The Diversity Delusion

by Heather Mac Donald

  Like Proteus caught in a net, the University of California struggled furiously over the next decade to rework its admissions formulas, trying to re-create its former “diversity” profile without explicitly using race. If, in 1967, an Arkansas fire department had devised pretextual, ostensibly nonracial, job qualifications to foil a desegregation order, it would have been judged in violation of the Constitution. But legal elites will never object to such pretextual surrogates for race in order to engineer a certain level of representation for “underrepresented minorities.”

  The university’s attitude was as damaging as its actions. How to explain the significant drop-off in black and Hispanic applications to UC’s most elite campuses after Prop. 209 passed? The then-dean of Berkeley Law School, Herma Hill Kay, gave PBS’s NewsHour the propreference answer: “I think that there was a feeling that California in general had turned its back on minority applicants. People felt that they didn’t have to come here if they weren’t welcome here.” Another explanation, of course, might be that minority students, well aware of how much they had previously benefited from preferences, realized that without those preferences they stood little chance of getting in to the most selective campuses.

  UC could have responded to the charge of being “unwelcoming” with something like the following rebuttal: “We welcome students of all races and ethnicities. Every student will be judged according to his accomplishments, and anyone who meets our standard—equally high for all—will win admission. UC has never discriminated and never will.” Instead, UC continued throwing its weight behind the argument that the only way to “welcome” minority students is to make sure that they get in whether or not they match the academic qualifications of white and Asian students.

  University spokesmen constantly convey the idea that 209 is forcing them to do something unjust. “It’s a hard message to send—persuading kids that they have a place at the university, when we deny so many qualified students,” observed administrator Nina Robinson.4 (Robinson masterfully blended the “unwelcoming” topos with the university’s current line that students who would be admitted only under affirmative action are all “highly qualified.”) But the University of California rejects almost all white and Asian applicants with combined SAT scores of 1000 and 2.85 GPAs, say, and no one accuses UC of being unwelcoming to rejected white and Asian students. If proportionally far fewer black and Hispanic students qualify for admission than whites and Asians, the problem lies with the systemic academic weakness of those students, not with the admissions standards. But this is a truth that, post-209, the university has persistently denied.

  Only in 1998 did the university’s admissions processes operate without either explicit racial preferences or stealthy surrogates for race. The results were telling: At Berkeley, the median SAT gap shrunk nearly in half, to 120 points; black and Hispanic admits logged an impressive 1280 on their combined SATs. The six-year graduation rates of this class would increase 6.5 percent for blacks and 4.9 percent for Hispanics, compared with the class admitted two years earlier.

  The more pedagogically sound environment that resulted didn’t matter to the race mongers, however. They flung themselves into their long experimentation with different admissions schemes, with one purpose: “To maintain a racially and ethnically diverse student body,” as former UC associate president Patrick Hayashi wrote in 2005. The first scheme that the university tried was to give an admissions preference to low-income students. This device backfired, however, when it yielded a wealth of Eastern European and Vietnamese admits—not the kind of “diversity” that the university had in mind. So the campuses cut their new socioeconomic preferences in half and went back to the drawing board.

  Various components in the system began diluting their academic requirements. Berkeley Law School reduced the role of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and college grade-point average (GPA) in ranking students, and it lowered the LSAT cutoff score that would disqualify a student for consideration. Previously these lowered expectations had applied only to minorities but they would now technically apply to all students. The school also removed the quality adjuster for high school GPAs, so that a 3.8 from a school where half the students drop out before graduating counted as much as a 3.8 from a school where the student body is frantically competing to rack up academic honors.

  Other schools created pretextual institutions in the hope that they would be minority magnets. UCLA’s law school established a specialization in critical race studies, a branch of legal theory contending that racism pervades nearly every category of the law and that writing about one’s personal experiences grappling with that racism is real legal scholarship. College seniors who say that they want to specialize in critical race studies on their UCLA law school applications get a boost in the admissions process. As the school discreetly put it, a student’s interest in the program “may be a factor relevant to the overall admissions calculus.” In 2002, UCLA rejected all white applicants to the program, even though their average LSAT score was higher than the average score of the blacks who were admitted.

  The university as a whole started admitting all students in the top 4 percent of their high school class, regardless of their standardized test scores, hoping that this would net more applicants from all-minority schools. The public justification for this practice, which Texas and Florida also implemented in response to affirmative action bans, is that getting to the top of one’s class signals the same academic talents regardless of whether your school awards As just for showing up. But a 2005 college board study found that 30 percent of the African American and Hispanic students with an A average have mediocre SAT verbal scores of 500 or lower.5 Indeed, while only half of the blacks and Hispanics who rank in the top tenth of their class also score over 600 on either section of the SAT, all the whites in the top 10 percent do. And contrary to the claims of affirmative action proponents, the evidence is strong that students with combined SAT scores of 1000, say, are less likely to do well in competitive colleges than students with test scores several standard deviations above that. In addition, UC also started giving preferences to students who had attended university-sponsored tutoring programs, which, while technically open to students of all races, target underrepresented minorities.

