Affirmative Action info coming soon

pldennison · February 1, 2001, 7:26pm

This isn’t a debate, but I didn’t want to resurrect the lengthy old thread regarding this topic. I had left a recent thread with the promise that I would be speaking with a friend of mine who had worked in college admissions for many years and see if he could offer some insight on the process. He did provide me with a ton of information, and I just want to clear with him what I can and cannot repeat here on the SDMB. Suffice to say that some of what he says confirms the suspicions of IzzyR and others concerning less-qualified minority applicants, while some things were quite surprising (e.g., the biggest beneficiaries of “affirmative action” in college admissions are male athletes of all colors; the group benefitting the least is poor women).

xenophon41 · February 1, 2001, 8:15pm

Thanks for the heads up, pldennison.
::begins girding for baby/bathwater debate::

pldennison · February 2, 2001, 1:26pm

OK, I got permission to use the following comments. I have edited them to remove the names of particular colleges. These come from someone who worked as a professional in the college admissions process for about a decade, at two private and prestigious colleges.

I make no comment on these statements for now; I just wanted to present them as promised, and let the debate flow as it may.

As you may guess, this was a really important issue to us, and one that came up all the time. I can tell you that pretty much all private colleges, and most of the most selective public colleges (except in states where it has
been outlawed, i.e. Texas, California) absolutely use race in admissions decisions and that many minorities (At least black and hispanic–as far as I know XXXXX was one of the very rare schools to also give preference to Asian students) are given preference over more qualified white applicants. And given what I’ve seen in the admissions process I think that if that policy is used intelligently, I agree with it. What I don’t agree with are the following:

–Socioeconomic factors are not used, and in fact hurt people. One of the pro-affirmative action arguments is that more black students are economically disadvantaged, but the fact is that wealthy black students benefit from it just as much, and in those cases I used to argue against
those students. What’s worst is that poor white applicants, particularly women, are the most discriminated-against group in all of admissions. This really pissed me off.
–There is now major “Affirmative action” for male applicants. This is one of the issues that I always argued against and ultimately caused me to quit admissions.
–The greatest beneficiaries of what I would call affirmative action are athletes. This issue, even more than the gender one, is what made my job finally unbearable and led me to leave. You would be appalled if you knew
not only who got in but what rules they did not have to follow in the admissions and financial aid processes.
–Yet another issue that I hated is that “merit” scholarships were given out to wealthy black applicants whose academics did not make them worthy. The
reason is basically that all of the colleges compete with each other to have “good numbers” of minority students and they all end up doing whatever they need to to enroll these students.

Back to the original issue, in many cases when reading the applications you can actually see how prejudices and racism caused some students to have a tougher time in high school, and this is why I support race-based affirmative action, but only in those cases where I feel that the student
was truly disadvantaged in many ways. In the cases of rich black applicants, the schools use affirmative action for them simply because they need the numbers, and as I said I always argued against those cases.

If anybody wants, I will be happy to go back to him for clarification on any of these statements, or get him to post here himself.

Jackmannii · February 2, 2001, 2:28pm

Since we’re dealing with generalities here, some clarification and concrete examples from your friend are desirable. For instance, how much “more qualified” are the non-minority applicants he feels are being unfairly excluded? (In the famous Bakke case, a few of the black students admitted to med school ahead of him had C averages in college, as compared to his straight As). Is the disparity ever that great now?

Your friend appears to be saying that affirmative action should not benefit males. What’s his reasoning there?

IzzyR · February 2, 2001, 3:17pm

Some comments:

In what way are women the “most hurt”? Is this solely due to affirmative action for men? (To what extent is this done?)
I don’t think the athletes have anything to do with affirmative action. (I see that the guy hedges his language in apparent recognition of this). The schools let them in to help the schools athletic programs out. Debatable, perhaps, but not affirmative action. they are being let in because they have something to offer (not merely who they are).
Jackmannii, I think he means that males are favored over women (there’s a growing shortage of men in colleges these days). Correct me if I’m wrong pld.

Needs2know · February 2, 2001, 3:21pm

I’m not at all suprised that athletes are STILL getting slip through admissions…just recently Michael Vick was drafted into the NFL from Virginia Tech. He’d been there for two years. Now I’d always thought that Tech had a pretty good rep as schools go. But then Virginians are very proud of their schools anyway. (Snobbish sometimes) Why it shocked me to see this guy on TV and he couldn’t put two sentences together I don’t know. My nine year old has a better vocabulary, and much better pronunciation. He had been at Tech for two years! Playing football of course. Let’s not call letting in athletes affirmative action, that’s been going on a lot longer. Just because so many of them happen to be black does not make this process anything close to AA. A detestable practice maybe, but not AA. I don’t think these school would care if the guy is plaid as long as he can handle a ball and help them win the penant.

