High school seniors are lined up, waiting for the start of their last lap in the years-long quest to gain admission to the college of their choice. When the doors to their high schools open this fall, among the first tasks will be tackling those applications, gathering the recommendation letters, and writing the dreaded essay.
On the other side of the process, the staffs of the admissions offices are gearing up for another cycle of hard choices and life-changing calls. The trajectories of young lives are easily influenced, and no one has more power over another’s future than the admission officer over the file-folder in front of him or her.
I stopped interviewing for my alma mater years ago when I could no longer distinguish between the dozen or so bright and earnest achievers who trooped through my office. It was then I became something of a radical on the subject of admissions. I believe in lotteries among those who score at a predetermined level on the SAT (that level would depend on the degree of competitiveness at a particular college). I would allow for preferential treatment of alumni kids because of the needs of institutions for the kind of bequests that generational attachments bring, for athletic and music scholarships, and for a handful of slots for each department to give out to lure a handful of stars into every nook of the university. Beyond that, however, let chance work its will. I am convinced that this is the best system because it is the most just towards the applicants. The ideal system leaves the applicant with the knowledge that his or her application was judged fairly. Increasingly, that fairness is disappearing from the system.
This past week the University of California system took another step backwards from fairness, confirming again the widespread suspicion that the admissions game is rigged by unseen bureaucracies pursuing agendas unrelated to fairness. First, a little history.
Like most major state-supported university systems, the UC system developed a highly evolved “affirmative action” program in the ’70s and ’80s. By the beginning of the ’90s, a backlash had developed as large numbers of Californians became convinced that this program was operating to include less qualified at the expense of more qualified. First, the Board of Regents moved to end race-consciousness in admissions in July of 1995, and then the voters of the state passed Proposition 209 the following year, slamming the door on race-based admissions.
While a lengthy debate has followed on the effect of these moves, it seems clear that the numbers of blacks and Latinos at the most elite campuses fell. Administrators pledged to diversity on campus devised some tools to increase admissions among minorities. One of them was the automatic admission to at least one of the UC campus of the top 4 percent of the senior class of every high school. I thought this a sensible move. Here was an incentive for every student to perform well; even if the high school in which he or she labored had leaky ceilings and horrible texts, a UC admission was there at the end of the rainbow if a student succeeded in his or her own world.
Last week the Regents took a sensible policy and by expanding it dramatically, turned justice on its head and threatened the future reputation of the system as well as its public support. Beginning in 2003, the University of California will guarantee admission to the top 12.5 percent of every graduating class in every state high school. Since the system as a whole is designed to serve only 12.5 percent of the graduating class, this sweeping policy change erects injustice at the heart of the UC admissions policy. Why? Because unless every high school in the state is allocated exactly the same level of student academic talent, then some schools will be sending unqualified students to UC, and some will see their very talented students barred from those campuses. Huge numbers of kids who have worked their hearts out, in short, will get screwed because they ranked number 126 or worse out of 1,000, even though their test scores and grades make them superstars. They picked the wrong high school. Tough luck.
The enormity of this change seems to have slipped past the education journalists in California and nationally, but it won’t be long until outraged parents call it to their attention. Imagine a somewhat wealthy community with a very high performing school district with three high schools, each one of which sends 90 percent or more of its 1,000 graduates on to college. Compare that district with one in which the three high schools are home to higher incidents of violence, greater challenges due to immigration and poverty, and a drop-out rate approaching that of the college-attendance rate. Both of these districts will be allocated the same number of UC admissions. Can that result be understood as fair?
Some will say yes, and will pursue some pretty tortured logic to get there. But most will immediately recognize that this is a dramatic break with the idea of merit. And it is not an abstract debate. Beginning in 2003, thousands of California high school kids will be rejected from a coveted seat in the UC system because the Regents will have arbitrarily decreed that those chairs are reserved for different high schools.
Under the 4 percent policy, the system could hold on to the fiction that all qualified students would be admitted. No one would push the proposition too far because it was not obviously wrong that the top 12.5 percent of high school seniors in the entire state would also include the top 4 percent of every particular high school. Even if that was hard to swallow, there was enough play in the joints (thank goodness for private colleges skimming off some of the 12.5 percent) to keep the meritocrats happy.
But it is simply absurd to argue that the top 12.5 percent of the high school seniors in the state includes the top 12.5 percent of every particular high school. In short, with barely an eyebrow lifted, the state has abandoned a four-decade old commitment to make the University of California system the best in the world by serving the most academically gifted of the state’s population. And that change has occurred without so much as a day’s public debate.
I expect another backlash. It is an expensive proposition to live in California. The state has very high levels of taxation, and increasingly the middle class gets little in return. Now the unGovernor, Gray Davis, has saddled the state with a ruinous energy debt that hits all employers large and small. The statehouse is controlled by Democrats of the left and far-left variety, and the other statewide offices are staffed by a group of second-raters that don’t deserve further mention. Housing is a crisis, and traffic long since so. Still, there are some benefits to living here besides the weather. One is the UC system, which taxpayers have gladly supported all these years because it was synonymous with excellence and promise.
Now the Regents have decided to make the UC system part of the spoils system – another benefit to be allocated according to the Census. That’s not what Californians signed up for. It will bear watching to see if anyone notices.
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