• Higher education Higher education Critics of affirmative action may be happy that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan’s undergraduate affirmative action policy. But they shouldn’t be pleased by one apparent consequence of that ruling. Seven
• Higher education
Higher education
Critics of affirmative action may be happy that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan’s undergraduate affirmative action policy. But they shouldn’t be pleased by one apparent consequence of that ruling. Seven months after the court handed down its decision, the number of minority applicants for next fall’s freshman class has dipped nearly 23 percent from a year ago.
The slow economy and the rising cost of college contributed to the drop, since the overall number of students applying for the fall’s incoming freshman class also is down 18 percent. In the 2003-04 school term, Michigan is charging $8,481 for tuition and fees, the third highest rate among major public universities. (The University of Missouri charged $6,558, the 10th highest; the University of Illinois charged $7,010, ranking sixth).
But admissions officials at the University of Michigan say that bright African-American students – even those who can afford the tuition and make the grade – don’t want to be thrown into a climate in which critics are constantly attacking diversity as a bad policy.
Will those who cheered the court decision be pleased to see classes with virtually no blacks, as is now the case at the University of Texas at Austin? Black enrollment is so low there that university officials have decided to restore affirmative action in undergraduate admissions in the fall of 2005.
This shift comes seven years after Texas adopted a race-neutral admissions policy, automatically granting admission to the top 10 percent of graduates from each Texas public high school. But under that policy, school officials report that 90 percent of undergraduate classes have only one or no African-American students, and 43 percent of the classes have one or no Hispanics. Fewer than 2 percent of the classes had one or no whites, even though whites will soon become a minority in Texas.
University of Texas officials say they can develop an affirmative action program that meets the conditions of the court ruling. It struck down quotas, but it allows universities to admit enough minorities to address the absence of a “critical mass” of underrepresented minority students. One Texas official said the university would define critical mass to mean adding a sufficient number of minorities so that these students “won’t feel isolated, or feel like a spokesperson for their race.”
Meanwhile, some Missouri colleges and universities are changing scholarship programs that take race into account or are opening them to other under-represented ethnic groups, or funding them through private money.
Crafting affirmative action policies that meet the court’s requirements and result in real diversity, not tokenism or worse, is a complex task. Diversity – in race, gender, geography and economic background – is an asset to any university. While the court didn’t define precisely what it meant by critical mass, it certainly didn’t mean that universities should return to the bad old days of segregation.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
