approved by Michigan voters Tuesday.
   Michigan is now the third state in the nation to outlaw racial preferences at
public entities by way of a ballot proposal.
   Proposal 2 outlaws racial, gender and ethnicity preferences in public college
admissions, government hiring and government contracting. Private businesses
will still be allowed to use affirmative action.
   The passage of Prop 2 effectively overhauls the University of Michigan's
selective admissions process and puts outreach, recruitment and financial aid
programs for minorities and women in jeopardy. While U-M's use of affirmative
action has been widely publicized, other less-selective Michigan colleges have
gender- and race-specific programs and scholarships that would likely be
challenged.
   Leaders predict that enrollment of black, Hispanic and Native American
students combined will plummet from 12-14 percent of the student body to about
4-6 percent. [which implies enrollment of Asian American students will increase
by 200%].  

11/3/06 National Review: They Want to Discriminate, Civil wrongs,
By Rich Lowry
    California s Proposition 209 passed in 1996. Its elimination of preferences 
was supposed to be the worst blow against the educational interests of 
minorities since Plessy v. Ferguson enshrined the principle of separate, but 
equal. Instead, Prop. 209 has been a success. The top universities in the 
University of California system Berkeley and UCLA saw declines in 
minority enrollment. But admissions of minorities in other parts of the UC 
system, schools like UC Santa Cruz and UC Riverside, increased. Overall, 
minority admissions stayed almost the same (down 1 percent from 1995 to 
2000).
    The redistribution of minorities within the UC system has had the benefit 
of increasing minority graduation rates. According to a law-review article by 
Eryn Hadley of the Pacific Legal Foundation, the black graduation rate at 
Berkley for the freshman class entering in 1998 after the passage of Prop. 
209 increased 6.5 percent. UCLA law professor Richard Sander notes 
that black students at UC San Diego had a four-year graduation rate of 
26 percent in 1995-1996 and a 52 percent rate in 1999-2001. These 
figures are so important because gaining admittance to a college doesnt 
do someone much good unless he gets a degree.
Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

10/18/06 New York Sun: Study Shows Biased Policies at University of Michigan
by Eliana Johnson 
    Discrimination against white and Asian applicants to the University of Michigan 's undergraduate, 
law, and medical schools is more severe than ever, a study released yesterday by the Center for 
Equal Opportunity says.
    The study, based on admissions data released by the university in response to a 2005 Freedom 
of Information request filed by CEO, shows that the grades and standardized test scores of black 
and Hispanic undergraduates in 2004 and 2005 were far lower than those of their white and Asian 
counterparts.
    The disparities persisted in the law and medical schools as well. According to the study, medical 
school applicants with MCAT scores of 41 and grade point averages of 3.6 in college science 
courses were admitted at rates of 74%, 43%, 12%, and 6% depending on whether the applicants 
were black, Hispanic, white, or Asian respectively.
    A spokesman for the university, Julie Peterson, called CEO's study "flawed" and "shallow" 
because the study does not take into account all the information considered in the admission 
process such as students' high school curricula, extracurricular activities, and teacher 
recommendations. "CEO attempts to reduce human beings to a couple of simplistic numbers," 
Ms. Peterson said in a statement yesterday.
    The study could affect the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which will be put to voters on 
November 7. If passed, the initiative will prohibit the state and local governments from granting 
preferences based on race, sex, or ethnicity in public employment, contracting, and education. 
Voters passed similar initiatives in California in 1996 and in Washington in 1998.
    CEO's president, Roger Clegg, said that the data are shocking in light of the Supreme Court's 
2003 decision to strike down the admissions program used by the university's main undergraduate 
school. The Court found that by automatically granting minority applicants 20 points out of the 
100 needed for admission, the school failed to consider applicants on an individual basis and 
thereby violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.
    In a similar case against Michigan 's law school, the Court upheld a different admissions 
process, holding that race could be used as a "plus" if considered as one among many factors 
in admission. The cases are Gratz and Grutter v. Bollinger, after Lee Bollinger, who was law 
school dean and then president of the University of Michigan and is now president of Columbia  
University .
    "What is really remarkable is that the weight given to race by the University of Michigan in its 
undergraduate admissions is actually heavier now than under the system that was struck down 
by the Supreme Court in 2003," the chairman of CEO, Linda Chavez, said yesterday in a 
statement. Mr. Clegg highlighted that today black students are 71 times more likely than white 
students to gain admission, whereas in 1999 they were 24 times more likely to be admitted.
    Some are arguing that CEO's study demonstrates that the University of Michigan has not 
reformed itself in accordance with the Supreme Court's mandate. "The proof is in these 
numbers," said Terrence Pell, the president of the Center for Individual Rights, the law firm that 
represented the plaintiffs who sued the university. Mr. Pell said Michigan persists in enforcing 
a "completely segregated double standard."
    Mr. Pell emphasized that the issue is not limited to the University of Michigan . "This ought to 
be an issue in every state that has a top-ranked state university because every one of those 
states is using double standards comparable to Michigan 's," he said.  

10/17/06 National Review: Discrimination Continues On the Michigan front,
By Roger Clegg
    Three studies being released today by the Center for Equal Opportunity document evidence of 
severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity in undergraduate, law, and medical-school 
admissions at the University of Michigan .
    Overview
    The studies are based on data supplied by the University itself, pursuant to freedom-of-information 
requests filed by CEO and the Michigan Association of Scholars. The studies were prepared by 
Althea Nagai, a resident fellow at CEO, and can be viewed on our website, www.ceousa.org.
    Severe discrimination favoring black applicants over white and Asian applicants was found at all 
three schools in all four years for which data were received (1999, 2003, 2004, and 2005, the most 
recent year for which data were available). Hispanics were also favored, but by less; frequently 
whites were given preferences over Asians, although to a still smaller extent. In all three studies, 
the data received from the university were analyzed to calculate: (1) the gaps in academic 
qualifications among admitted students; (2) the number of nonblack students who were rejected 
even though they had better academic qualifications than the median black admittee; (3) the odds 
ratios for the three minority groups relative to whites; and (4) the probabilities of admission for 
students of different races but with the same academic credentials (test scores and grades) and 
background (in particular, in-state applicants with no parental alumni/ae). For the undergraduate 
and medical school students, the subsequent academic performance of students after admission 
to UM was analyzed (the law school did not provide the data needed for such an analysis).
    Undergraduate Admissions
    It is noteworthy that race and ethnicity are apparently more heavily weighted in undergraduate 
admissions now than in the system declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2003.
    In the most recent year for which data were available (2005), the median black admittees SAT 
score was 1160, versus 1260 for Hispanics, 1350 for whites, and 1400 for Asians. High-school 
GPAs were 3.4 for the median black, 3.6 for Hispanics, 3.8 for Asians, and 3.9 for whites.
    In the four years analyzed, UM rejected over 8,000 Hispanics, Asians, and whites who had 
higher SAT or ACT scores and GPAs than the median black admitteeincluding nearly 2700 
students in 2005 alone.
    The black-to-white odds ratio for 2005 was 70 to 1 among students taking the SAT, and 63 to 1 
for students taking the ACT. (To put this in perspective, the odds ratio for nonsmokers versus 
smokers dying from lung cancer is only 14 to 1.)
    In terms of probability of admissions in 2005, black and Hispanic students with a 1240 SAT and 
a 3.2 high school GPA, for instance, had a 9 out of 10 chance of admissions, while whites and 
Asians in this group had only a 1 out of 10 chance.
    These disparities are reflected in subsequent academic performance at the University of 
Michigan, where blacks and Hispanics earn lower grades, and are less likely to be in the honors 
program and more likely to be on academic probation than whites and Asians.
    Law-School Admissions
    Black admittees had lower LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs than the other three ethnic 
groups. Whites and Asians had the highest LSATs and grades (whites grades were slightly 
higher than Asians); Hispanics were higher than blacks but lower than whites and Asians.
    During the four years for which we received data, 4415 Hispanic, Asian, and white students 
who earned higher undergraduate GPAs and scored higher on their LSATs than the median 
black admittee were nonetheless rejected.
    The odds ratio favoring black applicants over whites was 18 to 1 in 2005, the most recent year 
for which data were available. Again, recall that the smoker-dying-from-lung-cancer versus nonsmoker-dying-from-lung-cancer odds ratio is only 14 to 1.  
    In terms of the probabilities of admission that year, an in-state male candidatewith no parents 
having attended the law school, and with an LSAT score and GPA equal to the black admittee 
median of that yearwould have had a 7 out of 10 chance of admission if black, but only a 3 out 
of 10 chance if Hispanic, and a 1 out of 10 chance if white or Asian.
    Medical-School Admissions
    Black admittees had substantially lower MCAT scores and undergraduate science GPAs 
compared to other groups; Hispanic admittees scores and grades were higher; and whites 
and Asians the highest (with Asian GPAs slightly higher than whites).
    During the four years for which we received data, 11,647 Hispanic, Asian, and white students 
(or nearly 3000 students each year) who earned higher undergraduate grades and scored higher 
on the MCAT than the median black admittee were nonetheless rejected.
    The odds ratio favoring black applicants over whites was 21 to 1 in 2005.
    Likewise, differences in probabilities of admission in 2005 were dramatic. For instance, 
students with an MCAT total of 41 and an undergraduate science GPA of 3.6 have these 
probabilities of admission: 74 percent if black and 43 percent if Hispanic, but only 12 percent 
if white and 6 percent if Asian. For those with a 42 MCAT and 3.7 GPA: 85 percent if black 
and 59 percent if Hispanic, but only 21 percent if white and 11 percent if Asian. Finally, for 
those with a 43 MCAT and at 3.8 GPA, black applicants have a 9 out of 10 chance of 
admission (91 percent) and Hispanics a 3 out of 4 chance (73 percent), but whites have only 
a 1 out of 3 chance (33 percent) and Asians only a 1 out of 5 chance (19 percent).
    Gaps in USMLE Step 1 scores this is a licensing exam taken after the first two years of 
medical school parallel racial/ethnic differences in entering qualifications. White and 
Asian median scores are substantially higher than 75th-percentile black scores.
    Conclusion
    The voters in Michigan will have the opportunity this November to vote yes on Proposition 2 
and end the unconscionable discrimination that exists at the University of Michigan . Heres 
hoping that they do just that.
      Roger Clegg is president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity.  
He will answer questions about the studies at 10 A.M. today at the Hilton Garden Inn 
( 351 Gratiot Avenue ) in Detroit .

10/17/06 Inside Higher Ed: New Salvos on Affirmative Action,
by Scott Jaschik
    With Michigan voters weeks away from a vote on whether to ban affirmative action, critics of 
the practice are releasing admissions statistics that they say show the extent of the gap 
between black and white applicants admitted to the University of Michigan .
    The data reveal large differences in grades and standardized test scores, and indicate that 
black applicants are much more likely to be admitted, even with lower grades and test scores. 
These are the sort of data that have been influential in other states that have considered  
and passed statewide bans on affirmative action. The people of Michigan have a right to 
know the extent to which discrimination is taking place, said Roger Clegg, president of the 
Center for Equal Opportunity, which is releasing the data today and planning a series of 
events in Michigan to publicize the figures.
    David Waymire, a spokesman for One United Michigan, which is leading the fight against 
the referendum, said that the data being released were worthless because they did not 
include breakdowns by economic class. He said that he believed the gaps in scores were 
largely driven by class, not race and ethnicity, and that this was just the usual half-assed job 
from the Center for Equal Opportunity.
    The data came from the University of Michigan , which had to release the figures in 
response to the centers Freedom of Information Act requests. Among the findings:
    - The SAT median for black students admitted to Michigan s main undergraduate college 
was 1160 in 2005, compared to 1260 for Hispanics, 1350 for whites and 1400 for Asians. 
High school grade point averages were 3.4 for black applicants, 3.6 for Hispanics, 3.8 for 
Asians, and 3.9 for whites.
    - Black and Hispanic applicants in 2005 with a 1240 SAT and a 3.2 GPA had a 9 in 10 
chance of getting in while white and Asian applicants with the same scores had a 1 in 10 
chance of getting in.
    - For undergraduates in the most recent year for which data are available (2004), 28 percent 
of black students had been on academic probation at some point in their Michigan careers, 
compared to 23 percent of Hispanic students, 8 percent of Asian students, and 5 percent of 
white students.
    Similar patterns hold for law and medical school admissions. In the latter, for example, the 
data indicate that of applicants with an MCAT total of 41 and a GPA of 3.6 in college science 
courses, admit rates were 74 percent for black applicants, 43 percent for Hispanic applicants, 
12 percent for white applicants and 6 percent for Asian applicants.
    The debate in the weeks ahead is likely to be over what these numbers mean. To foes of 
affirmative action, they are the smoking gun about the use of racial preferences in admissions. 
To the University of Michigan , these are numbers without context or much significance at all 
(except perhaps politically).
    Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity said that these data suggest that the university is 
paying more attention now to race and ethnicity that it was before two landmark decisions by 
the Supreme Court in 2003. Those decisions one about the system used by Michigan to 
admit undergraduates and one about its law school effectively said that colleges could 
continue to use affirmative action, but couldnt have separate systems in which extra points 
were awarded across the board specifically for race and ethnicity. Cleggs group was hoping 
at the time for the court to completely bar affirmative action, but he said that the data show 
that Michigan is violating the ruling that was handed down.
    What the Supreme Court upheld was the use of race in a limited and nuanced way, he 
said, which is inconsistent with the wide gaps shown in the data his group is releasing.
    Julie Peterson, a spokeswoman for the University of Michigan , released a statement in 
which she took issue with Cleggs analysis, which she called flawed and shallow, noting 
that expert witnesses in the affirmative action cases had found that such comparisons are 
oversimplified to the point of being misleading.
    The centers analysis ignored key factors, she said, such as the rigor of the students 
high school or undergraduate curriculum, extracurricular activities, essays, teacher and 
counselor recommendations, and socioeconomic status. By ignoring these qualities 
about applicants, she said, CEO attempts to reduce human beings to a couple of 
simplistic numbers. No top university admits students solely on the basis of grades and 
test scores. We consider many factors in order to admit a group of students who have 
diverse talents, who are highly motivated and who have the potential to succeed at 
Michigan and make a contribution to the learning environment.
    Peterson noted that after the Supreme Court rulings, the university revised its 
undergraduate admissions process to gain more information about students. It is just 
plain wrong to imply that race somehow carries a greater amount of weight than it has 
in the past, or than the Supreme Court allowed.
    If there was one area on which Peterson and Clegg agreed, it was that the political 
stakes are high right now for data like the figures being released.
    It is no coincidence that CEO has released this report in the weeks leading up to a ballot 
proposal that would outlaw public affirmative action in the state of Michigan , Peterson said. 
This is a politicized attempt by CEO to narrow the focus of the debate to college 
admissions at a single institution, rather than acknowledging the broader potential impact 
on state employment and contracting, K-12 schools and public universities and 
community colleges, potentially affecting financial aid, outreach, pre-college and other 
programs that consider race, gender and national origin.
    For his part, Clegg said that he hopes the data will persuade Michigan voters to bar 
affirmative action. If they dont, he said that the data could be helpful to others who may 
want to sue the university. And if you arent in Michigan , Clegg said that his group  
which previously did a series of studies like the Michigan one is planning another series.

1/5/96 The Chronicle of Higher Education, p A39: " U.S. Lags in Resolving Bias Complaints 
by Asian Americans" by Mary Geraghty
    Civil Rights Complaints by Asian Americans
    A recent report by the General Accounting Office (G A O) found that complaints to the  
U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights brought by Asian Americans exceed 
those brought by other minority groups. A higher proportion of complaints by Asian Americans 
reviewed by the GAO concerned college-admissions issues. College-admissions cases 
typically take longer to resolve. (Seven of the thriteen cases reviewed by the GAO took 26 
or more months to be resolved.)
    The O.C.R. also found Asian Americans' complaints to be valid more often than cases 
brought by other groups.
    The civil-rights office has made changes to speed up its investigations and reviews and 
to reduce its backlog of cases.
    Sources: General Accounting Office report on Education Department investigations of 
civil-rights complaints by Asian-American students.
http://web.mit.edu/course/2/2.95j/complaint.html

10/10/06 Inside Higher Education: Too Asian?
    Rachel, for an Asian, has many friends.
    Thats the kind of line that apparently is turning up more and more in letters of
recommendation on behalf of Asian American applicants to top colleges,
according to experts on a panel called Too Asian? at the annual meeting of
the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
   When the recommendation line was cited as the kind of bias even perhaps
well intentioned bias that pervades the admissions process, many in the
audience at first seemed angry that in 2006 people would reference race in that
way. But when it came time for audience comments, one high school counselor
said that counselors feel they have no choice but to mention students Asian
status and to try to make it seem like their Asian students are different from
other Asian students.
    We make those comparisons because we feel its the only way we can get
through and get our students looked at, said the counselor, to knowing nods
from others in the audience.
   Many Asian students and their families have for years believed that quotas
or bias hinder their chances at top Ivy or California universities. But to listen to
panelists and members of a standing room only audience the intensity of
concern has grown, as has mistrust of the system.
   In the discussion at the NACAC meeting, participants tried to talk frankly
about Asian students perceptions and colleges perception of Asians with
several people admitting that they were simultaneously denouncing stereotypes
and saying that some of them had at least partial truth that colleges and high
schools need to confront.
   Admissions officers, while defending the overall integrity of the system,
admitted that bias is a real problem. And advocates for Asian students admitted
that they are challenged by the many Asian families who want to consider only
a subset of institutions.
   Many counselors during and after the session said that they have little
doubt that when applying for undergraduate admission to research universities,
white applicants are getting admitted with lower test scores and grades than
Asian applicants are. One high school guidance counselor told the panel of experts
that a sign of the distrust of the system is that he is increasingly asked by Asian
American students if they would be better off applying to college if they declined
to check the race/ethnicity box on the applications.
   Jon Reider, a counselor at University High School, in San Francisco, urged the
questioner to encourage students to continue to check the box, and he questioned
whether leaving the box would do much good. If your name is Wong..... he said to
laughter. But he also noted that one of the many ways Asian Americans today dont
fit stereotypes is in their names. The Asian American woman on the panel and
admissions official at Colorado College was named Rachel Cederberg.
   The prompt for the discussion was an article that ran last year in The Wall Street
Journal about the new white flight. The article reported that white families were
leaving some nice suburbs with great public schools or sending their children to
private schools as districts became too Asian, apparently meaning districts
where after-school academic programs are more popular than soccer. While the
school districts about which the article was written have criticized the piece, many
at the NACAC meeting said that the attitudes quoted in the article were real and
were playing a big impact in college admissions.
   Reider said he thought the article and the question of Too Asian? that it posed
was shameful and said that he was embarrassed as an American that such a
piece would appear today. He asked whether anyone would think of publishing an
article called Too Latino? and compared the bias to the kind of bigotry that for
decades limited the enrollment of Jewish students at top private universities. This
is a racist question, he said.
   He also said that the bias is real and cited his experience in his previous job
as part of the admissions office at Stanford University . There, he said, the office
did a study some years ago in which it compared Asian and white applicants with
the same overall academic and leadership rankings. The study was only of
unhooked kids, meaning those with no extra help for being an alumni child or an
athlete. The study found that comparably qualified white applicants were
significantly more likely to be admitted than their Asian counterparts.
   Stanfords admissions office responded with some serious self-reflection, he
said, and officials now spend some time each year studying different kinds of bias
like letters that compare Asian applicants to other Asians in an attempt to
weed out any unfair judgments. With bias removed, he said, theres no way that a
school or college can be considered too Asian.
   At the same time, he and others said that part of the problem in admissions
today is created by Asian applicants and especially their parents who tend
to accept only certain colleges as legitimate options.
   Colorado College , where Cederberg now works, has an Asian population
under 10 percent a figure that is quite typical for liberal arts colleges. Asian
students are considered to add to diversity to the college and she has the full
support of the college in recruiting them, she said.
   Based on working with institutions where Asian enrollment exceed 25 percent
something that is increasingly common at elite publics in California and top
universities elsewhere she said she hears lots of talk about admissions officers
who complain about yet another Asian student who wants to major in math and
science and who plays the violin or people who say I dont want another boring Asian.
   She said she wishes more Asian students would look at liberal arts colleges.
A broader problem, several speakers said, was an emphasis on just a few kinds
of institutions.
   Mike White, principal of Lynbrook High School , in one of the districts The Wall
Street Journal wrote about, said that he has a very tough time persuading Asian
students to look at the California State University campuses, including nearby San
Jose State University , which has many academic programs in areas his students
want to study.
   If they dont get into the University of California campus of choice or Stanford,
he said, many prefer to enroll at a community college and transfer to a UC campus
rather than attending a Cal State campus. White stressed that he didnt mean to
be critical of community colleges, but that it struck him that his students were
ignoring institutions that were a good match just because the institutions didnt
have a perceived level of prestige.
   Reider described an exercise he does for Asian parents in which he tells them
about two institutions. At one, he describes walking through a beautify campus,
meeting a president who knows all the students by name, seeing labs that are first
rate, and learning that science students are admitted to top graduate and
professional programs, based in part on their original research. At the other
institution, he describes how he meets a smart science student frustrated that he
cant get any work done because of the loud music down the hall. When Reider
walks down the hall, a student blaring music tells him its a party school.
   After he describes the two campuses, he says he tells the parents youd want
your kids at the first school, right? They agree. Then he tells them that the first
institution was Whitman College (although he quickly adds that it could have
been a few dozen other liberal arts colleges) and the second institution was
Harvard University . And then, he said, the parents all say that they were wrong
when they answered the question the first time, and they still want their kids at
Harvard.

