By Timothy Kudo and Mason
Stockstill
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
The Center for Equal Opportunity, a Washington-based think tank,
released a report Thursday saying that racial and ethnic
preferences have played a much larger role in freshman admissions
at U.S. colleges than many universities had previously
acknowledged.
The study reviewed admissions practices and statistics from 47
different colleges and universities, including UC Berkeley, UC
Irvine and UC San Diego.
Researchers found that African American and Latino applicants
had a far greater probability of admission than white or Asian
American applicants with the same qualifications.
“Everybody believed that there was some amount of
preference. The defenders of affirmative action have said
it’s been very modest,” said Linda Chavez, president of
the center.
“We’re hoping that (the study) will make those
universities that are engaging in racially preferential policies
rethink those policies,” said Chavez, who was President
Bush’s first choice for Secretary of Labor before she
withdrew amid allegations that she had hired an illegal
immigrant.
The study found that before affirmative action policies were
banned at the UC, the Berkeley campus was among the most extreme in
maintaining disparities between ethnic groups in its admissions
policies.
For example, the study found that in 1995, white students who
were admitted to UC Berkeley had SAT verbal scores averaging 150
points higher than the African American students who were admitted.
The gap for math scores was 180. Between whites and Latinos, the
gaps were 120 and 130, respectively.
Additionally, the study found that the average GPA for incoming
white students at Berkeley was 4.00, while it was 3.42 for African
Americans and 3.75 for Latinos. The gaps between whites and Asian
Americans were minimal in both GPA and test scores, the report
found.
“What this study shows is that at the most competitive
schools, the preference given is extreme,” Chavez said.
UC representatives said the system is currently in compliance
with state law, which requires that race and ethnicity not be a
factor in admissions.
“Other than that, we would have to take a close look at
(the study) in order to comment on it in any substantive
way,” said UC Spokesman Brad Hayward.
Data gathered from UC Irvine and San Diego showed gaps that were
less drastic.
The data for the UC campuses was taken from 1995, before the UC
Board of Regents passed SP-1, which banned the consideration of
race or ethnicity in university admissions. Proposition 209, the
statewide initiative that outlawed such consideration in all state
entities, was approved by voters the following year.
Despite the strong condemnation Chavez and the report’s
authors have for such programs, supporters of affirmative action
say the current standards for admission have so little to do with
success in college that taking race into account does more good
than harm.
“Anything taken to the extreme can be unfair and unjust,
but that’s not what affirmative action is about,” said
Evan Okamura, external vice president of the Undergraduate Students
Association Council.
“Just because you don’t have a high GPA and SAT
score doesn’t mean you won’t do well in college,”
he said.
Chavez also said she opposed UC President Richard
Atkinson’s recent suggestion to drop the SAT I test as a
factor in freshman admissions. Atkinson has said the test is an
unfair measure of academic success and is possibly biased in its
results.
“We believe SATs are in fact good indicators of how
prepared students are to compete,” Chavez said. “They
shouldn’t be abandoned.”
But like Atkinson and many others, Okamura also sees unfairness
in the SAT.
“I think the SAT scores aren’t just as it is,”
he said, referring to the fact that African Americans and Latinos
score substantially lower on average than their white and Asian
American counterparts.
Like Atkinson, Okamura supports the idea that universities
should take more holistic approaches to the admissions process,
with less emphasis on impersonal indicators like grades and test
scores.
As for the fact that doing so would make reviewing applicants a
much lengthier procedure for UCLA, which this fall received 40,500
applications for freshman admission, Okamura has a simple
suggestion: “Hire more people.”