Needs2know

tourbot · February 2, 2001, 3:32pm

Since schools universally lose money on athletic program spending, what exactly is it these athletes are offering the school?
And if these athletes are taking the place of others eligible for affirmative action programs, then in what sense is their admission not affirmative action?

IzzyR · February 2, 2001, 4:20pm

I think they make money on some sports and lose on others. I’ll bet that the guys who have the real edge in admissions are the ones from the sports that make money. But even for the others, they are obviously adding something (student interest, school pride, alumni connections, etc.) That’s why they are getting in. (What do you think?)

Something of a stretch there, don’t you think?

pldennison · February 2, 2001, 4:42pm

I should mention, in regards to the portion regarding athletes, that the specific schools being discussed here are both Div. III schools, and neither is high-profile in any sport in which they participate.

Keep in mind that Div. III schools do not offer NCAA/athletic scholarships, so if athletes at these schools are cruising through the admissions and financial aid processes without following the rules, they are taking merit and academic scholarships as well as, probably, other need-based aid.

tomndebb · February 2, 2001, 5:32pm

If they are losing money on the programs (which I am not convinced of), they are very likely gambling that they will make money because of the programs–at least if they can put together a winning season.

A huge source of college revenue is the endowment, generally funded by donations of the alumni. In an awful lot of schools, the key to the alumni pocketbooks is a successful sports program. [Anecdote Alert!] My brother attended Michigan State University before and during the Magic Johnson era. After years of disappointing football and basketball seasons, MSU was suddenly in the sports news everywhere. After the first season, MSU suddenly began a huge construction binge that owed nothing to new appropriations from the state legislature.[/Anecdote Alert]
(I have heard stories with similar themes from every college prefessor I know.)

tourbot · February 2, 2001, 7:28pm

Oh, it’s a good thing we have college sports to raise the price I will pay to send my children to college, while lowering the quality of their education at the same time. At least they’ll have lots of school pride, though. :rolleyes:

Absolutely not, even if you don’t consider athletic admissions affirmative action in and of itself. Suppose two equally qualified athletes (really that should read equally unqualified) are up for admission. One is a minority, one is not. The school has an affirmative action program. Which one gets in?

As for whether college sports lose money for schools in most cases, I could not find a web cite. However, there are many books on the subject, such as The Hundred Yard Lie, and several others by Murray Sperber. Even if tomndebb’s anecdote is true, how often does a Magic Johnson come along? And can you show that the cash the school took in as a result was more than it lost in the long run? Seems about as practical an income source as a lottery ticket to me.

This is turning into a bit of a hijack, but it is possible that college sports are partly responsible for some of the failings of affirmative action admission programs. Instead of academically qualified minority admissions, you have unqualified athletes being used to fill quotas. Remove affirmative action and college sports still steals more seats from academically fit students than affirmative action ever did.

I suspect that one of the reasons that white women are becoming the most discriminated against may have to do with the rise of women’s collegiate sports programs.

IzzyR · February 2, 2001, 7:34pm

Could you put some numbers on that?

tourbot · February 2, 2001, 7:49pm

Sorry, that was meant as an opinion. I don’t know if anyone has done a study that would provide numbers on that. However, if you reread the OP you will see a simlar statement, ostensibly based on the (admittedly anecdotal) testimony of someone who worked in college admissions.

pldennison · February 5, 2001, 5:17pm

I went back and asked for more specifics based on questions people have asked in the thread, and here’s what I got.

First, I asked him if the things he’s discussing in terms of his experience are fairly typical of most colleges (he would be in a position to know, having done a lot of travel to meet with students and other college admissions people):

As to the question about other schools, my experience is that the issues of gender and sports are now universal at “selective” colleges. It’s also important to note that this is equally true of schools that play Division III and have a tradition of losing sports teams (like Oberlin) as it is of major sports schools like Duke or Michigan.

As to the race-based affirmative action, it’s pretty universal too for private colleges, but I think a lot of public universities are changing their policies, not because they want to, but for fear of lawsuits.

As to the issues of money (poor white kids being at the bottom of the totem pole), that’s true for most schools, but the few very wealthy schools who have remained need-blind in admissions (Ivy League schools and some
others–Williams, where I went, is one), as far as I know, are very fair to poor kids of all races.

I also asked him about the degree of difference in qualification, which Jackmanii asked about, and he said this:

There are really two categories here:

People who have had lesser opportunities than others. These tend to be kids who either go to really bad inner city high schools or equally bad rural high schools. Generally, in these cases we would be unlikely to give
the students a break if their grades were below our standards, but in many cases the SATs would be pretty low, and in almost all cases we gave them a break in terms of the preparation we expected from them, figuring they just
didn’t have the opportunity. In terms of SATs, with white kids it was unlikely that someone whose scores were below 1300 (I don’t know if you know this, but SAT changed the scale in the mid-90s. A 1300 now is probably about the same as 1230 or so when you and I took it) would get in unless their grades and classes were outstanding. With some black and Latino kids, we’d take them if the scores were as low as 800, as long as the grades were good.