9/21/06 The Economist: Poison Ivy: Not so much palaces of learning as bastions of
privilege and hypocrisy,
    American universities like to think of themselves as engines of social justice,
thronging with diversity. But how much truth is there in this flattering self-image? Over
the past few years Daniel Golden has written a series of coruscating stories in the Wall
Street Journal about the admissions practices of America 's elite universities,
suggesting that they are not so much engines of social justice as bastions of privilege.
Now he has produced a bookThe Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class
Buys Its Way into Elite Collegesand Who Gets Left Outside the Gatesthat
deserves to become a classic.
   Mr Golden shows that elite universities do everything in their power to admit the
children of privilege. If they cannot get them in through the front door by relaxing their
standards, then they smuggle them in through the back. No less than 60% of the places
in elite universities are given to candidates who have some sort of extra hook, from
rich or alumni parents to sporting prowess. The number of whites who benefit from
this affirmative action is far greater than the number of blacks.
   The American establishment is extraordinarily good at getting its children into the
best colleges. In the last presidential election both candidatesGeorge Bush and John
Kerrywere C students who would have had little chance of getting into Yale if they
had not come from Yale families. Al Gore and Bill Frist both got their sons into their
alma maters (Harvard and Princeton respectively), despite their average academic
performances. Universities bend over backwards to admit legacies (ie, the children
of alumni). Harvard admits 40% of legacy applicants compared with 11% of applicants
overall. Amherst admits 50%. An average of 21-24% of students in each year at Notre
Dame are the offspring of alumni. When it comes to the children of particularly rich
donors, the bending-over-backwards reaches astonishing levels. Harvard even has
something called a Z lista list of applicants who are given a place after a year's
deferment to catch upthat is dominated by the children of rich alumni.
   University behaviour is at its worst when it comes to grovelling to celebrities. Duke
University 's admissions director visited Steven Spielberg's house to interview his
stepdaughter. Princeton found a place for Lauren Bushthe president's niece and a
top fashion modeldespite the fact that she missed the application deadline by a
month. Brown University was so keen to admit Michael Ovitz's son that it gave him a
place as a special student. (He dropped out after a year.)
   Most people think of black football and basketball stars when they hear about
sports scholarships. But there are also sports scholarships for rich white students
who play preppie sports such as fencing, squash, sailing, riding, golf and, of course,
lacrosse. The University of Virginia even has scholarships for polo-players, relatively
few of whom come from the inner cities.
   You might imagine that academics would be up in arms about this. Alas, they have
too much skin in the game. Academics not only escape tuition fees if they can get
their children into the universities where they teach. They get huge preferences as
well. Boston University accepted 91% of faculty brats in 2003, at a cost of about
$9m. Notre Dame accepts about 70% of the children of university employees,
compared with 19% of unhooked applicants, despite markedly lower average SAT
scores.
   Why do Mr Golden's findings matter so much? The most important reason is that
America is witnessing a potentially explosive combination of trends. Social inequality
is rising at a time when the escalators of social mobility are slowing ( America has
lower levels of social mobility than most European countries). The returns on higher
education are rising: the median earnings in 2000 of Americans with a bachelor's
degree or higher were about double those of high-school leavers. But elite universities
are becoming more socially exclusive. Between 1980 and 1992, for example, the
proportion of disadvantaged children in four-year colleges fell slightly (from 29% to
28%) while the proportion of well-to-do children rose substantially (from 55% to 66%).
   Mr Golden's findings do not account for all of this. Get rid of affirmative action for
the rich, and rich children will still do better. But they clearly account for some
differences: unhooked candidates are competing for just 40% of university places.
And they raise all sorts of issues of justice and hypocrisy. What is one to make of
Mr Frist, who opposes affirmative action for minorities while practising it for his own
son?
   The poor left behind
    Two groups of people overwhelmingly bear the burden of these policiesAsian-
Americans and poor whites. Asian-Americans are the new Jews, held to higher
standards (they need to score at least 50 points higher than non-Asians even to be in
the game) and frequently stigmatised for their characters (Harvard evaluators
persistently rated Asian-Americans below whites on personal qualities). When the
University of California , Berkeley briefly considered introducing means-based
affirmative action, it rejected the idea on the ground that using poverty yields a lot of
poor white kids and poor Asian kids.
   There are a few signs that the winds of reform are blowing. Several elite universities
have expanded financial aid for poor children. Texas A&M has got rid of legacy
preferences. Only last week Harvard announced that it was getting rid of early
admissiona system that favours privileged childrenand Princeton rapidly
followed suit. But the wind is going to have to blow a heck of a lot harder, and for a
heck of a lot longer, before America's money-addicted and legacy-loving universities
can be shamed into returning to what ought to have been their guiding principle all
along: admitting people to university on the basis of their intellectual ability.

8/18/05 The American Thinker: Asian Americans and Affirmative Action,
by James Chen
    As a civil rights activist and Republican Cabinet member, Arthur Flectcher had a long 
and distinguished career as an advisor to Republican Presidents from Richard Nixon to 
George H.W Bush.  Fletcher, who died last month at the age of 80, was known as the 
Father of Affirmative Action from his pioneering work as Assistant Secretary of 
Labor during the late 1960s.  
    As executive director of the United Negro College Fund in the mid-1970s, he was 
credited with coining the slogan, A mind is a terrible thing to waste.  For college-
bound Asian-American students, its a catchphase that serves as an ironic reminder 
of his Affirmative Action legacy.
    In today's highly-competitive college admissions environment, many Asian-American 
students are discovering that Affirmative Action and other race-based quota systems 
are wreaking havoc on their higher education plans.  For some time now, Asian-
American students have been subject to discrimination in the college admissions 
process as selective schools try to limit their numbers under the guise of "diversity".  
These policies have far-reaching implications for Asian-American students, who are 
responding in creative and sometimes odd ways to get around these barriers.
    While it is common knowledge that Asian students face higher admissions 
standards than any other racial group, the most frequently cited problems for college-
bound Asian-Americans are the invisible college admissions quotas applied to high 
schools whose student bodies have large numbers of Asians.  Because of the 
overabundance of high-performing Asian students, many educators and parents 
believe that top schools such as Stanford, Princeton and UC Berkeley willfully 
restrict the number of admits from high schools with an disproportionate number of 
Asian students.  It is alleged that these colleges surreptitiously favor students from 
schools in predominantly white, suburban areas in the admissions process.
    In Northern California's Bay Area, this phenomenon is often referred to as the 
"Lowell effect", named after Lowell High School, a top-rated San Francisco high 
school whose students are predominantly Asian-American.  Parents of college-
bound children in nearby areas with large concentrations of Asian students such 
as Fremont and Alameda have also noticed this trend.  In an effort to make their 
children stand out, some have responded by moving their families to predominantly 
white suburbs further inland or enrolling their children in lower-performing inner city 
schools whose students are mostly black and Hispanic.
    Other roadblocks exist, not the least being the "Asian nerd" stereotype that 
persists on college campuses and in admissions offices.  While some argue that 
the image of studious, piano-playing and mathematically-inclined Asian students is 
somewhat positive, the overall consensus among college admissions directors has 
been that Asian-American students are not as well-rounded as their non-Asian 
counterparts.
    This criticism has prompted Asian-American college applicants to present 
themselves in ways considered to be atypical of Asian applicants.  For some, this 
means participation in activities such as varsity sports and theater arts, or 
concentrating on areas of study other than math and the sciences.  Many college 
admissions counselors routinely advise their Asian applicants to state their intent 
to major in the liberal arts or social sciences, and to participate in non-academic 
extracurricular activities regardless of their interest in these areas.
    The Washington Post recently reported on Asian-American college applicants 
who have successfully applied these strategies:
    Robert Shaw, an educational consultant based in Garden City, N.Y., was working 
with a very bright Chinese American student who feared the Ivy League would not 
notice her at New Jersey's Holmdel High, where 22 percent of the students were 
Asian American, and she was only in the top 20 percent of her high-scoring class. 
    So, Shaw said, she and her parents took his daring advice to change their 
address. They moved 10 miles north to Keyport , N.J. , where the average SAT 
score was 300 points lower and there were almost no Asians. She also entered, 
at his suggestion, the Miss Teen New Jersey contest, not a typical activity for the 
budding scholar. 
    It worked, Shaw said. His client became class valedictorian, won the talent 
portion of the Miss Teen competition playing piano and got into Yale and MIT.
    However, there are limitations to these approaches, as the elite colleges appear 
to have set ceilings on overall Asian-American enrollment as well.  Many Asian-
American parents believe that their children are merely jockeying among 
themselves for the limited number of spaces allocated to them by college 
admissions officers.  Other factors, most notably the declining number of white 
students choosing to study technical fields such as math, science and engineering, 
may also be working in tandem against them.  According to Asian-American 
parents, the most noticeable effect of this shift has been the decrease the number 
of slots available to their children in non-technical fields.  
    Their reasoning goes like this: to compensate for lower numbers of white 
students studying math, science and engineering, colleges must accept more 
technically-inclined Asian students to take their place.  But if the overall number of 
Asian-American students is capped at a certain level, then a relatively high 
percentage of Asians majoring in technical subjects needs to be offset by a 
correspondingly low percentage allowed to major in non-technical subjects.  
Paradoxically, ceilings on Asian-American enrollment may then actually 
perpetuate the Asian nerd stereotype by prompting colleges to admit more 
Asian students majoring in technical subjects.
    The net effect of demographics and racial quotas has been the academic 
ghettoization of many select colleges and universities.  An observer needs 
only to walk into an electrical engineering classroom at Michigan  or UCLA to 
see this effect in real life.
    As recent developments show, these trends in college admissions policies 
towards Asian-Americans have resulted in unintended consequences.  In a 
backlash noted by the Washington Post, SAT takers and college applicants are 
increasingly refusing to identify themselves by race.  A significant number of 
those who decline to state their race are Asian-American, according to the 
Washington Post:
    Many applicants, though, say they omitted their ethnicity as a deliberate slap 
at a system they believe is rigged against them.
    Tao Tan, a high school senior from Plainsboro , N.J. , said he supports 
affirmative action "in theory." But when it comes to college admissions, he was 
convinced that too many of his competitors were "gouging the system" by 
highlighting tenuous family connections that might allow them to portray 
themselves as black or Hispanic. 
    Tan, 17, was convinced that admissions officers would hold him "to a higher 
standard" if he indicated he was Asian. So he didn't. "My name is not as Chinese 
as Chang or Lee," said Tan, who will attend Cornell University . "I picture them 
sitting in their offices scratching their heads: 'Is he African? Is he Asian?' " 
    With Decline to State Race now a viable option, some Asian-Americans 
would seem to have a built-in advantage in the college admissions process.  With 
the increase in racially-mixed marriagesa majority of American-born Asian 
women now choose to marry white mena growing number of Asian-American 
applicants have European surnames which disguise their Asian heritage.  With 
more than one-in-four Asian-American children of college age having one white 
parent, it stands to reason that a significant percentage of Asian/white mixed-race 
college applicants would either choose to classify themselves as white or be 
identified as such for admissions purposes.  Data from the 2000 US Census 
shows that roughly half of mixed-race Asian-white children identified themselves 
as white.
    Native-born Filipino-Americans would appear to have an even greater 
admissions advantage, as their Spanish-surnames may mislead college 
admissions offices into believing that they are Hispanic.  Similarly, Chinese-
American applicants with ethnically ambiguous surnames such as Young or 
Shaw or adoptees from Asia may increase their chances for admission merely 
by rendering hazy their ethnic origins.
    As these examples make clear, Asian-Americans attempts to circumvent 
quotas rely primarily on overturning demographic factors.  But despite these efforts, 
evidence is mounting that the cumulative result of discriminatory quotas against 
Asians is powerful cascading-effect that results in Asian-American applicants 
having a higher standard for admission at all levels of college selectivity.
    Under this scenario, the top-tier schools only admit a reduced number of Asian-
American students whose overall admissions criteria are higher than the general 
pool of students. Second-tier schools are then compelled to choose between 
having more Asian students in their classes (under a color-blind standard), or 
using quotas to reach their diversity goals. The second-tier schools will usually 
choose the latter, and so the effects cascade to the third-tier schools and so on 
down the undergraduate ladder. Thus, a quota to reduce the number of Asian 
students at the upper-tier of colleges has a net effect of moving all Asian students 
down a level in terms of college selectivity.
    In their defense of quotas, some supporters of Affirmative Action have noted that 
Asian-American students have plenty of options available to them.  Among them 
are looking beyond the Ivy League and the upper-echelon of state universities such 
as the University of California and small colleges such as Amherst .  Often, they point 
out that the Midwest has many excellent small colleges such as Oberlin and Grinnell 
that appear to welcome Asian-American applicants.  Others such as Washington 
Post education columnist Jay Mathews tell Asian-Americans to look at the bright 
side of things while reminding us that life isnt always fair:
    I am convinced that one reason why well-reasoned complaints have not led to 
massive demonstrations and legislative reform is that the students of Asian descent 
who are rejected by the Ivies get educations just as good in other colleges. College 
admissions cannot be fair for anyone when, as happens at some schools, there are 
ten applicants for every place in the freshman class.
    Still, asking some Indian-American kid from Fremont , California to spend 4 years 
in Kalamazoo (MI) or Valparaiso (IN), or at a nearby college where she is 
overqualified is small consolation to the tens of thousands of students negatively 
affected by Affirmative Action policies over the past 30 years.  To judge by the 
current responses of Asian-American parents, this is neither a feasible solution
many do not feel comfortable sending their children to faraway schools in the 
Midwest nor a desirable outcome.
    When Arthur Fletcher set out to create a remedy for racial discrimination, he 
probably had no intention for his system of good faith efforts towards the hiring of 
minority construction workers to result in systematic bias against Asian-American 
students.   Although the Supreme Court has established that race can be used as 
a factor in admissions decisions (Grutter v. Bollinger), colleges will soon be forced 
to make even more difficult choices, such as whether to apply the One-Drop Rule 
to the growing number of mixed-race Asians, or to continue  relaxing entrance 
standardssuch as abolishing use of the SATto maintain racial balance.  Given 
that Asians are the second fastest-growing ethnic group in the America (behind 
Hispanics, according to Census 2000 data), those decisions should be coming 
sooner rather than later.
    James Chen is proprietor of the blog Where Have you Gone, Joe DiMaggio?

6/15/05 60 Minutes: The Sound of Music,
"In 1991 70% of Juilliards students came from Asian descent."  Now it is down to 11% 
(see Colleges: 2005).

6/6/05 Princeton University website: Study: Ending affirmative action would sharply increase 
admission of Asian Americans to colleges,
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S11/80/77I23/index.xml?sectio
    Princeton University researchers have found that ignoring race in elite college admissions 
would result in a sharp increase in the number of Asian Americans accepted, sharp declines in 
the numbers of African Americans and Hispanics accepted, and no effect on white students.
University of California system where affirmative action has been eliminated: "Compared to the 
fall of 1996, the number of underrepresented minority students admitted to the University of  
California - Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School for the fall of 1997 dropped 66 percent from 162 to 
55.... African-American applicants were particularly affected as their admission numbers declined 
by 81 percent from 75 to 14, but acceptances of Hispanics also fell by 50 percent.




