Preferences Study Skewers U-M
U-M "Greatest Offender" in Using Race Bias in Admissions

by Benjamin Kepple

The University of Michigan (U­M) is "by far the greatest offender" among Michigan's public colleges and universities when it comes to using racial preferences, says a report recently released by the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), a Washington D.C. public policy think-tank. In addition, only the U-M at Ann Arbor would experience a significant decline in black enrollment if the University was to admit students on a colorblind basis, the report stated.

The study "shows race is not just one factor out of many, but a major force in deciding who gets in the University of Michigan," according to John J. Miller, vice president of CEO. "There is a double standard at U-M."

However, University officials continue to stand by their claim that their admissions policy is legal and acceptable.

"The University of Michigan will continue to use race as a factor in making admissions decisions as long as it is lawful to do so, and has no intention of changing this policy," according to a press release issued by the Office of University Relations. And Nancy Cantor, University Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, stated that "we evaluate each student's application using a broad set of factors ... we make human judgments and these judgments cannot be made simply by looking at test scores and grade point averages."

But the legality of the University's admissions is being questioned. A lawsuit filed on behalf of Patrick Hammacher and Jennifer Gratz, two white applicants denied admission to the University, by the Center for Individual Rights (CIR) is working their way through the legal system. In addition, the recent scrapping of affirmative action in California and the Hopwood v. University of Texas Law School case (which ended affirmative action in the jurisdiction of the national Fifth District Court) are still quite prevalent in the minds of University administrators. The University makes no secret about using racial preferences in its admissions policies and according to the CEO study, there is a great deal of preference given.

What the Numbers Show

"Schools routinely reject white and Asian students with higher test scores than black and Hispanic students who are admitted. These rejected students, however, usually have lower GPAs than black and Hispanic students who are admitted. Despite this, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor refused admission in 1995 to hundreds of white and Asian students who had both higher test scores and GPAs than the black admittee median," according to the CEO report.

In fact, 613 students (564 whites and 49 Asians) were rejected by the U-M in 1995 despite having higher ACT scores and GPAs than the black admittee median. 266 students were rejected despite having higher SAT scores and GPAs than the black admittee median.

"In various individual instances, these differences in qualifications were astoundingly large. 49 of these individuals had ACT scores greater than 29, 77 had combined SATs greater than 1200, and most amazing of all, 4 had SATs greater than 1400," according to the report.

And among students admitted to the University in 1995, white and Asian students performed better on the SAT, ACT, and had higher high school GPAs than their black and Hispanic counterparts (see chart).

The report also suggests that the use of these racial preferences in admissions is a major factor in the lower graduation rates of black and Hispanic students.

"We cannot prove that conclusively with these rates although these numbers are conducive with the hypothesis" that graduation rates will fall thanks to racial preferences, according to Miller. A similar CEO study looking at higher education in Colorado did conclusively prove racial preferences caused a drop in graduation rates. "If blacks and Hispanics are not graduating as high as whites and Asians ... it makes intuitive sense," Miller said.

Such a proposition is harshly attacked by University officials.

"Students of color graduate at a vastly greater rate here than those at many other institutions. This deflates CEO's argument that the U-M admits unqualified students of color. To follow the CEO theory, our graduation rates for students of color, supposedly unqualified for admittance, would be lower than other schools. In fact, the opposite is true," according to Cantor.

However, the CEO report does not claim that the admittees to the University are unqualified, but rather that those beneficiaries of racial preference may be less qualified than more qualified white and Asian rejectees. These students that may have lesser levels of qualification then are placed into the academic arena with students admitted under higher standards. According to the report, "if students gain admission to college for any reason other than their academic preparation, it is likely that they will face more hurdles in school compared to their peers who have been admitted under a higher standard."

At the U-M, the white-black gap between median scores on standardized tests and in other areas is quite large. White students admitted to the University scored a full 6 points better than their black counterparts on the ACT at the 25th and 50th percentiles, and 5 points better at the 75th percentile. GPA differentials for whites and blacks were a full half a grade at the 25th percentile, 0.4 at the 50th percentile, and 0.3 at the 75th.

And graduation rates for blacks and Hispanics are lower than those of their white and Asian counterparts at every Michigan school studied, except for Michigan Technical University, where Hispanic graduation rates are equivalent to those of their Asian counterparts. At U-M in Ann Arbor, 87 percent of white students graduated within six years, compared to 66 percent of blacks.

Both University officials and the CEO study acknowledge that students can drop out of college for many reasons, and that the lower rates for blacks and Hispanics could be due to economic factors or pressures "compounded for many minority students," according to Cantor. However, Dr. Robert Lerner, senior author of the CEO study and an indendent statistician who works outside of Washington, D.C., notes that "it is thought to be in part due to lower qualifications.

"There haven't been any schools in the country [studied] where black admissions are equally or more qualified than whites ..." and no schools in the country where black graduation rates are equal or higher than those of whites, according to Lerner.

Effect of Preferences "Shrouded in Secrecy"

"The whole subject is shrouded in secrecy. The whole point of the study is to promote openness," Lerner said, He was also senior author on the CEO's study of higher education in Colorado, and noted the difficulty of gaining relevant information in both cases.

Most university reports on the subject "[don't] seem analytical, but descriptive," Lerner noted. "I might stress that any college or University could do and they probably do any study" similar to the CEO report. Lerner also said that many Michigan schools failed to provide data that was available to the CEO in other states; according to Lerner, the U-M in Ann Arbor refused to provide graduation data. He later was able to receive the University's data through the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) "1997 NCAA Division I Graduation Rates Report," data that all member schools must provide to that body.