  None of these new admissions measures produced the numbers of “underrepresented minorities” at Berkeley and UCLA that the diversity ideologues and the ethnic lobbies in the state legislature demanded, however. The legislature’s Latino caucus told the university that more of “their people” at Berkeley and UCLA was the price of budgetary support. Clearly, the university remained too wedded to its old, meritocratic ways to achieve the “critical mass” of minorities that diversity advocates claim is necessary for a sound education. So the university began to “question all criteria, including criteria that have long been regarded as reflecting high academic achievement,” in the words of former associate president Hayashi. Incredibly, it began to ignore entirely its applicants’ objective academic rankings.

  For several decades, the university had divided its applicants into two categories: It admitted one half only by objective tests of academic merit, such as standardized test scores and honors classes; it evaluated the other half subjectively, weighing such factors as race, economic status, or leadership. From this tier, where racial preferences had free rein, the vast majority of blacks and Hispanics were drawn.

  After 209, the university could no longer use race within this second tier, and the surrogates for race it had developed netted a lower percentage of minorities from this tier than pure racial targeting. The solution? Junk the academic tier and evaluate the entire applicant pool on subjective and “contextual” factors. The hope, obviously, was that by eliminating the academic admits, the process would open up more spaces for students admitted on “holistic” factors—who just happened to be black and Hispanic.

  UC president Richard Atkinson proposed in 2001 that all campuses adopt this new “comprehensive review” process. Und
er comprehensive review, already in use at diversity-mad Berkeley, perfect 1600 scores on the SATs would have to be understood “contextually.” They might end up being given the same weight as 1100s, say, if the 1600-scoring student had come from a stable two-parent family and had attended a top high school. And 900s on the SATs might count more than 1600s, if the student with the 900s came from a school with many low-achieving students or if he came from a single-parent home or spoke a foreign language at home. Admissions officers perked up when they read that a student lived in a gang area or had been shot. Tutors in UC outreach programs taught students to emphasize their social and economic disadvantages in their application essay.

  Precious few faculty members in the UC system had the guts to oppose Atkinson’s comprehensive-review proposal publicly (though a plurality of professors polled by Roper opposed preferences—in private, of course). Berkeley political scientist Jack Citrin was one of the few who spoke out. Citrin observed that a UC Davis study showed that comprehensive review inevitably decreases the quality of the freshman class. Indeed, average SAT scores for entering freshmen at Berkeley dropped from 1330 in 1998 to 1290 in 2001, according to USA Today; and the test-score gap between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics, on the other, widened.

  Citrin exposed the vacuity of UC’s claim that it was necessary to “refine and redefine” the “concept of merit to make it more inclusive.” “How do we ‘refine’ the meaning of merit for a political science or electrical engineering major that goes beyond knowledge of subject matter and the capacity for critical thinking?” Citrin wrote in an op-ed. “Clearly, the concept of ‘evaluation-in-context’ is an invitation to introduce a new set of group preferences. I personally believe that poverty should not be a handicap to attending UC and strongly support generous student aid from all sources. But I do not believe that such a background factor should be a positive advantage, outweighing factors more directly linked to academic success and discriminating against middle-class students.”

  The university found even this criticism too much to tolerate. President Atkinson and his minions went ballistic when they learned that the UC regents chairwoman had invited Citrin to speak to that body before it voted on Atkinson’s comprehensive-review proposal. An Atkinson aide threatened to engineer a faculty vote of censure against the chairwoman if she did not cancel Citrin’s appearance. She held her ground, but not without further tongue-lashing from Atkinson.

  Atkinson needn’t have bothered. The regents duly rubber-stamped his plan, and UC swept away the concept of objective academic merit. If anyone had any doubt as to comprehensive review’s purpose, a 2003 legal settlement dispelled it. The NAACP and a bevy of other “civil rights” groups had sued Berkeley in 1999 for “discriminating” against “people of color” in its admissions process—i.e., for failing to extend them overt racial preferences. If ever there was a sweetheart suit, this was it, since Berkeley wholly embraced the plaintiffs’ cause. The parties settled amicably, agreeing that comprehensive review fully satisfied the plaintiffs’ demands by “taking into account the full range of indicators of ‘merit,’” according to the NAACP’s press release.