11/27/06 San Diego Union Tribune: "UC ethnic shift revives Proposition 209 debate: Asian-
Americans gain while blacks, Latinos aren't keeping pace,"
by Eleanor Yang Su
    Will Asian-Americans one day make up a majority of students at the University of California?
    If the trend of the past decade continues, it just might happen.
    This month marks the 10-year anniversary of the passage of Proposition 209, the state 
initiative that banned using racial preferences in public university admissions and state hiring 
and contracting.
    At the highly competitive University of California , where grades and test scores drive 
admissions, the enrollment trend is clear: Asian-American student numbers have grown the 
most, far outpacing their population increase in the state.
    Asian-Americans 14.1 percent of California 's 2005 high school graduating class make 
up 41.8 percent of the freshman class at UC campuses, up from 36 percent a decade ago.
    Meanwhile, blacks at 3 percent and whites at 32.2 percent make up smaller shares of UC's 
freshman class than they did previously. Latinos account for 16.3 percent of UC freshmen, up 
from 13 percent a decade ago, but still less than half their 36.5 percentage of state high school 
graduates.
    The changes to UC's student demographics are definitive, but many continue to debate 
Proposition 209's merits and its effects.
    Consider the story of Yat-Pang Au. He made headlines nearly 20 years ago when he filed 
a formal complaint against the University of California Berkeley alleging his rejection by 
the university was prompted by a discriminatory admissions policy toward Asians in response 
to their already soaring numbers at the campus.
    Despite his personal experience, Au says he has mixed feelings about Proposition 209.
    It's a more objective way of accepting those qualified, said Au, now 38 and running a 
security company in San Jose, but it's not a perfect system either.
    The ethnic makeup at colleges after Proposition 209, particularly the dramatic drop in 
the enrollment of African-Americans, has prompted some to talk about repealing it.
    Others, including one of the measure's most vocal proponents, former UC regent Ward 
Connerly, say the end of racial preferences has been a boon to the state by bringing it closer 
to being race-blind.
    What's driving growth
    As a whole, Asian-American student numbers at UC have grown more than any other 
ethnic group each year since Proposition 209 passed in 1996. (At California State  
University 's 23 campuses, the ethnicity of its freshman class has remained generally steady 
over the last decade.)
    Asian undergraduates already make up the largest racial group at seven of the nine UC 
undergraduate campuses. Only University of California Santa Cruz and University of  
California Santa Barbara have remained majority white in the past decade. At University of
California Irvine , Asians make up a majority of undergraduates, or 51 percent.
    Many academics agree that one thing driving the student numbers at UC is the growth of 
the Asian population in California . Another factor is Asians' prioritizing of education and 
economic ability to choose schools that better prepare students for college, said Robert 
Teranishi, an assistant professor at New York University , who has studied Asian-
American trends in higher education.
    Basically, Asians are vulnerable to the same challenges that all students are vulnerable 
to, Teranishi said, but in California , they tend to be positioned well to succeed in the 
system.
    It's hard to generalize from the data because Asians are not monolithic, he said. The 
Asian category includes several different populations such as Chinese, East Indian/
Pakistani and Vietnamese all of which have different cultural backgrounds and rates of 
admission to UC.
    If the high Asian numbers at UC are reflective of anything, Teranishi said, it is UC's 
heavy reliance on grades and test scores.
    The UC admissions process has two phases: the first looks at grades and test scores 
to determine who is eligible for the university. The second part involves specific 
campuses considering academic and non-academic elements to select whom to admit.
    Of all the racial groups, Asians have the largest portion of students meeting UC 
eligibility requirements. In 2003, 31.4 percent of Asians met the requirements, 
compared with an overall average of 14.4 percent among all California high school 
seniors.
    The university system also accepts the top 4 percent of each senior class in  
California high schools. That policy has tended to benefit poor whites and low-income 
Asians, said Frances Contreras, an education professor at the University of Washington,
 whose doctoral dissertation was on the effects of Proposition 209.
    The ones that rose to the top were Vietnamese and Hmong, Contreras said.    
    Other impacts
    Some say Proposition 209 has done great harm. Mostly notably, they point to the 
precipitous drop in black student numbers at UC.
    There are 96 blacks in the freshman class of about 4,800 at the University of California 
Los Angeles this year. About 50 black freshmen are enrolled at the University of California
San Diego this fall, making up only 1 percent of the class. If Proposition 209 remains in 
place, critics say, complete ethnic groups will lose access to the state's most prestigious 
public universities.
    It perpetuates a stratification and racially segmented society, and that's bad for the 
soul of academia, said Maria Blanco, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for 
Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization.
    Blanco said it was unfair to judge all students by the same admissions criteria when 
the high school resources available to them, such as honors class offerings, vary so 
dramatically across the state.
    Connerly said the criticisms were overblown, and that opponents of Proposition 209 
were out of step with the 54.6 percent of voters who had approved the constitutional 
amendment.
    Yeah, the number of black kids at UCLA, Berkeley and San Diego went down, 
Connerly said, but when you really look at that in the context of the state, there are 
relatively few people going to UC. That's a very small issue.
    The greater good achieved, Connerly said, is that Proposition 209 has hastened 
the transition from a race-conscious society to one where race has no place in 
American life or law.
    Connerly, who has mounted campaigns to do away with racial preferences in other 
states, had further success earlier this month. A measure in Michigan similar to 
Proposition 209 passed Nov. 7 with 58 percent of the vote.
    Classroom diversity
    Researchers across the country have trained a keen eye on shifts in diversity 
following Proposition 209.
    In the narrow view, some Asians are beneficiaries, and Latinos and blacks are 
losers; but really, everyone's a loser, said Gary Orfield, an education and social policy 
professor at Harvard. There may be enough minorities to have one or two kids in a 
classroom, but not enough to have a rich relationship.
    Diversity in the classroom has a tremendous impact on helping with students' 
critical thinking and social skills, said Sylvia Hurtado, a UCLA professor and 
director of its Higher Education Research Institute.
    Hurtado, who spent five years studying the impact of diversity on the learning 
experience, says a key to good teaching is interaction. When ethnically diverse 
classes interact, it benefits the learning environment and prepares students for the 
complexities of the workplace.
    Even if you're talking about a subject in which race doesn't matter, it plays into 
whether you study in a group, how you develop skills and whether you have a 
support network, Hurtado said.
    Students are divided on the issue.
    At UCSD, nearly 53 percent of this year's freshman class is Asian-American. 
Whites make up about 28 percent and Latinos 12 percent.
    Having diversity is a plus, but it doesn't feel like my education has [suffered] 
because of the drop in numbers, said Tiffany Yu, a UCSD freshman.
    But UCSD sophomore Zach Vickers said students would benefit if race were 
considered in college admissions. Vickers is from the Northern California city of
Alameda, where blacks and Latinos make up 15 percent of the population.
    It was an eye-opening experience to come from a place with quite a lot of 
blacks and Latinos to none at all, Vickers said. I like the idea of a really diverse 
campus.
    What's in the future?
    Some predict that certain minority groups will continue to shrink at UC.
    That's prompted a group of influential UC academics to propose changes to 
UC's decades-old eligibility system.
    By relying only on course grades and standardized test scores, UC's eligibility 
may not reflect a wide enough definition of merit, said Michael Brown, a UC Santa 
Barbara education professor. Adding the consideration of non-academic factors, 
such as leadership, initiative or improvement in grades in the course of one's high 
school career, may better gauge a student's potential, Brown said.
    UC's faculty board that considers admissions changes is examining the eligibility 
system, and if it formulates a proposal, it will be presented to the UC Board of 
Regents. Changes to the system could reduce the number of Asians and whites 
admitted, Brown said, unless UC raises its overall enrollment.
    One of our missions is to represent the California citizenry in their access to 
UC, Brown said. We can't afford to leave populations of our society behind.



4/20/05 San Francisco Chronicle: Univ. of Calif evades ban on using race in 
admissions,
by Tanya Schevitz
    More Latinos than ever are being accepted to the University of California system 
but not so for blacks in the pool of students eligible for freshman enrollment this fall, 
according to figures for California students released Tuesday.     
    Overall, 50,017 graduating high school students in California have been 
offered a spot at one of UC's 10 undergraduate campuses. UC admissions 
officials expect about 30,000 of those to accept and enroll this fall. 
    While whites and Asian Americans make up the majority, Latinos have 
seen a significant increase. A total of 8,438 Latino students from California  
were offered admission, compared with 5,570 in 1997 -- the last year before 
voters imposed the Proposition 209 ban on affirmative action. 
    Latinos have continued to see steady gains in the past few years, growing 
from 7,795 in 2003 -- the last year that is accurate to compare with because 
of temporary cuts in UC admissions last year due to budget reductions. They 
now represent 16.8 percent of total admissions, compared with 14.05 percent 
in 1997. 
    A total of 1,593 black students from California were offered admission to 
UC, up slightly from 1,503 in 1997 but down from the 1,720 accepted in 2003. 
They represent only 3.18 percent of the total admissions this year. 
    At UC's two most selective campuses, UC Berkeley and UCLA, the number 
of accepted Latinos, African Americans and American Indians still lags 
noticeably behind the totals of the affirmative action years. According to figures 
released by the UC Office of the President, 1,097 Latino students from
California were admitted to UC Berkeley for fall 2005, making them 12.9 
percent of the total. That compares to 1,216 Latino students in 1997, when 
they were 17 percent of the admissions. 
    UC's report released Tuesday includes only California students, who make 
up more than 90 percent of UC admissions. This year, UC Berkeley admitted 
262 blacks from California , making them 3.08 percent of the total. That 
compares with 525 black students in 1997 when they were 7.35 percent of 
the total. A total of 42 American Indian students were admitted to the 
freshman class at UC Berkeley in the fall, making them 0.49 percent of the 
admissions. That compares with 61 admissions in 1997, when they were 0.85 
percent of the total. UC Berkeley is working to come up with ways to increase 
minority enrollment. A five-year slide in the number of African American students 
stopped this year. 
    White students continued to make up the majority of admitted students, 
growing to 18,844 -- or 37.6 percent -- of those admitted this year, up from 
18,640 in 2003. Asian American students also saw an increase in admissions 
to 17,297 -- or 34.6 percent -- this year up from 16,125 in 2003.

3/22/05 Washington Post: Learning to Stand Out Among the Standouts: Some 
Asian Americans Say Colleges Expect More From Them, 
by Jay Mathews
    Robert Shaw, an educational consultant based in Garden City, N.Y., was working 
with a very bright Chinese American student who feared the Ivy League would not 
notice her at New Jersey's Holmdel High, where 22 percent of the students were 
Asian American, and she was only in the top 20 percent of her high-scoring class. 
    So, Shaw said, she and her parents took his daring advice to change their 
address. They moved 10 miles north to Keyport , N.J. , where the average SAT 
score was 300 points lower and there were almost no Asians. She also entered, 
at his suggestion, the Miss Teen New Jersey contest, not a typical activity for the 
budding scholar. 
    It worked, Shaw said. His client became class valedictorian, won the talent 
portion of the Miss Teen competition playing piano and got into Yale and MIT. 
    "As admissions strategists, our experience is that Asian Americans must meet 
higher objective standards, such as SAT scores and GPAs, and higher subjective 
standards than the rest of the applicant pool," he said. "Our students need to do a 
lot more in order to stand out."
    Asian American students have higher average SAT scores than any other 
government-monitored ethnic group, and selective colleges routinely reject them 
in favor of African American, Hispanic and even white applicants with lower 
scores in order to have more diverse campuses and make up for past 
discrimination.
    Many Asian Americans and some educators wonder: Is that fair? Why 
shouldn't young people of Asian descent have more of an advantage in the 
selective college admissions system for being violin-playing, science-fair 
winning, high-scoring achievers?
    "Chinese and all Asian Americans are penalized for their values on academic
excellence by being required to have a higher level of achievement, academic and 
non-academic, than any other demographic group," said Ed Chin, a New Jersey 
physician who has campaigned for years for a change in college admissions 
procedures. 
    Yet, Chin notes, Harvard humanities professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently 
estimated that two-thirds of blacks at Harvard are not descendants of American 
slaves but the middle-class children of relatively recent immigrants from the 
Caribbean and Africa . "Why should they deserve admission with lowered 
standards -- relatively speaking -- based solely on the color of their skin over a 
high-achieving Asian American living in a Chinatown ghetto or a black ghetto, 
or a poor white from the slums of New York City ?" Chin asked. 
    At some selective colleges, the percentage of Asians on the admittance list is 
reportedly significantly lower than the percentage of Asians who applied. But 
colleges usually do not release the ethnic breakdown of their applicants, so there 
has been little research on the matter. 
    Stanford University and Brown University , however, studied their admissions
data in the late 1980s and found enough evidence of cultural bias and stereotypes 
to alter procedures. 
    "Since then, the Stanford staff has been very careful to guard against all kinds 
of bias in the selection process," said Robin Mamlet, Stanford's dean of admissions. 
For several years, admissions staff members were trained annually on such issues 
as shyness to be sure as little bias as possible affected the decision process, she said. 
    About 25 percent of Stanford undergraduates are of Asian descent, higher than 
most other such similarly selective colleges as Georgetown , 10 percent; Princeton, 
12 percent; Yale, 13 percent; and Columbia, 14 percent. But Mamlet said she cannot 
be sure if Stanford's higher percentage is a result of different admissions procedures 
or its location in Northern California , with a large population of high-performing 
Asian Americans. More than 40 percent of undergraduates at the University of  
California at Berkeley, for instance, are of Asian descent.
    Harvard admissions director Marlyn McGrath Lewis said: "We have no evidence 
that our admissions committee disadvantages Asian American applicants." Seventeen 
percent of its undergraduates are of Asian descent, and the university was cleared in 
1990 of alleged racial discrimination against Asians. The U.S. Education Department's 
Office for Civil Rights said whites were admitted at a higher rate but because they 
included more recruited athletes and children of alumni. 
    Scholars say Asian cultures tend to emphasize education and say they are not 
surprised that Asian Americans, who make up 4 percent of the U.S. population, are 
found in much higher concentrations in selective colleges. In their 1996 book "Beyond 
the Classroom," Laurence Steinberg, B. Bradford Brown and Sanford M. Dornbusch 
said that "of all the demographic factors we studied in relation to school performance, 
ethnicity was the most important. . . . In terms of school achievement, it is more 
advantageous to be Asian than to be wealthy, to have non-divorced parents, or to 
have a mother who is able to stay at home full time."
    Many Americans, including some of Asian descent, have grown accustomed to 
seemingly irrational and unfair admissions decisions by selective colleges and 
shrug off the Asian numbers as something that can't be helped. 
    But Arun Mantri, born in India with children at Fairfax County 's Thomas Jefferson
High School for Science and Technology, said he thinks the system should change. 
Asian American applicants' chances "would improve dramatically if race was not 
used as a factor in admissions, perhaps at the cost of the white applicants, 
something that only a few selective schools have dared to do," he said. 
    Victoria Hsiao, who works with Shaw at the admissions strategy firm Ivy Success, 
said that when she attended Stuyvesant High School in New York , "my Asian friends 
and I all tried to make ourselves stand out, as we did not want to be stereotyped as 
Asians with good grades, playing the piano and doing scientific research." She joined 
the debate team instead of the math team and got into Cornell. 
    Shaw said about 40 percent of his clients are Asian, but he tells all that they need 
to learn about great but lesser-known colleges. "Students can get a quality education 
at hundreds of colleges throughout the country," he said, "so parents should definitely 
expand their horizons to other target competitive institutions beyond the Ivy League."
    That is not enough for Chin, who compares the limits on Asian admissions to the 
quotas that Ivy League colleges used to place on Jewish admissions. "There 
obviously needs to be a change to level the playing field," Chin said. Some estimates 
put the enrollment of Jews at Harvard as high as 30 percent, he said, "and admissions 
for them is indeed race and ethnic-group blind."

1/30/05 northjersey.com (The Record and The Herald News)
The secret world of college admissions,
By Patricia Alex
    Forget "The Apprentice." For real competition, check out "The Applicant" - a 
contest in which high-achieving Asian kids from New Jersey 's moneyed suburbs 
jockey for the Ivy League.
    Consider the case of a Chinese-American girl at Holmdel High School . Her 
grades and test scores were top-notch, she ran cross-country and she was 
an accomplished pianist. Still, her prospects seemed uncertain.
    The problem: her all-too-familiar profile.
    She didn't, and couldn't, stand out among her peers. She ranked in the top 20 
percent in the highly competitive school where nearly a fifth of the students are Asian.
    "We needed to get her away from the other Asian kids,'' said Robert Shaw, a 
private college consultant hired by the girl's family.
    Shaw advised bold steps: The family got a place in Keyport, a blue-collar town near 
their home, and the girl transferred to the local high school. There she was a standout: 
The only Asian kid in the school, she was valedictorian for the Class of 2004.
    Next came an extracurricular makeover, one a bit out of character for a Chinese-
American girl, said Shaw. "We suggested some outrageous activities, like Miss Teen 
New Jersey,'' where she won a talent competition playing piano.
    "We had to create a contrarian profile,'' Shaw said. "We put her in places where 
she could stand out."
    The girl was accepted to Yale and to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where 
she is now a freshman.
    Shaw helped the family play the admissions game. The ethnic, geographic and 
racial profiling that goes into assembling classes at the nation's top-tier colleges and 
universities is the worst-kept secret in American higher education.
    "It's a very well-known thing but colleges don't want to talk about it,'' Shaw said. "It is 
certainly not a meritocracy, it's about being the right type of kid."
    More than grades
    With a huge pool of outstanding applicants, admissions at the top schools long ago 
stopped being about the numbers.
    Good statistics alone are not the key to the Ivy League, said Willis J. "Lee" Stetson Jr.,
dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania . "In a really competitive pool, 
it's the extracurricular stuff that makes the difference."
    Penn gets almost 19,000 applications for 2,400 seats a year, and the odds are no 
better at other top-tier schools. So how does a kid stand out in a large pool of students 
who have 1,500s on their SATs and 4.0 grade-point averages?
    The children of alumni usually get preference, as do athletes. Admissions officers 
look for geographic balance as well, courting a mix of international and American 
students.
    And, even as the nation's highest courts have ruled against racial and ethnic quotas, 
a de facto system remains in place as admissions officers strive for "balance" and 
the inclusion of so-called "underrepresented" populations, like blacks and Latinos.
    "If you give me a Hispanic kid with a 1,350 (SATs), I can get that kid into every 
Ivy League college, or an African-American kid with 1,380 to 1,400,'' Shaw said. 
"But give me an upper-middle-class Caucasian or Asian with a 1,600, and I can't 
guarantee anything."
    Recently, an Asian client of Shaw's from suburban Philadelphia got "wait-listed" 
at Yale despite a 1,600 SAT score and a 4.1 grade point average.
    Shaw, a partner in the Long Island-based Ivy Success, honed his pragmatism while 
working in the admissions office at Penn. He recently changed his name from Hsueh 
to make it easier to pronounce, he said, but allows that a less Asian-sounding name 
may be an advantage when his young daughters reach college age.
    A 'hidden agenda'
    The schools deny quotas exist. On its Web site, Princeton University says: "We do 
not have a profile of the ideal applicant, nor do we map out a checklist of all the 
particular 'types' of students we plan to admit in a given year." Asians make up 13 
percent of the Princeton enrollment.
    Lauren Robinson-Brown, Princeton 's director of communications, said admissions 
staffers consider all applications without "criteria such as ethnicity or geographic region."
    But admissions counselors and parents who've been through the process say they 
know differently. "I'm not saying that colleges have racial quotas, but I imagine that 
most schools want representation of different cultural and ethnic groups,'' said Jonni 
Sayres, a counselor in Englewood and Teaneck .
    Bev Taylor, director of the Ivy Coach on Long Island , is more blunt. "Colleges have 
a hidden agenda. They are not going to say this,'' she said. "They look for diversity and 
unless you know the culture of the school, you are not going to know what's diverse."
    A bulge in the college-age population has made admission harder for everyone, said 
Stetson of Penn, which just filled almost half its incoming freshman class through early 
admission.
    Although less than 4 percent of the population, Asians make up about 14 percent of 
the Ivy League. And the numbers are even higher for schools located in cities, where 
Asians generally gravitate. At Penn, Asians make up almost 23 percent of the student 
body, 16 percent at Harvard.
    Still, because they are in such a highly competitive subgroup, they are admitted to 
the Ivies at a lower rate than other groups, with about one in every 15 gaining entry 
compared with an average of one in 10, Shaw said.
    As a group, Asians score the highest on standardized tests - a testament to a 
cultural emphasis on scholarship - and generally have high grade-point averages.
    When California eliminated racial preferences - set-asides for underrepresented 
groups - Asian enrollment skyrocketed in the venerable University of California  
system. Although Asians are 13 percent of the state's population, they make up 42 
percent of students of the campus at Berkeley , 38 percent at Los Angeles and 
61 percent at Irvine.
    Some counselors advise Asian students to apply to top-tier schools outside urban 
centers, such as Duke University in North Carolina or Dartmouth College in New 
Hampshire, where they will still be considered a minority.
    "One of my biggest obligations as a counselor is to get across to the parents that 
they need to look at areas who will appreciate them more," said Sayres, the
Teaneck counselor.
    Politics of admission
    The glut of A-students presents a dilemma for top-tier universities that want their 
classes to mirror the broader society. Such institutions are more likely to "attribute a 
higher degree of importance to a student's race or ethnicity," according to a soon-to-
be-released report from the National Association for College Admissions Counseling.
    Shaw and others say the system can work against individuals in a highly competitive 
pool like Asians. There are also complaints that Asians are counted as minorities by 
colleges but don't receive minority preferences at many top-tier schools. Others balk 
at an analysis that views admissions as a competition among minorities - that blacks 
and Latinos take what otherwise would be places occupied by Asians. They note that 
whites remain the majority at most selective colleges.
    There is concern, as well, that almost 30 distinct groups are lumped together under 
the Asian rubric, from the fifth-generation Japanese-American to the entrepreneur from
India to the poor Hmong farmer newly arrived stateside. Despite their variety, there is 
a belief that the bar is set higher for the entire ethnic group.
    "The perception is that there are so many who are qualified that they have to be a 
little higher up on the ladder," said Lance Izumi, who studies education at the Pacific 
Research Institute for Public Policy, a California think tank.
    Shaw and others have no doubt that the perception is a reality when it comes to 
admissions. They worry that the trend is creating upper-limit quotas for Asians at the 
best schools, such as those imposed on Jews prior to World War II when they began 
to break into the Ivy League after decades of overt anti-Semitism.
    The politics of admissions can be bewildering and disheartening, especially for 
parents. "They are very disappointed because they've done everything right,'' said 
Sayres. "For the Asian students, especially the Korean students, they lose faith if their 
child doesn't get into the Ivies. And it's just not possible anymore. There are too many 
kids and too few places."

