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Hard times at UCLA

From an article in today's LA Times:

Farmer started the quarter thinking he would meet black students in his lectures. Each had more than 300 students.

"But the problem," he recalled, "was there weren't any black people to sit next to."

That was when it struck him.

"I really felt the isolation."

Farmer had been on campus a few days before he found other black students, during a picnic for freshmen and transfers. Actually, they found him first.

Ella Franklin, 18, of Oakland had grabbed three other black students and told them, "Let's go find black people." She spotted Farmer. "There's one!" They introduced themselves.

"There's not a lot of us," Franklin said to him, "We've got to stick together."

I don't recall there ever being more than one or possibly two other Asian students in my elementary or middle school classes. In high school, that number may have reached three. I somehow managed to survive the isolation. Nor did I feel a compulsion to seek out Asian life-forms among my fellow students. D'Juan Farmer sounds like a smart student, but I've got little sympathy for him on this point.

While it would be desirable for UCLA to have more than only 2% black students, unless the admissions program is systemically biased against African Americans (which it certainly could be -- the article doesn't investigate the underlying causes and only vaguely refers to the new "holistic" admissions guidelines), I don't see what the justification would be for admitting students strictly on a racial basis. Feelings of isolation don't cut it.

The basic problem is the secrecy and opacity of the admissions process (at UCLA and everywhere). If school admissions were entirely transparent and based on public, objective criteria, this would be a non-issue. Policy-makers and voters could freely dispute and decide which standards create imbalances and differences we want to live with. Clear standards would give minorities and majorities alike answers to questions that are currently chalked up to racism. And there'd be a lot fewer hard feelings.

Edited to fix the blockquote tags, and to replace the unword "opaqueness".

By Mrooney at 2006-12-03 18:53 | Mrooney's blog | login or register to post comments | 710 reads

Antitrust procrastination

Can you really not imagine an argument for admitting students on a purely racial basis? Really? Come on, you're kidding.

I don't think the problem is the opacity of the admissions process so much as it is that people have different conceptions of the role higher education should serve and how students are best selected to serve that function. Depending on your point of view, admissions are working well right now... or, not.

If colleges should admit only the brightest and best-prepared and should primarily be geared to maximize the benefit to them, race shouldn't play much of a factor. On the other hand, if you start with the assumptions that racial differences probably don't play an appreciable role in how bright somebody is and how well prepared they are likely has to do with factors beyond those students' control, racial factors start looking more appealing. Honestly, if you're growing up poor in East Oakland, your American History test isn't the most pressing thing on your mind.(*)

It's an open question (I think) which approach provides the greatest net beenfit to society, but maybe that's a distinction between the roles public and private universities ought to fill. The problem of the student who arrives on campus completely unprepared is certainly not a small thing, but is denying the chance to go to a top university to broad swaths of the population who grow up in bad environments really the better policy?

What I'd really like to see used to weight admissions is socioeconomic background (that is, race and money instead of merely race), but I'm unsure how that would work in practice, and that appraoch would certainly run into more constitutional trouble than a purely racial approach.

Law schools tend to have a fairly transparent admissions policy. Unless you apply through a special program (such as the... err, Hastings has one with a clever acronym) admissions are based almost entirely on undergrad GPA and LSAT. You get a lot of white kids, plus some asians who didn't make it into med school, to be crass about it. (For full disclosure: UCLA Law did not look kindly upon my UGPA)

(*) As evidenced by a funny story from a friend of a friend who teaches in East Oakland. When I asked him what the weirdest name he'd run across was, he said "General Lee." Yikes. I suppose that kid's parents spent more time watching The Dukes of Hazard growing up than studying for their American History tests... Although Stonewall Jackson of all people has been seized upon by a subset of the Christian right as the ideal of Christian manliness, so I suppose anything's possible.

By bbaker at Sun, 2006-12-03 20:11 | login or register to post comments

You got me

Okay, I can imagine the reasons for race-based criteria for admission. Indeed, as an undergrad, I more or less agreed with them. But either advancing age is making me into a reactionary crank or being on the machine-operating end of the collegiate factory line has soured me on Affirmative Action, 35 Years and Counting. As you suggest, kids shouldn't be penalized for social forces and historical injustices well beyond their control. And the practical function of college isn't primarily to produce scholars and scientists, but to grease the gears of socio-economic advancement. On the other hand, using schools -- particularly colleges -- to prepare the poor and deprived for med school or office work or whatever is like using a mitre as a hardhat. Professors, textbooks, and Scantrons aren't the right tools to make people ready to maintain a 9-to-5 job, good credit history, and a mortgage. The black middle class has grown, but it's stagnant relative to the growth of the rest of the American economy. (Yes, I know the link is from an AEI scholar, but I don't see anything obviously misleading or ideological about the data he presents.) The problems start well before college, and affirmative action is all too often Tylenol for an infection that needs antibiotics.

That's where I think admissions transparency might help -- at least a little bit. By letting everybody know What You Need to Do to Succeed, kids and parents could have concrete goals and standards to aim for, and secondary schools likewise. And the admissions standards could (and, IMO, should) include factors whose practical effect is to increase minority enrollment. But those formulae should be public and publicly debated (at least for public colleges and universities), if for no other reason than to avoid the implication of racial quotas. ("Holistic" admissions sound to me like a step in the opposite direction, toward increased subjectivity and unknown biases.)

By Mrooney at Mon, 2006-12-04 00:36 | login or register to post comments

SCOTUS

It would appear that I have become Anthony Kennedy:

He looks like he is about to write an opinion that says there is a compelling state interest in desegregating schools but that the systems in Louisville and Seattle give him the heebie-jeebies. He will add that he looks forward to some future hypothetical case in which some school district somehow remedies racial imbalances without accounting for race.

I don't think it's an inherently crazy position. If the objective is to combat racism, at some point the dubious categories of race have to be discarded.

By Mrooney at Tue, 2006-12-05 10:35 | login or register to post comments