  A 2002 Wall Street Journal article provided eye-opening details about how comprehensive review worked in practice. UCLA had accepted a Hispanic girl with SATs of 940, while rejecting a Korean student with 1500s. The Korean student hardly lived in the lap of luxury: He tutored children to pay the rent for his divorced mother, who had developed breast cancer. But he went to a highly competitive school with a high Asian population in Irvine, while the Hispanic girl came from a school filled with failing students in overwhelmingly Hispanic South Gate. Students from South Gate got into UCLA and Berkeley at twice the overall acceptance rate. Indeed, an analysis of UCLA admissions rates in the four years following Prop. 209—even before comprehensive review—found that going to a school with a high-achieving student body decreased one’s admissions chances sevenfold. An engineer’s son with near-perfect SATs from University High in Irvine, for instance, was rejected from both Berkeley and UCLA.

  It’s remarkable in the post-209 world how explicitly university administrators speak about their racial intentions—and get away with it. Thus, a 2003 report by the UC president’s office lauded comprehensive review, the 4 percent automatic admissions mechanism, and the preferences for tutoring-program attendees for boosting the admissions chances of minorities, even as other groups faced decreased admissions. As long as the mechanisms that administrators use for engineering a certain racial outcome are ostensibly color-blind, they appear safe.

  Comprehensive review gives university administrators a face-saving explanation for admissions disparities that appear racially motivated. In 2003, for example, John Moores Sr., who was the one remaining regent committed to color-blind meritocracy, disclosed that Berkeley had admitted 374 applicants in 2002 with SATs under 1000—almost all of them “students of color”—while rejecting 3,218 applicants with scores above 1400. UCLA had similar admissions disparities. In a Forbes column, Moores, who had fought tooth and nail to get the data, accused Berkeley of continuing to discriminate against Asians and of admitting students who were unprepared for Berkeley’s rigors.

  Predictably, the administration exploded, engineering a censure resolution against Moores by his fellow regents. Backed up by a huge coalition of left-wing professors, civil rights groups, ethnic advocates, and opponents of standardized testing, administrators argued that the students admitted with extremely low scores had unique leadership skills or character and that their test scores said nothing about their ability to succeed at an elite institution. Race, they huffed, was irrelevant to their admission.

  But the few independent studies that were published on admissions processes continued to show racial disparities that such “contextual factors” cannot explain away. A study of UCLA admissions from 1998 to 2001—before the official onset of comprehensive review—showed that, even controlling for economic status and school ranking, blacks were 3.6 times as likely to be admitted as whites, and Hispanics 1.8 times as likely. An unpublished study of Berkeley Law School admissions by Richard Sander revealed disparities between minorities and whites of such magnitude that to posit any explanation other than race seems fanciful. The school assigns each applicant a numerical index based on college grades and LSAT scores. In 2002, it admitted 92 percent of white applicants with an index of 250 or higher but only 5 percent with an index between 235 and 239. By contrast, it admitted 75 percent of black applicants in the 235 to 239 range in 2002 and 65 percent in 2003. No black applicants had an index of 250 or higher. Even a 2004 university study acknowledged that there were admissions disparities by race that nonacademic, nonracial factors could not account for.

  Even if race were not motivating admissions decisions in violation of 209, it is ludicrous to imagine that it is a favor to let someone into an elite institution where most students scored much higher on the SATs. But preference advocates deny that standardized tests measure anything relevant about academic aptitude or preparedness. The standard line at UC is that “everyone whom we admit is highly qualified”—which just boils down to a tautology: If we admit you, you are by definition highly qualified.

  Yet the argument that objective tests reveal no meaningful distinctions among students contains implications that preference advocates don’t want to accept. If everyone above a certain minimum floor is equally qualified for elite institutions, Berkeley prof Jack Citrin asked during the debate over comprehensive review, why not admit people by lottery? A lottery would reflect the diversity of the applicant pool exactly and would admit more minorities. But it would also lower academic quality. “If you think they don’t care about that, of course they care,” said Citrin. “God forbid Berkeley should resemble [less elite] UC Riverside!”

  Citrin’s lottery proposal went nowhere, of course. Race-conscious schools are perfectly content to use objective tests of aptitude to judge Asians and whites, and even to rank black a
nd Hispanic students within their own group. But if you suggest using objective standards to evaluate students on a common universal scale, those standards suddenly lose all their validity.

  Why? “It’s not the case that test takers are uniformly capable of displaying what they know during standardized tests,” argued Mark Rashid,6 a civil engineering prof at UC Davis and chair of UC’s admissions committee. He invoked a theory propounded by Stanford education professor Claude Steele, who claims that blacks and Hispanics get so worried that they’ll confirm the stereotype that minorities score lower on standardized tests that they freeze up and do score lower. Unanswered, of course, is the question of how the stereotype arose in the first place. At any rate, if the so-called stereotype threat really were inhibiting minorities from showing what they know and can do, standardized tests should predict that black and Hispanic students will do worse in college than they actually do. The opposite is the case. Blacks and Hispanics do worse than their SATs predict.