1/25/05 Washington Post: "Quotas for Asian Americans? Yes and No."
by Jay Mathews
    Asian American applicants to selective colleges appear to be at a disadvantage. Nationally, they have the highest average SAT scores, and yet many African American and Hispanic students with lower scores and grades are accepted to Ivy Leagues schools while high-performing Asian American students are rejected even when their families are similarly poor and undereducated.
    My Oct. 12 column ("Should Colleges Have Quotas for Asian Americans?") discussed this, and I assumed it would attract little comment. Unfairness to that relatively small minority group is almost never mentioned by major news organizations. Outspoken advocates for change, like New Jersey physician Ed Chin who inspired the column, are few in number and mostly ignored.
    But I was wrong. The e-mails poured in, obliging me to share the surprising reaction I received to this overlooked aspect of the affirmative action issue.
    As Chin noted, the percent of African American and Hispanic students in selective college freshman classes is often higher than the percent of applicants from that group, while the opposite is true of Asian Americans. In 2001, 20.3 percent of applicants to Brown University 's class of 2005 were Asian American, but only 16 percent of the acceptances were. The percent of white applicants and acceptances was about the same, 66 percent, while African Americans comprised 9 percent of the acceptances and only 6 percent of the applicants, and Hispanics had 9 percent of the acceptances and only 7.1 percent of the applicants. 
    Chin is of Chinese descent, and was raised in New York City by low-income, immigrant parents. I thought I would hear from many Asian Americans who supported Chin, while other readers would be skeptical. But I was wrong. Readers of Asian descent were as divided on the issue as everyone else. The clash of race and class, of fairness and equity in this particular debate is so complex that nobody seems to have a predictable reaction, which is fine with me. 
    Virginia Y. Kim, for instance, is a lawyer in Chicago who grew up in an affluent, suburban Cleveland Korean-American family with what she called "the traditional Asian education ethos." She said she has heard complaints like Chin's all her life and her response has always been, "Who said life was fair?"
    Huy N. Tran, a San Jose State University student of Vietnamese descent, said he thought it was wrong for Chin to suggest that other cultures do not value education as much as Asian American cultures do. "I have met students of all different cultures who take a full load of classes and work several jobs to pay for their education," he said.
    On Chin's side, however, was Arun Mantri, who was born in India and has children at a very selective public school, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County . He said it was wrong that high-quality Asian students at that school were being rejected by top colleges. "Their chances would improve dramatically if race was not used as a factor in admissions, perhaps at the cost of the white applicants, something that only a few selective schools have dared to do," he said. 
    Also supporting Chin's argument was a member of one of the minority groups that tends to get more of a break in college admissions than Asian Americans do. Paul Grandpierre described himself as "a first generation Haitian American from a really poor family who managed to graduate law school." He said he thought affirmative action was better than doing nothing about the "inclination of the human heart to rationalize superficial differences into fundamental differences." But, he said, "I agree with Mr. Chin that today, affirmative action should focus on the poor and not merely on blacks. . . . I can tell you that from my experience that being poor presented more powerful obstacles to my unlikely ascent than being black."
    Chin also had support from non-Hispanic white readers. Jeff Werthan said it was paternalistic and patronizing for me to suggest that "a hard-working and brilliant Asian student and his or her family . . . should be satisfied with the other admittedly good schools out there if they are otherwise deserving of admission to Harvard or Yale."
    A white reader, who declined to let me use his name because he does not want to offend the university that employs him, said his experience as an admissions officer confirms Chin's sense of unfairness. "What scares the top colleges is what their campuses might look like, racially speaking" if they followed Chin's suggestion and rejected middle-class African American and Hispanic students in favor of higher-scoring, low-income Asians. They fear, he said, "the sort of intense heat they'd take for the presumed drop in 'diversity.'" 
    Chin's argument does, however, rest upon sophisticated analysis of test scores and a willingness to emphasize averages, rather than the many individual cases that do not support his point. Many readers saw that as a weakness. 
    Mike Martin, a research analyst with the Arizona School Boards Association, warned Chin against putting so much weight on test scores in determining who is being discriminated against, particularly when looking at the narrow band at the very top of the SAT scale. "So if you accidentally mismark a question, or misconstrue a question, only one question, you could drop out of the 1600 club," he said. "In W. Edward Deming's preaching about corporate management he warned about making decisions based on differences that were within normal variation."
    Michael J. McCabe, whose children have attended the challenging D.C. private school, St. Anselm's Abbey, noted that white kids are also rejected by selective colleges for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of their applications. His older son graduated in the top five of his high school class, had a 1470 SAT, was an Eagle Scout, captain and founder of the school's Science Bowl team and co-captain of its "It's Academic" team. Yet he was rejected by Dartmouth , Rice and the University of Virginia . McCabe thinks U-Va. had reached its quota for students from D.C. private schools, not an unreasonable theory given the way such colleges fill their classes. 
    So now, McCabe said, his son is thriving academically at Carnegie Mellon, but he and his roommate, who is from China , often complain about "the large proportion of Asians in the engineering and computer programs and the limited interaction they have with students of different socioeconomic backgrounds."
    Most of the people who responded to the column appeared sympathetic, however, to Chin's view that colleges should make less of race in their admissions decisions and look more closely at family income. A student who had overcome difficult circumstances to compile an impressive high school record was likely to appreciate what a great university had to offer.
    If the system is to change, and worthy Asian American students are to get what they deserve, they are going to need more advocates than just Ed Chin and the few other civil rights and admissions experts who have raised these issues. Shellye McKinney, a former college admissions officer, said that "affirmative action was created because people fought for it" and those who think it is hurting students of Asian descent are going to have to struggle in the same way to make themselves heard.
    As I usually tell Chin when he rails against the American media in general and me in particular for not giving his concerns enough attention, there has to be dramatic evidence of support for his thinking before editors and news directors will get interested. Street demonstrations, boycotts, major conferences, bills in Congress -- all those things would help. 
    The press tends to pay attention to those who are shouting the loudest, and so far the people Chin is trying to help have been very quiet.

2/2/03 New York Times: "The New Calculus of Diversity on Campus,"
By Jacques Steinberg
    At public universities in California and Texas, the end of affirmative 
action in admissions has benefited one minority: Asian-Americans.
    And if the Supreme Court decides later this year to limit or eliminate 
race-conscious admissions at the University of Michigan, Asian-
Americans stand to gain far more than any other group, at least in 
proportion to their numbers in the general population.
    Their experience in the admissions process provides yet another 
prism through which to view the affirmative action debate. As things 
stand now, a relatively low percentage of Asian-American students are 
admitted to many top private and public institutions, nearly all of which 
practice affirmative action, compared with the high numbers of the 
arguably qualified among them.
    But if the Supreme Court phases out race-conscious admissions, 
the number of Asian-American students can be expected to soar, at 
the expense of other groups, even whites.
    The statistics in California and Texas give ammunition to critics of 
affirmative action who say that some applicants, primarily white or 
Asian-American, are being rejected in favor of blacks and Hispanics 
who may not be as accomplished, at least as measured by 
standardized-test scores and grade-point averages.
    But the same statistics also provide ammunition to those who 
support race-conscious admissions and who argue that unless 
colleges give special attention to black and Hispanic applicants, 
whites and Asians could lay claim to all but a handful of the spots on 
some campuses.
    To gain a sense of how the composition of a student body can shift, 
consider the University of Texas at Austin.
    After a federal court in 1996 barred the University of Texas from 
practicing affirmative action, the state began offering admission to all 
high school students ranked in the top 10% of their classes. Given the 
racial and economic segregation in the state's high schools, the 
assumption was that blacks and Hispanics would be given a fairer 
chance to enroll, without having to compete directly with whites who 
lived in richer districts.
    But as it turned out, the main beneficiaries were Asian-Americans. 
The percentage of freshmen entering the Austin campus who were 
Asian-American rose to 18% last fall, compared with 14% in the fall 
of 1995. Thus, almost one in five freshmen at the university's flagship 
school is Asian, in a state where only about three of 100 residents are.
    As the admission rate of Asian students rose, to 71% from 68% 
over that period, the admission rate of whites fell, by one percentage 
point to 66%. So did that of blacks, to 43% from 59%.
    Hispanics were admitted at a rate of 56% in 2002, down from 72% 
in 1995. They make up about a third of the state population but less 
than a fifth of the freshman class at Austin.
    Asked to explain the dynamic, Bruce Walker, the director of 
admissions at Austin, said, "Obviously they are the top students in 
their schools."
    "Any state that goes to a percent plan and has a significant number 
of Asians will discover that Asians will be the ones who will benefit 
most," he added.
    In California, where Asians make up 11% of the general population, 
the gains were also striking after the state ended traditional affirmative 
action in the late 1990's and adopted a system similar to that of Texas.
    At Berkeley, the percentage of the freshman class that was 
Asian-American rose 6 percentage points, to 45%, in 2001. Over the 
same period, the percentage of the class that was black fell by three 
percentage points, to 4%; the percentage that was white dropped by 
one percentage point, to 29%; and the percentage that was Hispanic 
fell by six percentage points, to 11%.
    Contrast that with the experience of the University of Michigan Law 
School, which practices race-conscious admissions in a typical way, 
with admissions officers considering applicants' test scores and 
grades, as well as their backgrounds. Along with the undergraduate 
program, which uses a more formulaic approach that awards extra 
points to a black or Hispanic applicant, the law school is a defendant 
in the lawsuits being heard by the Supreme Court.
    When, for example, it assembled its class for the fall of 1999, the 
law school accepted only one of the 61 Asian-Americans, or 2%, who 
were ranked in the middle range of the applicant pool, as defined by 
their grades and test scores, according to court filings. The admission 
rate for whites with similar grades and scores was 3%.
    But among black applicants with similar transcripts, 22 out of 27, 
or 81%, were offered admission.
    Michigan, like other selective colleges, defends the lift given to black 
applicants, as well as to Hispanics, for two main reasons: to level the 
playing field for what it calls underrepresented minorities, who might 
not have the educational advantages of many whites and Asians, and 
to enhance the educational experience of all students by immersing 
them in a diverse environment.
    Though supportive of affirmative action for black and Hispanic 
applicants in particular, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, a professor of history and 
ethnic studies at Brown, said she took offense at the perception that 
there might be a threshold for how many Asians on a campus was too 
many.
    "I'll tell you what is discriminatory in the case of Texas," said Ms. 
Hu-DeHart, who emigrated from China in the 1960's. "They don't say 
whites are overrepresented. They're pitting Asian-Americans against 
blacks and Latinos by saying Asian-Americans are taking your place."
    She added: "Let Asians compete freely with white students."


2/2/03 New York Times
    Ed Hu, who was an admissions officer at Brown University from 
1989 to 1994 and was one of the first Chinese-American admissions 
officers in the Ivy League, said that when he began working at Brown, 
"there was a lot of stereotyping of Asians" among the staff.
    When Brown assembled the class of 1987, for example, it admitted 
20 percent of all applicants, but only 14 percent of those who identified 
themselves as Asian. A committee appointed by the Brown trustees 
ultimately concluded that "Asian-American applicants have been treated 
unfairly," and the admission rate of Asians has subsequently pulled 
relatively even with those of the class as a whole.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/weekinreview/02JACQ.html?ex=1163048400&en=e2772ce64fb7b59c&ei=5070

8/23/05 Boston Globe: After Boston Latin School prevented from using 
race in admissions, Asians Americans increased from 22% to 30% of the 
students, while Blacks decreased from 18% to 10%  
[Original headline from Bigots for the Left: Minority numbers plunge at Latin: 
Concerns raised about recruiting,]
By Maria Sacchetti
    In the six years since a federal court ruled that elite Boston Latin School  
could not consider race as an admissions factor, black enrollment in the 
school has plunged by more than 42 percent.
    The number of Hispanic students in the city's most prestigious public 
school has dropped by 32 percent during the same period, according to 
state Department of Education records.
    Boston 's overall student population was more than 75 percent black and 
Hispanic in the last school year, but the two groups made up less than 16 
percent of Latin School pupils. They made up nearly 27 percent of enrollment 
in 1998-99, the last academic year before the court ruling took effect barring 
the use of race in admissions.
    While white students make up 14 percent of the city's schools overall, they 
are nearly 54 percent of the student body at the Latin School . The class that 
enters the school Sept. 8 continues the trend.
    Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant said the Latin School -- where the 
number of black students dropped from 435 to 250 from 1998-99 to last year 
and the number of Hispanic students from 198 to 134 -- has the highest 
admission standards of the three exam schools.
    He said the school system, with a limited budget, is still trying to prepare 
and recruit students to the Latin School and the other two exam schools, 
where minority enrollments are significantly higher and have held steady since 
the November 1998 court ruling. Black and Hispanic students make up about 
60 percent of the enrollment at O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science 
and nearly 40 percent of Boston Latin Academy .
    Before the ruling, which covered all three exam schools, Boston reserved 
35 percent of seats for black and Hispanic students. Now, Boston 's exam 
schools admit students based solely on scores on an entrance exam and 
grades. The Latin School is the largest of the three, with more than 2,400 
students in grades 7-12.
    Boston Latin School , the oldest public school in the country, was founded 
in 1635 and is known for strict academic standards, a focus on the humanities, 
and an alumni roster that includes Benjamin Franklin, John Han cock, and 
Ralph Waldo Emerson.

3/27/03 Detroit News: Op Ed: How affirmative action affects minorities: 
Experience shows racial preferences take seats from Asian-Americans,
echoing past discrimination against Jewish students
    by George Bornstein / Special to The Detroit News
    The looming Supreme Court decision on the University of Michigan  
Admission cases, with oral arguments on Monday, offers a crucial opportunity 
to clarify how colleges and universities practice affirmative action toward 
racial and ethnic groups. An important issue is who is harmed by the policy, 
if failing to enter an elite university constitutes harm.
    As everyone knows, African-Americans and to a lesser extent Latinos
benefit. But as the statistics from California , Texas and other states
that have banned affirmative action in admissions pile up, the answer 
to who loses is becoming clear. It is not whites, but Asian-Americans.
    A Feb. 2 New York Times article found that in the well-documented cases 
of UCLA, University of California Berkeley and the University of Texas at
Austin , abolishing affirmative action caused the number of African-
Americans to decline most and that of Hispanics next-most.
    The real surprise is that the percentage of whites hardly budged. At 
The University of Texas at Austin , for example, the percentage of white
freshman admitted declined from 67 percent in the class before a 
federal court order to 66 percent. Similarly, at Berkeley, whites as a 
percentage of the latest freshman class fell a percentage point from the last 
year before affirmative action was abolished in California . Indeed, non-
Hispanic whites are actually an "under-represented group" at Berkeley : 
They comprise 49 percent of the state's population but only 29 percent of 
the freshman class.
    The places vacated by African-Americans, Latinos and whites went to
Asian-Americans. At Austin , for example, the percentage of Asians 
admitted rose to 71 percent from 68 percent, so they now comprise 18 
percent of the first-year students there in a state with an Asian population 
of 3 percent.
   The Berkeley numbers are more startling. The percentage of Asians-
Americans there jumped six percentage points between the end of 
affirmative action and the fall of 2001; Asians now comprise 45 percent 
of the freshman class at Berkeley but 12 percent of California 's population.
   The lesson is clear. Affirmative action transfers places from Asian-
Americans to African-Americans and Latinos. Yet both supporters and 
detractors cast the debate as black vs. white. The true issue is whether 
we want or need a policy that systematically restricts the places for
Asian-Americans in our elite universities.
    We will never resolve this contentious issue if we continue to frame 
the debate in simplistic and misleading terms of white versus black.
    Recasting the debate can also help us see why so much of the current
rhetoric supporting affirmative action to include minority groups as
defined today sounds so much like the rhetoric used earlier in the 20th
century to exclude a minority group as defined then -- Jews. Then as 
now, university administrators wished to control the racial mix (Jews were
considered and called a "race" then). Otherwise, they feared their
campuses would be "overrun" with members of a small but academically 
very high-achieving group.
    Until the early 20th century, even the most elite American universities, 
such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton , were largely regional campuses. 
But faced with a high influx of academically talented Jewish students, 
they sought to reduce the numbers of that group. Aware that Jews (and to a
lesser extent Roman Catholics) were concentrated in Northeast cities, 
they devised a system of national recruitment to restrict numbers of Jews 
while avoiding charges of overt discrimination.
    Then as now, a key concept was diversity, only then it meant (in public) 
geographic diversity. Then as now, quotas were publicly denied even 
while an elaborate system to maintain de facto quotas evolved. Then as now,
administrators argued that other things besides grades and examinations
mattered as much or more -- character, for example, or obstacles overcome. 
Then as now, the result was to transfer places that would have gone
disproportionately to members of an academically talented minority 
group to members of other groups.
    And then as now, the ends were felt to justify the means. Readers can
trace part of this history in Marcia Synnott's wonderful and neglected
book "The Half-Opened Door," which traces discrimination and admissions 
at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other elite schools from 1900-1970.
    There is a final "then as now" worth noting: In both cases, administrators 
sought to hide their practices. Deans of the Ivy League universities and 
related colleges held numerous confidential meetings (fortunately, they 
kept meticulous minutes which researchers can now use). Similarly, the
University of Michigan sought to suppress public knowledge of its
practices, and not until forced by Freedom of Information Act requests
from Professor Carl Cohen and others did word seep out of what it was
doing.
    At that point, the college of liberal arts changed from its blatantly
illegal chart system of classification to a more subtle one on whose
legality the Supreme Court will shortly rule and the law school devised
somewhat different policies to achieve the same end.
    Faced with this situation, what should we do? Some say that if affirmative 
action survives it should be in a class-based form. To the extent that
members of minority groups disproportionately cluster at the bottom of 
the socioeconomic order, they would benefit disproportionately. But that 
would strike most people as fairer than the current racial preferences.
    Others might feel that we should get rid of such factors and return to 
a system blind not just to race but to all factors other than academic
performance.
   Both positions have flaws. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill's
acerbic defense of democracy, either might turn out to be the worst system 
we could devise except for all those other systems.
    George Bornstein is C.A. Patrides Professor of Literature at the
University of Michigan . Write letters to The Detroit News, 615 W.
Lafayette , Detroit , MI 48226 , or fax to (313) 222-6417 or e-mail to
letters@detnews.com.