People who went to private schools (sometimes on scholarship, sometimes not) or high-quality suburban or city-magnet high schools. This is where I had a tougher time, because these students may have still suffered from racism and discrimination in some ways, but certainly not from a lack of educational opportunity. These students tended to get a break for both SATs and grades. I could accept the SAT break, partly due to cultural
bias, and partly due to the affirmative action concept, but I think most colleges really forgive too many poor grades. I’d say that where a white kid from a really good school probably needed about a 3.6 or better to get in, black and Latino kids were often getting in with less than a 3.0.
Football and basketball players were even worse–we were taking kids with 2.5 in non-honors curriculums from really weak Ohio high schools. That was the pits. Those kids usually had SATs below 1000 too (or the equivalent ACT
score–the midwestern athletes never seemed to take the SATs.)

Anyway, I’m straying from the point. You can see that the standards were quite a bit lower for both grades and scores. We tried to keep the same curriculum standards for everyone, but in the context that we wouldn’t compare a kid from a challenging high school with a kid from an inner city high school as long as they both tried to challenge themselves given what was offered.

One simple way to explain this, in my opinion, is that when a school is very selective, it can only take as many people as it has spaces for. Lots of qualified people would get turned away, simply because other people were even more qualified. The basic standard with affirmative action cases was “is this student qualified? Can he/she do the work?” In other words, the policy was to take black and Latino (and some Asian) students who were not at the same academic level as the white kids we took, but who we felt were still qualified to be successful at the school. On the other hand, I think we took a lot of athletes who were not qualified, and doomed to failure. The other big thing that was diffrent is that we took a lot who were clearly
not good personal matches for the school (i.e. kids who wanted fraternities, business majors and other things we didn’t offer) just because they were athletes. I think that was an injustice to them as well as us–obviously
the coaches convinced them to come to a school they wouldn’t even like.

He said if I want specific case examples or more information, he’ll be happy to provide them.

Kimstu · February 6, 2001, 1:25am

IzzyR: 3. Jackmannii, I think he means that males are favored over women (there’s a growing shortage of men in colleges these days).

Yeah, that’s what “affirmative action for men” is about: the ratio of female to male applicants just keeps growing (certainly at my university), and the ratio of females to males admitted keeps staying about the same.

However, I wince a little bit at describing it as a “shortage of men”, although that’s certainly how college admissions offices with desired gender/race/ethnic balances to maintain think about it. A big part of the phenomenon is simply the fact that men without college degrees tend to make more money than women without college degrees, so males in high school are more likely to view college as optional. A few typical situations:

strongly unionized or independent skilled-trades jobs which don’t require a college degree and still pay pretty well (construction, auto repair) are much more common among men than among women. “Women’s jobs” for high-school graduates are in the much lower-paying categories like nurse’s aide, sales clerk, or receptionist. I believe the median entry-level salary of women with a college degree is still actually less, or only very slightly more, than that of a man without one (can find the cite if you want).
going directly from high school to a career in the armed services is still much more common among men than among women (though I don’t know if very many career servicemen these days don’t get a college education out of it at some point along the line).
“high tech highschoolers”, the kind who walk straight from their hacking projects in their parents’ basements into high-paid tech jobs, are much more likely to be boys than girls. (I’m not sure this is a significant portion sizewise of the college-aged crowd, though.)

And of course, the majority of young people jailed during the prison expansion of recent years are male. But other than that, what you call a “shortage of men” in higher ed isn’t some weird extinction of the species Vir collegialis, but is mostly due to the fact that the investment in a college education is more apt these days to look like a paying proposition to women than to men.

(And by the way, I rather agree with pld’s informant that the least constructive kind of “affirmative action” break you can give an applicant is to forgive poor grades, especially from a high-quality school, and especially after the first year or so of high school. Yes, there are lots of biases and problems that disadvantaged kids have to contend with, but someone who has not learned how to get at least solid high B’s after a couple of years in a good school where the teachers really work to challenge and motivate students is going to be caught very off guard by the demands of college, particularly a “selective” college.

And I completely agree with the conclusion that the worst served by such policies tend to be athletes. Another problem that he doesn’t mention is that of social adjustment: college athletes who’ve been coaxed to a school that they don’t really like and aren’t really prepared for sometimes form a rather antisocial, if not downright hostile, clique with a “we’re-not-really-part-of-your-stupid-school” mentality that, especially after a few brewskis, can lead to some very unfortunate incidents. I gnash my teeth every time I read a letter from some rich old fart in an alumni magazine complaining how horribly the football team did in their last game and how they’re going to stop their contributions if the university can’t do better on the field. It’s those idiots (and how the hell did they ever graduate from college if all they cared about was football? the folks who moan about how much better higher education used to be in the old days really make me laugh) who do the most to perpetuate the affirmative-action-for-athletes problems.)