While the CEO study was not able to conclusively prove that racial preferences directly affected graduation rates, "it provides evidence in support of that view one would have to take the entire cohort of the student body and then ... trace them through four, five, or six years" to gain data able to determine whether graduation rates were affected by racial preferences. This was unable to be done because the study did not have data on all of the students applying to all the public colleges and Universities in Michigan.

Indeed, Eastern Michigan University, Oakland University, U-M Flint, Wayne State University, and Western Michigan University all either refused to comply with the CEO's requests for information or supplied inadequate data.

"This is a tactic we encountered all over the country - these Universities will stone wall if they have data that is embarassing," Miller said.

Race in Admissions: "One Factor of Many," but the One that Counts?

The most controversial statistic in the CEO report, and one given a great deal of attention to by the media, is the statistic that a black applicant, if equally qualified as a white applicant and competing with that student for only a single spot, the black applicant has a 173.7 to 1 chance of being selected over the white applicant.

According to the CEO report, "critics of race preferences argue that as better schools reach down into the applicant pool to accept minorities, [there will be a qualifications gap] between white and minority enrollees. If this is the case, then there should be a positive relationship between the quality of the school, and the white-minority gap in qualifications.

"A useful way to do this is to develop [statistical models] ... by computing prediction equations for the admissions decision by race, ethnicity, and including test scores and high school grades as statistical control variables," the report continued.

Using a mathematical technique called logistic regression, statisticians can then derive odds ratios from those prediction equations. Odds ratios are similar to correlation coefficients, according to Lerner, and the odds ratio of 173.7 to 1 expressed as a correlation coefficient is 0.98, an extremely strong positive corrrelation. Lerner said that this odds ratio was "unbelievably large," and noted that the chance of race playing a factor on such an admissions decision at U-M was six times as large as the odds of getting lung cancer if one smokes throughout one's life.

"No other possible factor or variable could come close to account for it. There is no possible way being an athlete or a [legacy] could even come close" to race as a factor in admissions, according to Lerner.

However, Cantor sharply criticized the report and its findings.

"This report describes an admissions process that simply doesn't exist. We don't do admissions simply by rank ordering on test scores or GPA. We look at such things as their artistic, athletic, and leadership abilities, disadvantages they might have overcome, the kind of curriculum they have taken advantage of in high school, along with a range of other factors.

"One of the fundamental problems with this report is that it shows a shocking resolve to allow the 'only highly selective institution in the state,' according to the report's characterisation, to become a segregated institution ... highly selective institutions like the University of Michigan should be open to all segments of society. This document discredits students of color because it implies that they need to be enrolled at lesser institutions than the U-M."

Cantor also claimed that "what we are really talking about, in the context of the lawsuits against the U-M and the CEO report, is a systematic effort to resegregate our most selective institutions. We simply cannot allow that to happen."

Many University administrators along with Cantor claim that affirmative action opponents are working towards the re-segregation of higher education. Associate Provost for Academic and Multicultural Affairs Lester Monts recently said, in an open letter to the University community regarding the Martin Luther King Day Symposium, that "since our last observance of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday, we have witnessed setbacks to higher educations's goal to provide quality educational opportunities for all people. Hopwood, Proposition 209, and the University of California Board of Regents' decision on affirmative action have become topics in our daily conversations. Now, the University of Michigan is faced with a lawsuit that has the potential to impede not only progress toward educational equality, but to turn us back to a resegregated educational system nationwide." Monts was unavailable for comment and declined to answer questions posed to him over e-mail.

University President Lee Bollinger has also condemned affirmative action opponents.

"The CEO study suggests that we should tolerate segregated higher education. We cannot, and this suggestion is offensive and ignores the impact of diversity on the quality of education in the United States," he said in a statement. A main focus of the University's argument against the CEO report and affirmative action opponents in general is to claim that they support re-segregation of higher education.

But the CEO has in no way supported anything remotely resembling the re-segregation of higher education. Indeed, the Detroit Free Press reported in a January 27th article that CEO President Linda Chavez said it was "nonsense" to state the CEO supports re-segregation of higher education. And the CEO report makes it clear that if racial preferences in admissions were ended, only the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor would suffer a significant decline in black enrollment. Additionally, when noting the probably access to schools based on top-quartile GPAs of black admittees, the CEO study states that "black students at Michigan Tech, U-M Dearborn, and U-M Ann Arbor would probably be admitted to every school" in the state of Michigan without benefiting from racial preferences.

The Ann Arbor News, in an article published on the 26th of January, stated that "CEO has ties, both in ideology and Web site links to the Center for Individual Rights, the conservative, public interest law firm that has filed the lawsuits against the U-M."

However, Miller dismisses the claim that there is any kind of connection between the CIR and the CEO. "There is none," Miller said. "What [the Ann Arbor News reporter] wanted to demonstrate was that there was some kind of conspiracy," noting that the CEO Web site has links to both sides of the racial preferences issue, and not just the CIR's.

The CEO report adds fuel to an already raging fire at the University of Michigan over the use of racial preferences in admissions. Given the massive reaction to this report by those students, faculty, parents, and administrators on both sides of the issue, that fire will undoubtedly burn hotter in the weeks to come. MR

This article was published in the 11 February 1998 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 16, Number 7).
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