Statistics on Reverse Discrimination by University of Virginia.
http://www.ceousa.org/docs/virginia2.doc
"Preferences at the University of Virginia: Racial and Ethnic Preferences 
in Undergraduate Admissions, 1996 and 1999,"  
by Robert Lerner, Ph.D. and Althea K. Nagai, Ph.D.
December 15, 1999
Statistics on Reverse Discrimination by University of Virginia, North Carolina 
State University and William & Mary Law School
http://www.nas.org/reports/foi/AA_at_3Us.pdf
"Affirmative Action at Three Universities,"
by David J. Armor, Ph.D., George Mason University
November 13, 2004



2/1/07 http://www.discriminations.us: Racial Preference Policies Favor 
(Black) Foreigners,
By John Rosenberg
    A couple of years ago, bouncing off an article in the New York Times, I wrote:
    One of the dirty little secrets of racial preferences, now beginning to leak out, 
is not only that most of the beneficiaries are middle class or actually rich  
that has been known if not advertised for a good while but that most are 
not even American, or if they are American they are of very recent origin. Eight 
percent of the undergraduates at Harvard are black (still underrepresented, 
says [Harvard Law prof Lani] Guinier), but the majority of them perhaps as 
many as two-thirds were West Indian and African immigrants or their 
children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.
    That article went on to discuss research being conducted by sociologists at 
Princeton and Penn. That research, according to an article in todays Chronicle 
of Higher Education, has now been published. 
    The paper draws on a study of 1,051 black students who enrolled at 28 
selective institutions in 1999.... 
    Of those 1,051 students, 27 percent were born outside the United States or 
had at least one parent who was born outside the United States most 
commonly in Jamaica , Nigeria , Haiti , Trinidad, or Ghana . By contrast, only 13 
percent of the general population of 18- and 19-year-old black Americans in 
1999 were first- or second-generation immigrants, according to data from the 
Census Bureau's Current Population Survey....
    At the most selective of the 28 schools, the ratios for non-native black 
students were even higher. The study included four Ivy League universities  
Columbia , Penn, Princeton , and Yale and at those universities, 41 percent 
of black students were first- or second-generation immigrants.
    These foreign preference beneficiaries: 
- were much more likely than native-born black students to have at least one 
parent who has earned an advanced degree; 
- were significantly less likely to have grown up in segregated black 
neighborhoods and significantly more likely to have attended a private high 
school; 
- had significantly higher average SAT scores than did the native-born black 
students 1250, versus 1193, respectively. 
    Curiously, these foreign preferees do not seem to have performed better than 
their native-American minority peers. The authors speculate that this may be 
because immigrant black students are more likely to choose certain majors 
particularly engineering where grade-point averages are relatively low 
across the board.
    The authors apparently do not discuss the implications of their findings for 
the debate over racial preference, but they are obviously aware of at least 
some of them. In an interview, one of the authors, Camille Z. Charles, an 
associate professor of sociology at Penn, said:
    If youre a purist that is, if you view affirmative action as restitution for 
the harm done by American slavery and segregation then youll think that 
this is not in the spirit of affirmative action, Ms. Charles continued. But if 
youre a diversity purist, and your idea is to expose everybody to as many 
different kinds of people as possible, then youll think this is great.
    Even if youre a diversity purist, however, you might still think that 
importing into selective colleges a large number of the sons and daughters 
of professionals most commonly [from] Jamaica, Nigeria, Haiti, Trinidad, 
or Ghana is not the best way to expose everybody to as many different kinds 
of people as possible.
    Finally, but not altogether surprisingly, Prof. Charles neglected to mention 
us equality purists, who believe that racial preference is wrong whether it is 
for restitution or diversity.

12/06/04 National Journal: "Do Racial Preferences Limit Black Lawyers?"
By Stuart Taylor Jr., 
National Journal Group Inc.
    The 35-year-old debate about affirmative action in university admissions has often focused on whether the supposed benefits to black and Hispanic students justify the costs to whites and Asians who lose out, and the resulting racial divisions and resentments. 

11/5/04 Wall Street Journal: Critics Assail Study of Race, Law Students
    A new study that's raising controversy in law-school circles questions whether admissions preferences for black students help them or, ironically, set them back in their careers.
    Research by a respected law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, asserts that blacks who benefit from affirmative action are being admitted to law schools where they find themselves in over their heads, achieving lower grades and failing the bar exam in higher numbers than they would have without the preferences.
    The research by Prof. Richard H. Sander, scheduled for publication in this month's Stanford Law Review, turns traditional critiques of affirmative action on their heads. It already is under assault.
    Some critics say the study dramatically understates the positive impact of affirmative action on black law students. Based on the same data the study used, Richard Lempert, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Michigan, argues that eliminating affirmative action in law-school admissions would reduce the number of black attorneys by at least a quarter.
    "I and other people who looked closely at it absolutely despair at the quality of the research," says Prof. Lempert, an architect of the University of Michigan law school's affirmative-action program, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in a pivotal ruling last year. "His conclusions are just dead wrong."
    Usually, social conservatives decry preferences because of perceived unfairness to white applicants. Although critics have talked before of a "stigma" that damages black recipients, the new analysis stands out for its detailed focus on alleged harms to the careers of black students.
    "We need to take seriously the idea that there are potential costs to minorities who benefit from racial preferences," Prof. Sander says in an interview.
    Prof. Sander, who describes himself as a lifelong Democrat sympathetic to the goals of affirmative action, claims that abolishing preferences wouldn't reduce the number of black lawyers. In fact, he estimates it would likely increase the cohort of black attorneys emerging from the Class of 2004 by 8% and the number of those passing the bar the first time by 22%.
    The study comes after the Supreme Court last year in the Michigan case narrowly endorsed the use of race as a factor in undergraduate and law-school admissions. The court ruled that diversity in higher education was necessary to cultivate "a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry."
    Drafts of the study, which hasn't been made public, have circulated among experts, and Prof. Sander discussed it at a recent academic conference. Critics, including Prof. Lempert, are drafting a harsh critique to submit to the Stanford Law Review.
    Prof. Sander relied primarily on data that the Law School Admission Council collected on 27,000 students who entered 160 U.S. law schools in 1991, including their grades in college, test scores and bar-exam results.
    The study found a stark achievement gap between blacks and whites throughout the nation's law schools. Close to half of the black law students ended up in the bottom tenth of their class. African-Americans were more than twice as likely as whites to drop out -- and more than six times as likely to fail state bar exams after multiple tries.
    Prof. Sander argues that the reason for this outcome stems from a "mismatch" between the credentials of the black students and the institutions they attend. Because they have weaker credentials, he says, the students achieve lower grades. And since grades are strongly correlated to success on the bar exam, he argues, these students failed the bar in higher numbers.
    He argues that students who perform at the bottom of their classes at more selective colleges often are confused by tougher material taught at speeds that challenge higher-achieving classmates. At less selective colleges, the material tends to be simpler, so these students can pull into the middle of their class and pick up the baseline information needed to pass the bar exam. And he says there is a "cascade effect" on every tier of law school, from Harvard and Yale down the ranks, ensuring that, at each level, blacks perform worse and are less likely to become lawyers.
    By the study's tally, 86% of blacks currently admitted to law schools would still gain admission without preferences. But they would attend less competitive schools, where they would compile stronger records. The remaining 14% -- 500 to 600 a year -- would likely drop out or fail the bar.
    To preserve diversity, Prof. Sander recommends setting modest goals for racial preferences -- about 4% in law school classes -- instead of aiming for twice that figure, which he says is typical. Less selective schools would be able to meet that figure without affirmative action, he argues.
    But University of Michigan 's Prof. Lempert says the study makes a number of unreasonable assumptions. Without affirmative action, many African-Americans wouldn't attend law school at all, he says. The study assumes that black applicants would merely go to a less selective school, but Prof. Lempert says many would be unable or unwilling to go to such schools because they might be so far away that the students wouldn't even consider them.
    He also notes that, although there is a correlation between grades and bar passage, many other reasons explain blacks' poor performance on the test. These, he said, include a documented "stereotype threat," the tendency of minority groups to conform to negative stereotypes about their abilities.
    Prof. Sander says he found no data to support Prof. Lempert's critique. James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern University , who is reviewing the same data, also found nothing suspect in the study. Now that the Supreme Court has accepted the legality of affirmative action, Prof. Lindgren says, the study might help "the debate move into a more fruitful and nuanced discussion about whom it helps and whom it hurts."
    The new study's conclusions contrast sharply with a prominent study of affirmative action chronicled in the 1998 book "Shape of the River," by former Harvard University President Derek Bok and former Princeton University President William Bowen. Their research, based on voluminous data from selective colleges, concluded that racial preferences were enormously beneficial to African-Americans, who went on to earn unusually high numbers of professional and graduate degrees and achieve success in business and other endeavors.
    Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school at the University of California , Berkeley , says that, even if Prof. Sander's findings are correct, he would suggest taking measures to improve African-American student performance, rather than scrap affirmative action. Prof. Edley also says the study gave insufficient weight to the academic benefits of diversity, for which there is "universal celebration" on his campus.
    At UCLA, Prof. Sander has been at the center of the debate over diversity. In 1997, after a voter initiative banned affirmative action in California , Prof. Sander helped design and implement a preferential formula to help socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants. But the school turned to other methods after that system failed to achieve enough racial diversity to satisfy some faculty.

6/24/04 New York Times: Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?
    Cambridge , Mass. : At the most recent reunion of Harvard University 's black alumni, there was lots of pleased talk about the increase in the number of black students at Harvard..
    But the celebratory mood was broken in one forum, when some speakers brought up the thorny issue of exactly who those black students were.
    While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them - perhaps as many as two-thirds - were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. 
    They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.
    What concerned the two professors, they said, was that in the high-stakes world of admissions to the most selective colleges - and with it, entry into the country's inner circles of power, wealth and influence - African-American students whose families have been in America for generations were being left behind. 
    "I just want people to be honest enough to talk about it," Professor Gates, the Yale-educated son of a West Virginia paper-mill worker, said recently, reiterating the questions he has been raising since the black alumni weekend last fall. "What are the implications of this?" 
    Both Professor Gates and Professor Guinier emphasize that this is not about excluding immigrants, whom sociologists describe as a highly motivated, self-selected group. Blacks, who make up 13 percent of the United States population, are still underrepresented at Harvard and other selective colleges, they said.
    The conversation that bubbled up that weekend has continued across campus here and beyond as these professors and others publicly raise painful and complicated questions about race and class and how they play out in elite university admissions, issues that some educators and black admissions officers have privately talked about for some time.
    There is no consensus on the answers, and since most institutions say they do not look into the origins of their black students, the absence of hard data makes the discussion even more difficult. 
    Some educators, including the president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers, declined to comment on the issue; others are divided. 
    The president of Amherst College , Anthony W. Marx, says that colleges should care about the ethnicity of black students because in overlooking those with predominantly American roots, colleges are missing an "opportunity to correct a past injustice" and depriving their campuses "of voices that are particular to being African-American, with all the historical disadvantages that that entails."
    But others say there is no reason to take the ancestry of black students into account.
    "I don't think it should matter for purposes of admissions in higher education," said Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University , who as president of the University of Michigan fiercely defended its use of affirmative action. "The issue is not origin, but social practices. It matters in American society whether you grow up black or white. It's that differential effect that really is the basis for affirmative action."
    Professors Gates and Guinier cite various sources for their figures about Harvard's black students, including conversations with administrators and students, a recent Harvard undergraduate honors thesis based on extensive student interviews, and the "Black Guide to Life at Harvard," which surveyed 70 percent of the black undergraduates and was published last year by the Harvard Black Students Association. 
    Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement of minority students at 28 selective colleges and universities (including theirs, as well as Yale, Columbia, Duke and the University of California at Berkeley), found that 41 percent of the black students identified themselves as immigrants, as children of immigrants or as mixed race.
    Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton sociology professor who was one of the researchers, said the black students from immigrant families and the mixed-race students represented a larger proportion of the black students than that in the black population in the United States generally. Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College , says that among 18- to 25-year-old blacks nationwide, about 9 percent describe themselves as of African or West Indian ancestry. Like the Gates and Guinier numbers, these tallies do not include foreign students.
    In the 40 or so years since affirmative action began in higher education, the focus has been on increasing the numbers of black students at selective colleges, not on their family background. Professor Massey said that the admissions officials he talked to at these colleges seemed surprised by the findings about the black students. "They really didn't have a good idea of what they're getting," he said.
    But few black students are surprised. Sheila Adams, a Harvard senior, was born in the South Bronx to a school security officer and a subway token seller, and her family has been in this country for generations. Ms. Adams said there were so few black students like her at Harvard that they had taken to referring to themselves as "the descendants." 
    The subject, however, remains taboo among some college administrators. Anthony Carnevale, a former vice president at the Educational Testing Service, which develops SAT tests, said colleges were happy to the take high-performing black students from immigrant families.
    "They've found an easy way out," Mr. Carnevale said. "The truth is, the higher-education community is no longer connected to the civil rights movement. These immigrants represent Horatio Alger, not Brown v. Board of Education and America 's race history." 
    Almost from its inception, following the civil rights struggles of the 1960's, affirmative action has been attacked and redefined. In its 1978 Bakke decision, the Supreme Court shifted the rationale away from issues of social justice to the educational value of diversity.
    One black admissions official at a highly selective college said the reluctance of college officials to discuss these issues has helped obscure the scarcity of black students whose families have been in this country for generations. 
    "If somebody does not start paying attention to those who are not able to make it in, they're going to start drifting farther and farther behind," said the official, who declined to be identified because the subject is so charged. "You've got to say that the long-term blacks were either dealt a crooked hand, or something is innately wrong with them. And I simply won't accept that there is something wrong with them."
    Mary C. Waters, the chairman of the sociology department at Harvard, who has studied West Indian immigrants, says they are initially more successful than many African-Americans for a number of reasons. Since they come from majority-black countries, they are less psychologically handicapped by the stigma of race. In addition, many arrive with higher levels of education and professional experience. And at first, they encounter less discrimination.
    "You need a philosophical discussion about what are the aims of affirmative action,'' Professor Waters said. "If it's about getting black faces at Harvard, then you're doing fine. If it's about making up for 200 to 500 years of slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you're not doing well. And if it's about having diversity that includes African-Americans from the South or from inner-city high schools, then you're not doing well, either."
    Even among black scholars there is disagreement on whether a discussion about the origins of black students is helpful. Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist and West Indian native, said he wished others would "let sleeping dogs lie." 
    "The doors are wide open - as wide open as they ever will be - for native-born black middle-class kids to enter elite colleges," he wrote in an e-mail message.     There is also wide disagreement about what, if anything, should be done about the underrepresentation of African-American students whose families have been here for generations. Even Professor Gates, who can trace his ancestry back to slaves, and Professor Guinier, whose mother is white and whose father immigrated from Jamaica , emphasize different ideas. 
    "This is about the kids of recent arrivals beating out the black indigenous middle-class kids," said Professor Gates, who plans to assemble a study group on the subject. "We need to learn what the immigrants' kids have so we can bottle it and sell it, because many members of the African-American community, particularly among the chronically poor, have lost that sense of purpose and values which produced our generation." 
    In Professor Guinier's view, there are plenty of other blacks who could also succeed at elite colleges, but the institutions are not doing enough to find them. She said they were overly reliant on measures like SAT scores, which correlate strongly with family wealth and parental education. 
    "Colleges and universities are defaulting on their obligation to train and educate a representative group of future leaders," said Professor Guinier, a Harvard graduate herself who has been studying college admissions practices for more than a decade. "And they are excluding poor and working-class whites, not just descendants of slaves."
    Harvard admissions officials say that they, too, are concerned about attracting more lower-income students of all races. They plan to spend an additional $300,000 to $375,000 a year to recruit more low-income students and provide more financial aid to these students. 
    "This increases the chances that we will be able to reach into the communities that have not been reached," said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid. 
    While Harvard officials ignore the ethnic distinctions among their black students, Harvard's black undergraduates are developing a body of literature in the form of student research papers.
    Aisha Haynie, the undergraduate whose senior thesis Professor Guinier cited, said her research was prompted by the reaction from her black classmates when she told them that she was not from the West Indies or Africa, but from the Carolinas . "They would say, 'No, where are you really from?' " said Ms.. Haynie, 26, who earned a master's degree in public policy at Princeton and is now in medical school.
    Marques J. Redd, a 20-year-old from Macon , Ga. , who graduated in June and was one of the editors of Harvard's black student guide, said that Harvard officials had discouraged them from collecting the data on who the black students were. 
    "But we thought it was one aspect of the black experience at Harvard that should be documented," he said. "The knowledge had power. It was something that needed to be out in the open instead of something that people whispered about."

8/19/04 e-mail from Ed Chin, MD:
    According to the Hillel database (http://www.hillel.org/hillel/Hillel_Schools_New.nsf/Schools?openform), Jews are 2.5% of the American population. They represent 30% of the undergraduates at Harvard College , 23% at Yale College and over 30% of all students at the University of Pennsylvania .  The Ivy League and other elite schools have no quotas limiting Jewish students.
    These same schools impose quotas limiting the number of Asian American students.  Asian Americans are about 4% of the American population.  Asian Americans are about 15% of the students at the Ivy League and other elite schools.  At the University of California at Berkeley , Asian Americans represent 41% of undergraduates, and at Stanford, they are 25%. 

