"Holistic" admissions to selective colleges is a "black box," writes Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. Nobody knows whether admissions officers are debating the merits of applicants' essays -- is working in the family pizza parlor better than a service trip to Guatemala? -- or throwing darts at a board. Or judging applicants by the color of their skin in defiance of the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling banning race-based admissions.
"At MIT, black and Latino first-year enrollment plunged, while the number of first-year Asian-American students spiked," Hess writes. Black enrollment fell sharply at Wellesley and at Boston University. But "Yale, Princeton, and Duke saw a drop in Asian-American enrollment and no change in black enrollment."
These colleges "pocket a fortune each year in taxpayer-funded aid, subsidies, grants, and loans," he writes. They "should be required to establish transparent admissions qualifications and annually report anonymized data, audited and confirmed by a third party, on all relevant characteristics of the applicant pool and of admitted students."
More than "60 percent of college students reported lying on their applications about such topics as their high-school activities, their personal experiences, and even their race," last year, Hess writes. Thirty percent "said they’d faked their letters of recommendation."
The admissions numbers don't prove colleges are defying the affirmative action ban, writes Sonja B. Starr, a University of Chicago law professor, in a New York Times commentary.
Last month, Students for Fair Admissions, which won the suit against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, "sent letters to Yale, Princeton and Duke, accusing them of circumventing the court’s decision and threatening litigation," she writes.
Starr comes up with several reasons why the data is not a "smoking gun." It's possible that Asian Americans who might have gone to Yale are now going to MIT, she writes. Or, as her research suggests, Asian Americans could be more reluctant to identify themselves by race. The decline-to-identify category is growing. (I suspect many applicants believe their race will count against them, whatever the court says.)
More likely is that universities have found ways to promote racial diversity via race-neutral policies, such as giving points for growing up in a low-income family or other measures of socioeconomic status, Starr writes.
While racial preferences are very unpopular, many people are fine with giving a break to applicants who've overcome barriers to qualify for college.
Eliminating preferences to alumni children or dropping standardized testing requirements also are ways to improve diversity without violating the court's ruling, writes Starr.
"Colleges are free to consider essays about race-related experiences, which might demonstrate strengths like resilience," she writes, as long as they don't give points solely for group membership.
We'll see how this shakes out, particularly as grade inflation forces many selective schools to return to using SAT or ACT scores in admissions.
Flexible testing like that at Yale, from 2025, offers superior alternatives to the SAT & ACT via IB and AP exams (Cambridge are better still), so this transition may lead to improvements, especially if university colleges respond appropriately to the criticism they are receiving by using a new university programme selection rank system akin to the transparent systems in place overseas, where, in spite of the protestations of America's National Association of School Counselling Admissions about their supposedly morally superior practices, these last are actually illegal, at least in the case of the German federal constitution.