8/6/04 AsianWeek.com: Newcomer High Immigrant Supporters Strike Back at S.F. Superintendent.
By May Chow
   Tensions were inflamed in late June when San Francisco School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, the first African American woman to hold that post, made veiled accusations of racism against Newcomer High School s mostly Chinese student body.
   Students who heard the superintendents comments are totally baffled by the insinuations of racism because they know the diversity that exists in Newcomer, said Cyntha Cen, whos been teaching ESL reading and language development at Newcomer for the past two years.
   Ackerman told the San Francisco Chronicle on June 28: I understand racist behaviors and racist policies when I see them. Its the elephant in the room that none of us will talk about. Im really disappointed, and the minute you bring it up, everybody gets offended. Im now saying enough is enough. Im going to call it the way I see it.
   The School Board and Ackerman want to place XCEL Academy classrooms at the Newcomer campus next year, taking up about 40 percent of the schools instructional space. The new students are mostly black and Latino. The population at Newcomer is about 50 percent Chinese; 35 percent of Newcomer students are Spanish speakers from Mexico and Central and South America .
   Cen said race is not the issue: From the very beginning, we were concerned with the impact another school, which will bring approximately 180 students and use 40 percent of our instructional space, will have on our school program.
   Newcomer, located in Pacific Heights at 2340 Jackson St. , was founded in 1979 and has served as a learning center for recent immigrant students. It offers the districts only one-year transitional program for limited English proficient students.
   Phil Ting, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, criticized the way the district handled the decision. Others pointed directly to Ackermans role.
   She never met or talked with Newcomer students to get our input, so its not fair that she said that we were racist, said Vanessa Zhan, a former Newcomer student.
   Demands from the Newcomer advocates include an apology from Ackerman, as well as a community meeting with her, and a guarantee that the displacement of Newcomer students will last for one year only.
   As the child of immigrants, I understand the importance of inviting parents from different cultures into the system and allowing them opportunities to become more involved in the school.

5/11/04 The Dartmouth: "Admittance rates differ drastically by race for Class of 2008,"
   Dartmouth accepted 44.6 percent of African Americans who applied -- 2.5 times higher than the overall rate of 18.3 percent. Native Americans were accepted at 34.6 percent and Latinos at 29 percent. White students, on the other hand, had a more difficult time getting accepted; only 16.2 percent of white, non-international students received letters of acceptance.
    Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg cited two reasons for the higher acceptance rates. First, the College recruits minority populations aggressively, producing "a very well cultivated applicant pool," he said. Second, Dartmouth and other prestigious institutions are competing for the same small pool of highly qualified minority students. The College has to accept more of them, therefore, to compensate for a lower yield.  "Its supply and demand," Furstenberg said.
    But not all minorities are receiving preference. The number of Asian American college applicants has grown substantially over the last decade, so that Asian Americans no longer receive a significant preference for being a minority sub-population. Asian Americans applying for the Class of 2008 at Dartmouth enjoyed just a four percent boost over the average applicant, being accepted at a rate of 22.8 percent.
    This is partially attributable to the higher number of Asian American applicants compared to the other minority groups. A record 1,513 Asian Americans applied for a spot in the Class of 2008, compared to just 437 African Americans.           
    Michele Hernandez '89, author of the book "A is for Admission," and currently a private college consultant, noticed the disparity when she worked for the Dartmouth admissions office in the mid-1990s.
    "Colleges count Asian Americans in the numbers of students of color, but Asians receive no preference in the admissions process. I can't believe Asians aren't outraged," Hernandez said.

3/29/04 Forbes: "College Capers," by John Moores.  "Defying voters, UC, Berkeley is admitting kids with low SAT scores and rejecting high achievers,"
    When Governor Gray Davis appointed me to the Board of Regents of the University of California in 1999, I recognized the university's responsibility to extend the opportunity for academic achievement to as many capable students as the resources of the nation's premier public university allow. Sadly, today's UC admissions policies are victimizing students--not just those unfairly denied admission but also many with low college entrance exam scores who were admitted and can't compete.
    The California electorate voted to stop racial preference in college admission in 1996. Since then UC administrators have been manipulating the admissions system and, I believe, thwarting the law. (Although I have been the board's chairman since 2002, I'm just one vote.) UC, Berkeley, the top school in the UC system, is admitting "underrepresented minorities" with very low SAT scores while rejecting many applicants with high SAT scores.
    Prompted by many complaints from parents whose high-scoring children were rejected by Berkeley , I started probing admissions records. I learned that 359 students with combined SAT scores of 1,000 or less were admitted to Berkeley in 2002, accounting for 3% of the 10,905 students admitted that year. (The national SAT average is about 1,000.) Of those 359 students, 231 were from underrepresented minorities--meaning blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. Only 19 of the low scorers were white. Some 1,421 Californians with SAT scores above 1,400 applying to the same departments at Berkeley were not admitted. Of those, 662 were Asian-American, while 62 were from the underrepresented minorities.
    How did the university get away with discriminating so blatantly against Asians? Through an admissions policy with the vague term "comprehensive review." The policy includes factors like disabilities, low family income, first generation to attend college, need to work, disadvantaged social or educational environment, difficult personal and family situations. This means that a student from a poor background whose parents didn't go to college is given preference over a kid raised by middle-class, educated parents--all other things being equal.
    Nobody believes that the SAT is a perfect predictor of academic success, but it's silly to pretend that very low scoring applicants should be admitted to one of America 's premier universities with the expectation that somehow these students will learn material that they missed in K-12.
    Needless to say, there is no hard weighting system at Berkeley for any of the fuzzy factors mentioned above. The result is an admissions system that is impossible to audit and that offers a cover for university administrators who don't want the media hounding them over declining minority enrollment.
    The university is saying it is tilting the balance in favor of disadvantaged students as opposed to merely engaging in racial discrimination. Whatever the truth of that assertion, any good that comes from giving disadvantaged kids a leg up is undone if the tilting goes too far. It goes too far when kids who struggled with eighth-grade math have to compete with kids who aced advanced-placement calculus.
    Another disappointment is the many "outreach" programs that were funded post-1996 to create more diversity at the university. As I see it, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on encouraging poor, often minority, high school students to apply to UC even if they have very low SAT scores. But the outreach programs have had perverse consequences. The victims are the kids who should have gone to one of California 's outstanding community colleges, where they might have had the possibility of success and a chance to grow intellectually.
    California 's public higher education is the best in the world. UC should ensure that its policies are consistent with its well-deserved reputation. The university's admission process should be legal and fair, and the criteria for admission should be transparent to the public. Students should understand that the path into UC is pretty straightforward: Work hard, take demanding courses and demonstrate academic success.

3/23/04 Wall Street Journal, p. A22: "On Regents and Reality,"
    Californians probably think racial preferences in college admissions ended in 1996 when voters approved Proposition 209. But John Moores, chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of California , says some UC administrators have been manipulating the system and defying the law for the past eight years. Last week Mr. Moores's fellow regents voted 8-6 to censure him for expressing these views in a recent Forbes magazine opinion piece. A medal is more like what the man deserves.
    In his article, Mr. Moores details how Berkeley, the UC system's flagship school, is admitting hundreds of blacks, Latinos and Native Americans with SAT scores as many as 400 points below the whites and Asians who are being rejected. This is because the liberals who run Berkeley, and their enablers on the Board of Regents, all worship at the altar of "diversity."
    They're more interested in some ideal racial mix on campus than in matriculating students who are best prepared to do the work and most likely to graduate. In the real world, Mr. Moores had the temerity to write, this idealism translates into "kids who struggled with eighth-grade math hav[ing] to compete with kids who aced advanced-placement calculus."
    A Gray Davis appointee, Mr. Moores notes that university administrators are perpetuating discrimination against high-achieving whites and Asians through a policy known as "comprehensive review," which plays down such objective criteria as grade-point averages and test scores.
    Instead, the emphasis is placed on highly subjective "measurements," such as an applicant's background and experiences, which mainly serve as proxies for race and ethnicity. The result, writes Mr. Moores, "is an admissions system that is impossible to audit and that offers a cover for university administrators who don't want the media hounding them over declining minority enrollment."
    Enrollment of "underrepresented minorities" did fall off at Berkeley after Prop 209 passed, but it rose at other campuses within the UC system, such as Riverside , Irvine , Santa Cruz and elsewhere. By 2002 more of these minorities were attending University of California institutions than before the referendum passed. Moreover, because minority students are now choosing schools suited to their academic abilities, they are better able to compete and less likely to drop out.
    Mr. Moores's efforts to expose Berkeley deserve praise, and the attempt by his colleagues to silence him is all too typical of the closed liberal mind. Racial bean counters are using taxpayer dollars to circumvent the law and the will of the voters. And in the name of political correctness, they're also doing a disservice to many college-bound minorities.

3/23/2004 USA TODAY: "College admissions examined,"
    Three national groups critical of affirmative action are invoking state open-records laws to demand that public universities disclose whether and how race and ethnicity are considered in admissions decisions. 
    Organizers of the effort said Tuesday that they have contacted presidents of selective public universities in 20 states asking for detailed admissions information, such as the extent to which an applicant's race or ethnicity factors into decisions, and whether targets or quotas have been set for certain racial or ethnic groups. They plan to extend the inquiries to universities in most, if not all, states.
    One goal is to ensure that universities comply with a Supreme Court ruling last summer in a case involving the University of Michigan, says Bradford Wilson, executive director of the National Association of Scholars in Princeton, N.J., whose members are making the requests. Also, he says, taxpayers "have every right to know precisely how applicants are being treated" by public institutions.
    So far, universities that have responded say the requests are too broad. An official at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign wrote in a letter that the request is "unduly burdensome." Lewis Morrissey, freedom of information officer at the University of Michigan , said the request does not describe a "public record sufficiently to enable the public body to find the public record." 
    Wilson says his group expects the requests to be "met with delay and evasion," but "we intend to persevere." 
    Other groups participating in the effort plan to analyze the schools' policies as they are collected. If any policies appear questionable, the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Virginia-based group, will consider filing complaints against specific universities with the Justice Department or the civil rights office of the Education Department. The Center for Individual Rights, which represented rejected white students in the University of Michigan legal case, says an analysis of the data gathered through the requests may lead to more lawsuits. 
    The Supreme Court ruled in June that universities can consider race as one of many factors in admissions. But it said certain University of Michigan undergraduate policies, including awarding points based on an applicant's race or ethnicity, were unconstitutional. 
    Since then, a number of schools have dropped or expanded access to recruitment programs or scholarships once available exclusively to certain minorities. At least three institutions - Michigan , Ohio State University and the University of Massachusetts - revamped admissions policies effective last fall. Applications are still being processed, but Michigan reported drops in minority applications this year, and Ohio State has reported a drop in applications from blacks. Minority applications in Massachusetts appear to be up slightly.
    Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education, a group for higher education leaders, calls the new demand for data unnecessary. "We're talking about a complex process that does not lend itself to simple quantification."
    But Curt Levey, director of legal and public affairs for the Center for Individual Rights, says colleges that resist the requests send the message that they have something to hide - that "they want to use (racial) references and they don't want the public to know."

3/9/04 San Diego Union-Tribune: New study targets UC admissions: Asian-Americans may get short shrift, says statistical analysis,
by Eleanor Yang
    Asian-American students are less likely to be admitted into the University 
of California than students from other racial groups with comparable 
academic qualifications, according to a UC study released yesterday.
    Additionally, African-American and Latino students are more likely to be admitted than students from other ethnic groups, when most other factors are considered equal, the study said.
   UC President Robert Dynes said yesterday that he is concerned about the unexplained differences in admission rates and called for further investigation before the 2005 admissions cycle begins. 
    Dynes noted that the differences in admission rates of similarly qualified students has dropped significantly since Proposition 209 was passed. The 
1996 law dismantled many of California 's affirmative action programs. 
    Nonetheless, some critics argue that the university system is still not in compliance with the law.
    John Moores, chairman of the university's Board of Regents, cited "a 
consistent pattern, campus by campus, of Asians being admitted at a lower 
rate than 'projected.' " 
    To project the likelihood of each ethnic group's admission to the campuses, 
the university consulted with outside experts who used statistical techniques 
that considered students' academic and demographic characteristics, but not race. Essentially, the process tried to project or predict what numbers of 
different ethnic groups would have been admitted if race were not considered. 
    Though the number of Asian students enrolled at UC has continued to grow over the past several years, the admission rate falls short of that predicted by 
the statistical analysis. 
    At several campuses, fewer Asian-Americans have been admitted than members of other ethnic groups with similar academic qualifications. For example, at UC Berkeley last year, 33.9 percent of Asian applicants were projected to be admitted; 32.2 percent were. That represents 219 qualified students who were rejected. 
    Conversely, at some UC campuses, more African-Americans and Latinos 
were admitted than were applicants from other ethnic groups with similar 
grades, SAT scores, parental education, family income, and several other 
factors. 
    For example, at UC Berkeley last year, 234 African-American applicants 
were projected to be admitted; 355 were accepted. 
    The university acknowledged that the study is imperfect and that small differences between predicted and actual numbers can be expected. But 
officials said the consistent patterns shown by the study warrant further exploration. 
    UC officials said some changes will probably follow as a result of the study. 
At some campuses, applications for fall 2005 will be stripped of applicants' names so readers aren't given clues to race or ethnicity that could affect evaluations. 
    Officials warned against jumping to conclusions and said their next step is 
to determine whether the numbers are the result of discrimination, incomplete analysis, or a bad statistical model. 
    To do that, the university will try to quantify factors that weren't considered student leadership, improvement in academic performance and overcoming personal obstacles and add them to the mix. 
    UC officials pointed out that the differences between the projected and 
actual admission numbers are small, especially at campuses such as UC San Diego, where more than 35,000 students applied. 
    They also noted that underrepresented minorities blacks, Latinos and American Indians still make up a small portion of UC students. Last year, the three groups made up 18 percent of the freshman class. Dynes said the 
university must continue to work to ensure that students of all backgrounds 
have good academic preparations for college. 
    The university's report is one of the final pieces of analysis studied by a 
group formed by Dynes last year to address concerns raised about 
admissions. The group was formed after Moores issued a report last year 
that found hundreds of students with lower-than-average SAT scores were 
admitted to UC Berkeley in fall 2002, while thousands of students with higher-than-average SAT scores were rejected. More than half of the 
students accepted with low scores were black or Hispanic. 
    At their meeting in San Francisco next week, regents and administrators 
will present 16 recommendations for changes to UC's admissions policy. 
    For the past several months, Moores has been studying whether UC 
Berkeley rejected a disproportionately higher number of Asians in 2002, 
while rejecting a disproportionately lower number of Latinos and blacks. 
    He believes his questions prompted yesterday's report. Moores wrote a 
column on the topic for the latest issue of Forbes magazine, which will hit newsstands Friday. He is preparing a report to present to the university in 
early April that shows when all other factors are considered equal, Asians 
had a harder time getting into UC Berkeley in 2002, he said.
    "I'm not going to drop it," Moores said.
    Eleanor Yang: (619) 542-4564; eleanor.yang@uniontrib.com

OPPOSE  WASHINGTON STATE'S PROPOSAL TO RESTORE REVERSE DISCRIMINATION AGAINST ASIAN-AMERICANS 1/23/04 Seattle Post Intelliger: Bill would allow universities to consider race in admissions,
    Olympia -- Legislative proposals to incorporate race as a factor in admissions to Washington's public universities is necessary to help diversify the state's student body and its work force, a Senate panel was told yesterday.
    [translation without liberal bias: There are too many Asian-Americans and not enough blacks and Hispanics.  Therefore, let's engage in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans]
   All 15 individuals who testified before the Higher Education Committee gave resounding support to the measures.
    With Senate Bill 6268 and its companion, House Bill 2700, legislators and Gov. Gary Locke hope to incorporate the language of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling into Washington state law. The nation's high court ruled that race could be considered in admissions.
   "This bill is about providing flexibility to our public universities and colleges in evaluating their applicants for admission individually, taking into consideration all of the factors, attributes and experiences of an applicant," said Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle.  
    [translation without liberal bias: There are too many Asian-Americans and not enough blacks and Hispanics.  Therefore, let's engage in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans]
   The bills would amend Initiative 200, which state voters approved in 1998.
   I-200 expressly prohibited the government from discriminating against or giving preference to individuals based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.
   If lawmakers approve the plan, public universities would be able to take into account race, color, ethnicity and national origin when admitting students. However, colleges and universities would be prohibited from using quotas or set-aside slots specifically for students of color.
   "There is nothing wrong with examining all the background characteristics of a student," said Sen. Don Carlson, R-Vancouver, chairman of the panel. "It absolutely does not violate the citizens' decision in the passage of Initiative 200."
   At the hearing, Sen. Cheryl Pflug, R-Maple Valley , raised several concerns about the language of the bill. She questioned why the bill left out admissions policies allowing sex as a factor as well.
   Pflug also questioned the bill's vague definition of "diversity."
   "They are allowed to use race to create some kind of diverse atmosphere but what does that mean?" asked Pflug. "More of a particular race, less of a particular race, what constitutes diverse?"
    [translation without liberal bias: There are too many Asian-Americans and not enough blacks and Hispanics.  Therefore, let's engage in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans]
   The Washington Policy Center , a non-profit research organization for limiting government involvement, opposes the new proposals saying they go against the voters' decision for I-200 blocking unequal treatment of applicants because of their race.
   According to the 2000 U.S. Census, numbers of minority Washingtonians are rising. The Hispanic population is the largest minority population with 441,509 members followed by 322,335 Asians, 190,267 blacks, 93,301 American Indians and Alaska natives and 23,953 native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.
   Of the approximately 5.9 million residents of Washington , the Hispanic population composed about 7.5 percent in the 2000 Census. But 2003 Hispanic enrollment in the University of Washington 's graduate and professional programs was only 2.9 percent. Overall, enrollment in the graduate and professional programs was 14 percent minority students, according to Julia Harrison, president of UW's Graduate and Professional Student Senate.
    [translation without liberal bias: There are too many Asian-Americans and not enough blacks and Hispanics.  Therefore, let's engage in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans]
    Representatives from major higher learning institutions across the state testified in support of the senate bill.
   Representatives from the University of Washington, Washington State University, The Evergreen State College and Centralia College stated their need to factor race in their admissions policies to attain a more diversified student body. Delegates said new policies would enhance learning and educate a varied future work force.
    [translation without liberal bias: There are too many Asian-Americans and not enough blacks and Hispanics.  Therefore, let's engage in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans]
   Since 1999, the University of Washington admissions policy promoted the diversity of students without looking at race.
   The UW's total student enrollment increased by about 4,000 students since 1998, but numbers of underrepresented students declined in most cases, according to Tim Washburn, UW assistant vice president for enrollment services.
    [translation without liberal bias: When selection was color blind, the number of Asian-Americans increased.  Therefore bigots for the left have been engaging in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans for 20 years.  There are too many Asian-Americans and not enough blacks and Hispanics.  Therefore, let's engage in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans]
   "Although we've maintained numbers in some areas, the proportion of students in almost all of the underrepresented areas has declined," said Washburn.
    [translation without liberal bias: When selection was color blind, the number of Asian-Americans increased.  Therefore bigots for the left have been engaging in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans for 20 years.  There are too many Asian-Americans and not enough blacks and Hispanics.  Therefore, let's engage in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans]
   Minority admissions declined after the passage of I-200. Numbers have since gradually increased.
    [translation without liberal bias: When selection was color blind, the number of Asian-Americans increased.  Therefore bigots for the left have been engaging in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans for 20 years.  There are too many Asian-Americans and not enough blacks and Hispanics.  Therefore, let's engage in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans]
   Representatives from the State Board of Health and the Washington State Hispanic Bar Association of the King County Bar Association testified to the rising need for diverse employees.
   The percentage of Hispanics working in the legal profession does not match those using the legal system, according to Joaquin Hernandez of the Washington Hispanic Bar Association of the King County Bar Association.
    [translation without liberal bias: When selection was color blind, the number of Asian-Americans increased.  Therefore bigots for the left have been engaging in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans for 20 years.  There are too many Asian-Americans and not enough blacks and Hispanics.  Therefore, let's engage in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans]
   Last June the U.S. Supreme Court handed down two related decisions affecting the way public universities admit students, particularly students of color.
   The court decided 5-4 to uphold the University of Michigan 's law school's affirmative action policy. This policy took race into account but did not include quotas or point systems in which minority applicants were given a set number of additional points.
   But the justices struck down the university's freshman admissions policy 6-3 regarding the handling of applicants' race. At that time, the freshman minority applicants were given additional points on the admission rating scale. The court said this violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  

1/13/04 Wall Street Journal: "No More Boost for 'Legacies' At Texas A&M University,"
    Texas A&M University , one of the nation's biggest colleges, is eliminating admission preference for alumni relatives, yielding to criticism that the practice discriminates against minorities.
    A&M becomes the third public university in recent years to drop what is known as "legacy" preference, following state universities in Georgia and California . Its decision, announced Friday, may add momentum to proposals in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail to curb so-called white affirmative action.
    The move reinforces the notion that it is no longer politically acceptable for universities to give preference to alumni relatives -- who tend to be predominantly white at most institutions -- unless their criteria also favor minority applicants. Most selective universities, such as the University of Michigan , give an edge to both groups. The University of Florida , which does not consider race in admissions, does give a tie-breaker edge to legacy applicants, says Wayne McDaniel, executive director of its alumni association. He says legacy preference has drawn little scrutiny there.
    At Texas A&M, legacy preference had come under increasing fire from civil-rights groups and several Texas legislators after the college's president, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Robert Gates, announced last month that the university won't give admissions preference to minorities.
    "When we decided not to take race into account as a factor, then it seemed to us -- to be consistent -- we had to eliminate legacy at the same time," Mr. Gates said in an interview. "Either you have an admissions process based on individual merit and personal qualities, or you don't."
    Mr. Gates said the move was greeted with some grumbling by alumni, but "not as much as I expected." The university, located in College Station , Texas , is in the midst of a $1 billion capital campaign, and has raised nearly $700 million, he said.
    No selective private universities have dropped legacy preference, which they regard as essential to luring donations from wealthy alumni. Because they receive state money, public universities are less dependent on such donations.
    Legacy preference is "completely indefensible for public universities, particularly one like A&M that doesn't practice affirmative action," said Michael Olivas, a University of Houston law professor who has testified in the Texas legislature for proposals to prohibit legacy preference. "At least affirmative action is a proxy for disadvantage. Legacy preference is a proxy for white privilege."
    A&M's undergraduate admissions system awarded a maximum of four points on a 100 point scale to alumni children, grandchildren and siblings -- one point for each parent, grandparent and sibling who attended the university up to four. Of 10,271 students admitted in fall 2003, this edge was decisive in admissions of 312 whites, 27 Hispanics and six blacks, according to a university spokesman. The university, which specializes in engineering, is the second most-selective public university in the state, behind the University of Texas at Austin .
    A&M's student body of 37,000 undergraduates is 82% white, 9% Hispanic, 3% Asian-American and 2% African-American. A&M didn't admit its first black student until 1963.
    A 1996 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit had barred Texas public universities from using affirmative action in selecting students. That decision was superseded by the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling this past June upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan law school.
    Nevertheless, Mr. Gates announced in December that A&M wouldn't resume considering race in admissions. Instead, he said, it will seek to boost its minority representation through aggressive outreach and scholarships for low-income students.
    The University of Texas at Austin has said it will return to considering minority status as one factor in admissions. It doesn't grant legacy preference.

The Center for Equal Opportunity has released several studies analyzing 
admissions patterns which show that Asian-Americans are victims of 
reverse discrimination

Universities Against Asians

Arthur Hu's collection of statistics

University of California's "Comprehensive Review" Is A New Racist Strategy

Statistics on reverse discrimination at the University of California,
UC medical school, UC law school and other states

Brief of the Asian American Legal Foundation as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioners in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger (i.e. opposed reverse discrimination against Asian Americans)

10/10/03 San Francisco Chronicle: "UC admissions under fire again,"
   More than 400 students -- nearly 90 percent of them minorities -- were admitted to UC Berkeley in 2001 with below average SAT scores under an admissions policy that was to have ended racial preferences at state universities, The Chronicle found in an analysis of admissions data.
   UC Berkeley officials developed the policy, which considers grades and SAT scores but includes other factors, such as socioeconomic status, after voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996 to ban affirmative action in admissions.
   But the analysis of the data shows that of the 422 among the bottom tier of admitted students, 378 were minorities. Seventeen were of unknown race and 27 were white.
   Considering the numbers, John Moores, chair of the UC Board of Regents, and Regent Ward Connerly, who spearheaded Prop. 209, are concerned that the policy might have been used as an end run around the ban on racial and ethnic preferences.
   "I am withholding final judgment until I see the 'smoking gun,' but it certainly looks as if the university is acting inappropriately," Connerly said in an e-mail. "And it also appears to me that a lot of people have been in on the act. This can only happen when there is somewhat of a conspiracy in the design and the execution of that design."
   Data for the class admitted in 2001 show SAT I scores as low as 610 (out of a 1600 scale), made by a Latino student with a 3.50 grade point average. Although most students who scored poorly on the SAT I exam had good GPAs, such as an African American student with an 810 SAT score and a 4.09 GPA, there were some with low academics to match the low test scores.
   Of the 422 students, 73 -- or 17.3 percent -- of the admitted students had GPAs below 3.50. One African American student with a 940 SAT I score had a 2. 65 GPA. An Asian American student scored 670 on the exam and had a 3.0 GPA. One white student had an 860 SAT I and a 2.90 GPA.
   "It is outrageous. They don't have any business going to Berkeley ," said Moores, who did his own preliminary study of 2002 admissions data recently without looking at race. He was intrigued by the 2001 data and said it appears the students were admitted for "all the wrong reasons."
   "I always expect the kid that doesn't test well that turns out to be a whizbang, but there are not hundreds at Berkeley . It can't be," Moores said. "I believe there is a huge element of social justice behind some of the (decisions). I question whether people are really being honest of what the chances are of students being successful."
   NEW ADMISSIONS PROCESS
   The new admissions process allows each campus to evaluate its applicants on a comprehensive basis, expanding the definition of merit to include extracurricular activities, academic opportunities, societal contributions and intellectual motivation, as well as socioeconomic status.
   Richard Black, assistant vice chancellor for admissions and enrollment at UC Berkeley, could not comment specifically on the 2001 data but said there could be many factors, such as athletics, that led to the students being admitted.
   "All of our admissions decisions comply with Prop. 209. The student was not admitted because he or she was an ethnic minority," Black said. "The students demonstrated excellence in some other way. . . . some combination of other factors: rank in high school class, it might be athletics, the way that the student approached hardship, not the fact the student had hardship but how he or she overcame it. It could be leadership or possibly a very strong participation in one of our outreach programs."
   He said the emphasis in admissions is still on academics and noted that the students were only a small portion of a group of 7,949 admitted students.
   According to the internal report by Moores, 3,218 students with SAT I scores above 1400 were denied admission to UC Berkeley in 2002, while 374 applicants with SAT I scores between 600 and 1000 were admitted -- about 30 of those were athletes, Moores said. (An SAT score of 1010 is in the 50th percentile in California .) Of the low-scoring students admitted, 236 enrolled.
   The report says, "Comprehensive review obviously was not meant to be a mechanism whereby less competitive students could gain admission to UC," but Moores said that appears to be what happened.
   SUPPORT FROM REGENT
   But Regent Velma Montoya supports the admissions policy and said she doesn't "think we have sufficient information to turn against Comprehensive Review. . . . I still believe that just looking at one part of academic criteria, the SAT I, isn't enough to conclude the process is flawed."
   University officials dispute some of the findings, but new UC President Richard Dynes is calling for an in-depth study of the UC system's admissions policies.
   "It raises huge questions about the fairness of the process," said Patrick Callan, president of the nonprofit National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, which has an office in San Jose .
   UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl countered Moores ' report in a letter to Dynes, saying Berkeley is adhering to regents' policy in admissions. It is unfair to focus just on SAT I scores because a host of factors determines an applicant's admission score, Berdahl said. On average, he said, an applicant's GPA and test scores correlate very highly with the admission score. But for any individual applicant, some factors will be higher and some lower than the average.
   In addition, he said, the regents have directed the campuses to preserve some access for low-income students.
   SCORES CORRELATE WITH INCOME
   "Because SAT I scores, in particular, are very highly correlated with family income and education level, it is likely that some students with otherwise strong academic and personal qualifications will present relatively low SAT I scores," he wrote.
   He contended that a small number of lower-scoring students are admitted at all selective campuses across the country.
   Berdahl said that the campus' academics were the best in the university's history. Overall, the average GPA for those admitted was 4.23 and the average SAT I score was 1337.
   Berdahl also said in his letter that applicants do not compete against one another because they are separated into different pools according to the college or major to which they have applied. So a high scoring student applying to major in the College of Engineering may be denied while another with the same score would be accepted into another major, he said.
   He also took issue with relying on the SAT I as the dominant measure of academic quality. Because research has shown it to be the least predictive of success at UC, more weight is supposed to be given in the admissions process to grades and SAT II subject matter tests.
   In investigating the cases cited by Moores' study, Berdahl said the campus found that students with high SAT I scores who were denied fell into four categories: They had either withdrawn their applications, they were out-of- state applicants who are held to a higher standard, their GPAs and other academic factors were deficient or they had applied to one of three very highly competitive majors in the College of Engineering.
   He said that Berkeley actually admitted 98 percent of California resident applicants with SAT I scores above 1400 who did not apply to one of those three majors and whose GPAs were not below average for the Berkeley admit pool.
   "Most importantly, first-year performance data for these (low-scoring) students indicates they are doing well at Berkeley: not one has left due to academic deficiency," Berdahl said in his letter.
   "This is under the blah, blah, blah, category," Moores said of the university's response to his report. "I think something is very screwy, so I want somebody to come back and tell me exactly what is going on."


10/7/03 San Francisco Chronicle: "S.F. parents rekindle desegregation debate Issue of diversity vs. neighborhood schools,"
    Andy Chu, 15, grudgingly plans to begin class today after a six-week attendance strike failed to earn him a slot in one of San Francisco's top public high schools near his Sunset District home.
    Across town in the Bayview, Terry Malone, 16, would like to attend a good high school close to home, too -- but there aren't any. Instead of going on strike, he joined a community drive to build a new Bayview high school.
    Today, Chu and Malone are emblematic of a growing debate over how the San Francisco Unified School District balances twin goals of school desegregation and student choice in where -- and, by extension, with whom -- they go to school.
    Playing the old role of whites during desegregation battles of the past, west side Chinese Americans, like Chu and his family, are fighting assignments to low-performing schools in heavily Latino and African American sections of town.
    Meanwhile, African Americans on the east side, like Malone and his family, say they resent the fact that every academically competitive high school is an hourlong Muni bus ride away.
    And families of all backgrounds say that in a city as racially and ethnically diverse as San Francisco, they place higher priority on the convenience and sense of safety and community associated with attending a neighborhood school -- even if it means a loss of diversity in the classroom.
    "It's a sort of bread and butter issue -- it's like apple pie and the American way," said San Francisco schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman. "You say neighborhood schools, and it resonates with everybody."
    Ackerman, the city's first African American schools chief and a strong proponent of diversity who herself was bused to a mostly white school as a child, is asking the city school board to next year begin alloting at least 50 percent of seats in each school to students from the neighborhood.
    That would be a big change. Currently, neighborhood students get priority only if they add to a school's diversity -- as measured by the district's "diversity index," a compilation of six socioeconomic factors, not including race.
    The diversity index is the product of two decades of court battles over equal opportunity in San Francisco public schools. In 1983, the NAACP sued the district to desegregate its schools and won an agreement that no race would make up more than 45 percent of a school.
    Eleven years later, the "racial caps" were challenged by Chinese American families who felt they were unfairly being kept out of top-notch schools such as Lowell High. To settle that case, both sides agreed to the creation of the diversity index.
    Without the index, a system based solely on where students live would lead to resegregation and keep African Americans and Latinos out of the best schools.
    "That would have a negative impact on most of the minority (African American and Latino) children in the district," said Michael Harris, assistant director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights for the San Francisco Bay Area.
    Nonetheless, those who are unhappy have begun to voice their objections louder than ever.
    Political Awakening
    A group of west side Chinese American families -- known as the Parents for Neighborhood Schools Association -- kept their kids out of school for six weeks to protest every morning outside the district office on Franklin Street. The protest ended last week when Ackerman secured slots for the students at two charter schools.
    Chinese American students compose 30 percent of the district's enrollment and live mostly near the city's highest-performing schools in the Sunset and Richmond districts.
    By comparison, African American students make up 15 percent of the district and mostly live near the city's lowest-performing schools in the east side. (Non-Hispanic white students hardly factor into the equation, making up 10 percent of enrollment and living in neighborhoods scattered throughout the city.)
    For Chinese Americans -- often considered a "sleeping giant" in San Francisco politics -- the issue of neighborhood schools is sparking a political awakening.
    From their standpoint, they have scraped to buy houses along the avenues of the Sunset and Richmond districts and say this entitles them to send their children to their neighborhood schools, Lincoln and Washington High, even if it means over-crowded classrooms and little diversity.
    "I think it's a little bit unfair," said Chu, the student who ended his attendance strike last week.
    To make their case, Chinese Americans have formed a number of grassroots organizations, spoken up at school board meetings, stormed Ackerman's office and signed petitions, and they have have thick binders full of copies of letters they've sent to city, state and national officials.
    They've also registered to vote in higher numbers than usual, said David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee.
    "We ask them, 'Are you doing this for the recall or the mayoral election?' " Lee said. "They say, 'No, I'm just angry about the schools, and I want to vote.' . . . No longer are parents satisfied with talking about it. This time around, they feel they can really do something about it."
    'Commonsense Issue'
    Though their experiences differ, African American students and parents living on the city's east side share the same sentiment.
    "Sometimes people like to make it a racial issue -- Bayview Hunter's Point is predominantly African American, and the west side has a lot of Asian families," said Tinisch Hollins, 24, the coordinator of Bayview's Gang Free Communities Initiative. "But any parent would rather have their child go to school close to home. . . . It's not a race issue. It's a commonsense issue."
    Recently, 200 Bayview-Hunters Point students began working with a nonprofit group called Bayview Learns, which has a goal of building a new neighborhood high school by fall 2004.
    The group has submitted a proposal for the school -- tentatively called Bayview Community High -- as part of the district's small school initiative, which aims to build a couple of new schools of fewer than 400 students each year. Bayview Learns expects to get an answer from school officials by November.
    "It would be better," said Malone, a junior at Burton High, who has helped conduct surveys for the group. "We'd be able to walk to school or ride our bikes. It's safer to be closer to home."
    Statistics gathered by Malone and others show two-thirds of students in Bayview would prefer attending a school in their neighborhood. Bayview has 6, 000 students and just 3,400 seats at schools even remotely nearby. Many of those bused outside the area spend more than two hours every day on Muni and are often failing their first period classes because they're so late.
    Laura Critchfield, founder of Bayview Learns, says she thinks a quality school close to home would do wonders for students' grade point averages and morale.
    "They're not getting the comprehensive support they need to be successful," Critchfield said. "Nobody in their community is connected to their school, and nobody at their school is connected to their community."

10/4/03 Los Angeles Times: "UC Berkeley Admissions Scrutinized. Study finds hundreds of highly qualified applicants were rejected in favor of freshmen who were 'marginally academically qualified.'"
    UC Berkeley, the University of California's oldest and most prestigious campus, admitted hundreds of freshmen in 2002 who were "marginally academically qualified" at the expense of many more highly qualified applicants, according to a confidential report obtained by The Times.
    The preliminary analysis of UC Berkeley admissions, prepared for the UC Board of Regents, showed that nearly 400 students were admitted to the campus in 2002 with scores of 600 to 1000 on the SAT entrance exam, far below the 1337 average SAT score for last year's admitted class. Sixteen hundred on the test is considered a perfect score.
    The report also shows that more than 600 applicants with scores on the SAT of 1500 or above were not admitted, along with nearly 2,600 others with scores from 1400 to 1500. Berkeley officials say many of the rejected students with high SATs had relatively low grade-point averages.
    Overall, the document finds, the admissions process at UC Berkeley "might not be compatible with [the school's] goal of maintaining academic excellence."
    The report was prepared at the request of regents Chairman John J. Moores. It is based on university data, but contains extensive analysis that primarily was written by Moores. The report does not attempt to explain the reasons for UC Berkeley's admissions patterns. It does not break down admissions by race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status, nor does it measure changes over time.
    But it urges a more comprehensive study of admissions "including some of these factors" at Berkeley and the university's seven other undergraduate campuses.
    One regent, Ward Connerly, said Berkeley's flexible standards might be an attempt to get around the state's ban on affirmative action and admit more underrepresented minority students.
    The analysis provides a highly unusual window into the student admissions process at UC Berkeley, one that "despite the institution's status as one of the top public universities in the nation" is largely hidden from public view.
    UC Berkeley officials and faculty members acknowledged that the statistics in the report are generally accurate, but cautioned that in some instances the data were misinterpreted or misunderstood. They strongly defended their admissions practices, saying that academics are the leading criterion in all decisions, apart from a small number of exceptions for those with "exceptional personal talent" often athletes.
    The campus is "in full compliance with the regents' stated policy on admissions," said David Stern, a UC Berkeley education professor who heads its admissions committee.
    But he and others at the campus also acknowledged that 381 students - 3.5% of the admitted students that year - were invited to enroll in 2002 despite test scores far below the average for Berkeley students, or applicants. All had "other indicators of academic strength," Stern said, adding that SAT scores alone are not the best predictor of success at the university.
    Of those, 236 - or about 5% of the entering class - enrolled at the campus, the report shows.
    Richard Black, UC Berkeley's assistant vice chancellor for admission and enrollment, said the students with the 600 to 1000 SAT scores were accepted largely because they "made the most of the opportunities that were available to them."
    He explained that a "substantial portion" of the accepted students with low SAT scores were underrepresented minority students from California's lowest-performing high schools.
    "We're in the unfortunate position of not being able to admit some truly outstanding students, and that is difficult for us," Black said.
    UC Berkeley officials said the largest group of rejected applicants with 1400-plus SAT scores were denied admission largely because of their lower grade-point averages. This group, university officials said, also took fewer semesters of honors and Advanced Placement courses, which allow students to gain college credit in high school if they pass certain exams.
    Yet statistics provided by UC Berkeley officials on Friday showed that these rejected students actually had, on average, higher grade-point averages and more semesters of honors and AP courses than the students with SATs in the 600 to 1000 range who were accepted.
    Students, parents and high school counselors often complain that the process of applying to the UC system, particularly Berkeley, is opaque, complex and confusing - and the resulting decisions seemingly arbitrary.
    The report, even in preliminary form, seems likely to fuel concerns by regents and others that a recently revamped "comprehensive review" admissions policy at the university would lower UC's academic standards.
    The policy, in use systemwide for two years -  and at Berkeley, in various forms since 1998 - allows admissions officials to weigh personal factors, not just grades and test scores, in reviewing each applicant, although academic considerations are still required to be paramount.
    The switch to more flexible selection guidelines came in the years after the university, and later the state, banned consideration of race or ethnicity in public college admissions and hiring decisions. The changes were designed to broaden access to the university for students from diverse socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds, without factoring in race.
    Faculty studies have found there has been no subsequent decline in the academic quality of students at UC, and that some academic indicators have risen. But several regents, including Moores, remain concerned that too many high-achieving students are being rejected by the university, while others - seemingly less well-qualified - are being admitted.
    Moores, who said he requested the analysis after hearing complaints about the university's new admissions policy from parents, described himself as "shocked" by Berkeley's admissions data.
    "You really can't tell exactly why some people are getting in and others are not getting in," he said. "I just don't see any objective standards"
    The report also surprised several higher education researchers around the country. One said he was "flabbergasted" that UC Berkeley would admit significant numbers of students scoring below 1000, particularly those in the 600 to 800 range.
    "I'm not a big supporter of SAT scores at all," said William G. Tierney, director of USC's Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis. "But if you sign your name, you get a 400."
    Patrick M. Callan, president of the nonprofit National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in San Jose, said the number of students with SATs below 1000 who were admitted "certainly raises a question about what the actual selection criteria are used in the university."
    "You would expect a handful of those, where there was some special consideration - maybe the kid was genius who doesn't test well, a musician, a poet, a football player, something.... But it's the magnitude that surprises me," Callan added, referring to the number of students admitted who had SAT scores below 1000.
    The analysis did not include data about race. But Connerly, a strong opponent of affirmative action, seized on the findings as evidence that that the comprehensive review process, inherently more subjective than previous policies, could serve as a backdoor way for admissions officials to slip consideration of a student's race back into the process.
    Connerly said that while his primary concern was that the Berkeley campus might not be taking the best students it could, he also believes that race may be an unstated factor in at least some of its admissions decisions.
    "Either the University of California at Berkeley really believes that students who are lower academic achievers based on SATs are better students than those who are higher achievers on those tests, or there is some other reason here. You know which I think," he said, adding that "this is a damning report."
    Other regents expressed concern about the report as well, along with chagrin at its release. But several said it was too preliminary to comment on at any length.
    Regents Velma Montoya and Joanne Kozberg also noted that it highlighted students' SAT scores, despite the university's decision in recent years to downplay those scores in its admissions decisions.
    The report also focused on high school grade-point averages, which the authors said was significantly correlated with SAT scores.
    Some regents stood by UC Berkeley's approach to admissions. "I can see why people would have reasons to be concerned I suppose, and I don't begrudge them for that," said Matt Murray, a senior at UC Berkeley who is a student member of the UC Board of Regents. "But I would not say, based on this report, that somehow there's something terribly wrong with what the university is doing."
    "The admissions process is a horribly complicated thing," he said. "The SAT is not the end-all and be-all.... There are all of these other factors that go into the admissions process."

8/27/03 Wall Street Journal: "SAT Scores Are Highest Since 1974: Test Gap Between Whites, Minorities Widens Among College Freshmen,"
    This year's college freshmen scored an average 1026 out of a possible 1600 points on the SAT college-admissions exam, the highest average since 1974. But the already big gap between test scores of white and most non-Asian minority students widened, which could complicate affirmative action just two months after the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed it.
    There's now a 206-point gap between average test scores of whites and blacks, and an average 158-point gap between whites and Mexican-Americans, a difference that has grown by 19 points for blacks and 31 points for Mexican-Americans in the past decade. The flat scores for these minorities, compared with big score increases for whites and Asian-Americans, could make it harder for colleges to find minority students who score high enough to meet admissions minimums.
    "You can only dip so far and make [affirmative action] work," said Douglas Laycock, a University of Texas law professor who has written widely about racial preferences.
    The growing gap also suggests that it will be harder than the high court assumed to bring the performance of minority students up to par with whites, and make it unnecessary for colleges and universities to offer them admissions preferences. In upholding affirmative action, justices said they "expect" it won't be needed in 25 years because the gap will disappear.
    The average SAT score is up six points from a year ago, including three-point increases in both math and verbal scores. But in a second disturbing trend, the gap in scores between males and females also widened, so that even though girls typically earn better grades in high school, the young men now are outscoring young women by an average 34 points on the math test and nine points on the verbal test.
    The College Board, which owns the SAT, said that is because female test-takers are more likely than males to be minorities and to come from families with lower incomes and less education. Those characteristics are strong predictors of lower scores.
    But David Sadker, an education professor at American University in Washington who studies the gender gap, also attributed it to classroom "gender biases" that undermine girls' self confidence on high-stakes tests.
    College Board President Gaston Caperton attributed the rising average math score -- up 16 points in the past decade -- to more students taking more math. But students, and especially women, also are taking fewer English courses, the College Board said. Average verbal scores are up seven points in the past decade.
    There are other reasons for the score increases too. Asian-Americans increased their average score by a stunning 13 points over last year and by 41 points in the past decade, pulling up the overall average. Beyond that, the National Science Foundation has poured billions of dollars into elementary- and high-school math education in the past decade. And test-preparation courses are now ubiquitous.
    The College Board released its significantly higher SAT scores a week after its rival, ACT Inc., reported flat average scores on its ACT college-admissions test. The ACT warned at the time that too few students are taking math and science in high school, a finding that doesn't square with the College Board's results.
    That could be because the ACT is more commonly taken in the middle of the country, where there are more college-entrance slots than in the East and West regions, where the SAT is the dominant test. "The competitive buzz isn't there," said Mr. Basili, referring to the Midwest.

Average combined verbal and math SAT scores for incoming college freshmen

8/8/03 San Francisco Chronicle: Asian-American Enrollment Surges 
in San Francisco Public Schools: After Court Order Ended Race-
Based Admissions in '99, Reverse Discrimination Against Asian-
Americans Ended; 
    The number of San Francisco schools with one ethnic group making up 60 percent or more of at least one grade -- jumped from 30 schools two years ago, said Stuart Biegel, a UCLA law and education professor hired by the state to monitor the district's desegregation program.
    At Francis Scott Key Elementary in the Sunset District, for example, Chinese Americans are projected to make up 73.7 percent of the student population this year, compared with 55.4 percent last year.
    The pattern has been evident since a 1999 court order ended race-based enrollment in response to a suit brought by Chinese American parents, who objected to the district's policy of setting a maximum racial enrollment at desirable schools such as Lowell High. In 2001, the parents, district, state and NAACP agreed to a new form of school admissions that includes a diversity index.
    The index takes into account six factors: socioeconomic status, academic achievement, mother's educational background, language status, home language and academic performance of the child's previous school.
    David Levine, one of the lawyers who represented the Chinese American parents who sued the district, said Biegel's definition of "severe resegregation" might be overstated.  "It's his own definition," Levine said of the 60 percent figure. "I don't know that everybody would use that."
    Levine added that the diversity index can't be seen as a failure from Biegel's statistics because it is achieving "economic diversity, language diversity and educational diversity." He added that if the district offered more top-notch schools, the issue would be moot.
    "Certainly, the overall solution to the problem is more good schools so that we're not in the situation of having to fight over a limited number of spots," Levine said. "Basically, people want good neighborhood schools no matter what your race is."
    Under the 2001 agreement, the school board is free to suggest modifications to the diversity index so long as they don't involve race. Jill Wynns, a school board member, said the index might need to be "tweaked."

7/22/03 Associated Press: "U. Washington Deans Unite to Press for 
Changes Reflecting Supreme Court"
    Seattle -- Deans at the University of Washington, where 
consideration of race or gender in admissions has been barred 
since voters approved Initiative 200 five years ago, hope to press 
the Legislature to amend the law.
    The goal is to bring Washington's approach in line with the recent 
U.S. Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action at the University of 
Michigan, said Denice Denton, dean of the UW's College of 
Engineering -- one of 15 deans to sign off on an op-ed piece on
the subject published earlier this month in The Seattle Times.
    I-200 barred government preferences for women and minorities 
in education, hiring and contracting.
    The deans' letter said the high court ruling ``sets a fair standard 
and a good example that the state of Washington should follow. ... 
We believe that the Legislature must refine our own state law, 
Initiative 200, to reflect this Supreme Court decision.''
    No way, said I-200 spokesman and conservative talk-show host 
John Carlson.
    ``Cut through the rhetoric, and the deans are arguing that they 
can't increase the number of black and Latino students unless they're 
allowed to discriminate against Asian and white students,'' said 
Carlson.  ``I don't buy it, and the people of Washington state don't 
buy it either.''
    Initiatives can be changed by the Legislature -- immediately with 
a supermajority vote and, after two years, with a simple majority.
    State Rep. Phyllis Gutierrez Kenney, co-chairman of the House 
Committee on Higher Education, said the issue could come up next 
session.
    Enrollment of minorities at the UW dropped initially after I-200 
passed. But it's been inching back up since then to near pre-I-200 
levels.
    According to statistics from the UW's admissions office, the 
percentage of incoming Asian freshmen at the UW showed the 
biggest gain -- from 24.96 percent in 1998 to 27.03 percent last fall.
    Hispanic students have fared the worst, dropping from 4.65 
percent of incoming freshmen in 1998 to 3.67 percent last fall. Blacks 
made up 2.94 percent of the freshman classs in '98, dropped to 1.84 
percent in 1999 and last fall made up 2.85 percent of the freshman 
class.
    White students made up 54.64 percent of last fall's freshman class 
-- up a hair from 1998's 54.59 percent.
    Other racial or ethnic groups are proportionally smaller, and about 
7 percent of entering freshmen don't indicate a racial classification.
    To Carlson, these data show that outreach and recruitment methods 
developed since I-200 -- ``that don't cross the line into race 
discrimination'' are effective in producing a diverse student body.
    ``They want to go back to diversity on the basis of race because it's 
easier,'' said Carlson. ``An Italian kid from White Center, from a single-
parent home, with nobody in the family who's been to college, shouldn't 
be penalized because his skin isn't dark enough.''
    The return to pre-I-200 numbers has not occurred at the law school, 
said Dean W.H. Knight.
    The number of new Asian students enrolled has increased, from 27 
in 1998 to 32 last fall. The law school lists Filipinos as a separate group, 
with seven admitted in 1998 and three admitted last fall. Four Indian 
students were admitted last fall, up from zero
in 1998.
    In 1998, the law school -- a three-year program that generally has 
about 500 students -- enrolled 173 first-year law students, compared 
with last fall's 174. Five years ago, 49 of the students were racial 
minorities, compared with 48 last fall. Eight were black, double the four 
admitted last fall, and seven were Hispanic, compared with five last fall.


7/11/03: 18 Vietnamese Americans graduated as Valedictorians or 
Salutatorians out of about 80 in Dallas-Fort Worth

"Ruling on race policy draws mixed reaction," by Esther Wu
7/3/03 Dallas Morning News 
    On June 24, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that colleges could use 
race as a factor when it comes to admissions policies. The court 
handed down its decision after two white students challenged the 
admissions policies at the University of Michigan and the University 
of Michigan Law School. They claimed that the use of race in the 
schools' admissions was unconstitutional.
    There were two cases before the court, one involving admissions 
to the law school, and the other challenging the schools' complex 
undergraduate admissions process.
    In the first case, the court ruled 5-4 that the school could use race 
as a factor in enrollment in law school. However, the courts also ruled 
6-3 that the school could not continue its current affirmative action 
plan for its undergraduate program because it involved a point system.
    In the 5-4 ruling, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, "In a society 
like our own ... race unfortunately still matters."
    Sounds like a slam-dunk, doesn't it? But last week's ruling has left 
mixed feelings among many Asian-Americans.
    It's a complicated issue compounded by the fact that the new ruling 
supersedes a court decision that barred the use of race in admissions 
in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. That case revolved around a 
woman named Cheryl Hopwood, who in 1992 said less-qualified 
students were admitted to the University of Texas Law School 
because of their race.
    Some education groups have reported that the percentage of Asian-
American applicants granted admission at the University of Texas at 
Austin rose from 68 percent to 81 percent after the Hopwood decision.
    'Level playing field'
    However, last week, Malcolm Gillis, president at Rice University in 
Houston, said, "As the only highly selective university bound by the 5th 
Circuit's 1996 Hopwood ruling, Rice and the state of Texas have 
experienced a significant 'brain drain' of highly qualified minority students 
taken by universities able to take race into consideration. We particularly welcome the return to a level playing field this decision appears to provide."
    They aren't the only ones happy to see race used as a factor in school admissions.
    "The Supreme Court's decision reaffirms the need for affirmative action initiatives in America today. Asian Pacific American students will now be 
ensured that the student body will be representative of American society 
and that the Supreme Court recognizes that discrimination is still a factor 
that affects all minorities," said Karen K. Narasaki, president and executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.
    But Fort Worth attorney Don Joe said the Supreme Court's decision 
would allow universities to revert to or continue policies that hurt Asian-Americans, for the most part, because most Asian-Americans fall 
into a higher economic bracket.
    "In California, Washington and Texas, universities were forbidden from considering race in admissions and financial aid decisions. After the 
prohibitions went into effect, the number of Asian-Americans admitted by universities in those states increased," said Mr. Joe, who has been 
tracking this trend on his Web site, www.asianam.org.
    "I favor affirmative action based on income: A poor kid who has the 
same qualifications as a rich kid should receive a preference in university admissions," he said. "There is no reason the children of wealthy 
minorities should benefit from affirmative action based on race."
    A real victory?
    Syndicated columnist and television reporter Michelle Malkin agrees 
with Mr. Joe. The conservative columnist recently wrote: "Clueless Asian-
American students and leaders are proclaiming 'victory' with other 
minority groups in the wake of the Michigan decisions. But as Peter 
Kirsanow, one of the rare voices of sanity on the U.S. Civil Rights 
Commission notes, 'Were Asian-American students not discriminated 
against in the college admissions process, they would constitute the 
largest minority group, if not an outright majority, at many schools.' "
    She may be right. But it will be hard to convince Angie Chen Button.
Her son, Dane Chen Button, was denied admission to Harvard despite 
scoring 1500 on his SAT and being elected president of his student body 
at Berkner High School in Richardson. Instead, he will be attending an 
honors program at UT's School of Business.
    Ms. Button knows that not everyone who applies gets accepted. "But 
we feel strongly that this was a case of reverse discrimination," she said.
    As Americans - hyphenated or not - we are all equal. But until 
everyone understands this, we'll need affirmative action programs.

6/30/03 Wall Street Journal: "Affirmative-Action Opponents Seek A Ban 
on Collection of Ethnic Data,"
    By law, public and private colleges and universities are required to ask prospective students about their race and ethnicity on applications and to 
report the results to the federal government. Students aren't legally bound 
to answer such questions, however, and a growing percentage don't.
   Nearly 18% of those who took the SAT in 2002 didn't respond to 
questions about their race and ethnicity, up from less than 10% in 1997. 
The College Board, the association that administers the SAT, uses such 
data to ensure that test questions are fair to all races. Schools also buy 
lists of SAT test takers to use for recruiting purposes.
   Meanwhile, at the University of California at Berkeley, 9.5% of the 
students admitted for this fall provided no ethnic data, up from 6% a 
decade ago. Johns Hopkins officials estimate that one out of five of its 
applicants doesn't reveal his or her race or ethnicity and say that most of 
the "no reports" appear to be Caucasian and Asian-Americans who 
apparently believe that reporting their race will play against them.
   Stung by last week's Supreme Court decision allowing race to 
continue to be considered in college admissions, affirmative-action 
opponents plan to attack such diversity programs by denying them a 
crucial commodity: data.
   Their first battleground will be California, where, as early as this fall, 
voters will be asked to decide on a "Racial Privacy Initiative." If passed, 
it would bar state and local government entities from maintaining 
databases related to citizens' race and ethnicity and -- except where 
the federal government requires it -- even collecting such information 
on forms involving school enrollment, job applications and government contracting.
   The measure is opposed by a far-flung group that ranges from civil-
rights advocates who fear it will block efforts to stop racial profiling to 
health-care providers concerned that it will hamper medical research. 
The initiative has "a lot to do with how important health, education and law-enforcement programs are delivered," says Jay Zeigler, co-director 
of the Coalition for an Informed California.
   Still, there are signs that many people are increasingly reluctant to 
give up such information about themselves, and in California, early 
polls indicate that the initiative has the backing of 48% of the state's 
voters, even if many also say they are unsure of its details. Affirmative-
action opponents hope a victory will stir up sympathetic legislative 
activity and ballot-box initiatives elsewhere.
   The California initiative's leading advocate is Sacramento 
businessman Ward Connerly, who was also a leader of the successful 
1996 campaign to pass California's Proposition 209, which bars 
government entities in the state from using racial preferences in hiring, contracting and education. Mr. Connerly's efforts inspired voters in 
Washington state to pass a similar initiative two years later, and in 
2000, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush changed his state's university admissions procedures after Mr. Connerly threatened to launch an initiative 
campaign there.
   In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling, Mr. Connerly is already 
assessing whether to launch a second initiative campaign, in Michigan. Collecting the data necessary to categorize people by their backgrounds 
only heightens race's divisive influence upon society, he maintains. "I 
think deeply embedded in the psyche of the American people is the 
notion that we want to be colorblind," says Mr. Connerly, whose 
ancestors included Irish, French, African-Americans and Choctaw 
Indians.
   Opposition to the gathering of racial and ethnic information has not 
always been ground occupied by conservatives, reverse-discrimination 
activists or cagey college applicants. After World War II, early United 
Nations proclamations denounced the sort of government racial 
classifications that the Nazis had employed. During the civil-rights era, 
liberals argued for banning application photographs, which were used 
to screen African-American students out of many universities.
   The loss of such information would be a huge blow to efforts to ferret 
out discrimination, says Troy Duster, a New York University sociologist. 
"It may well be true that we are all alike at the DNA level," he adds, "but 
that doesn't stop the police from profiling or the bank from giving out 
loans due to pigmentation."


"Asian-Americans have nothing to celebrate,"
by Michelle Malkin, 6/25/03 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc., 
6/26/03 Dallas Morning News 
    There was only one thing that disturbed me more than President 
Bush's mushy comments praising socially engineered campus