The last ECA post commented on some issues arising out of the brief filed with the United States Supreme Court on May 2 by Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA) in its case alleging discrimination against Asian-American applicants to Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill. There was one other issue from that brief that I intended to address, but inadvertently left out when I put the finishing touches on the post, trying to keep it from turning into a tome.
Beginning on page 20 of the SFFA brief there is a section that argues that “Harvard uses race at every stage of the admissions process.” That includes recruiting students differently based on race.
The brief states that “African-American and Hispanic students with PSAT scores of 1100 and up are invited to apply to Harvard, but white and Asian-American students must score at least 1310 to get an invitation.” It continues, “In some states (which Harvard calls ‘sparse country’), Asian-American students must score higher [italics theirs] than all other racial groups, including whites, to be recruited by Harvard.”
I think those couple of sentences raise some interesting questions about affirmative action in college admissions. Previous court cases involving the use of race in admission have focused on how admissions decisions are made.
The Bakke case in the 1970s involved a program at the University of California at Davis medical school whereby 16 of the 100 places in the entering class were set aside for “qualified” minority applicants. The Supreme Court in a divided vote concluded that the UC-Davis program was a quota system and that the medical school was conducting two separate admissions processes, one for minority applicants and one for the rest of the applicant pool.
The Gratz case, decided at the same time as the Grutter case that is now being challenged by Students For Fair Admissions, involved the University of Michigan’s practice of giving applicants from underrepresented minority groups an additional 20 points toward the 100 needed for undergraduate admission. By a 6-3 margin the Court found that the thumb on the scales approach wasn’t constitutional.
The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that it is appropriate to consider race as one of many factors in a holistic admissions process. That interpretation has its origins in an amicus curiae filed in the Bakke case by none other than Harvard. Critics of affirmative action in college admission question whether race is indeed one of many factors, or whether colleges have simply found more subtle ways to consider race than the quota system outlawed in Bakke.
While most of the discussion of affirmative action in college admission focuses on how decisions are made, what about recruitment? Is it wrong to use different techniques to recruit students from different ethnic or demographic groups?
To be fair, the Students For Fair Admissions brief doesn’t argue that differential recruiting is wrong. It includes the mention of different cutoffs for different groups primarily to argue that Harvard is conscious of race in all parts of its admissions process. But is Harvard discriminating by using different cutoff scores in recruiting?
The reference to scores refers to the score parameters that colleges can use when they use the College Board’s Student Search Service. Student Search gives colleges the ability to reach out to desired groups of students based on factors ranging from their scores on the PSAT or SAT to planned major to zip code.
We might question whether a university that already rejects 97% of applicants, many of them superbly qualified, needs to be actively recruiting students most of whom won’t have a chance of admission, but the practice of using Student Search to target particular groups of students is a mainstream practice. White and Asian-American students with a score below 1310 aren’t in any way prohibited from applying to Harvard because they don’t get an “invitation,” and this past year close to 60,000 somehow found a way to apply without being actively recruited.
One of the original definitions of affirmative action was finding ways to expand the pool of candidates to open up opportunities to those who had been excluded by traditional processes. That was particularly true for institutions like trade unions or public sector jobs such as police and firefighters that were at one time largely closed shops. It was considered appropriate (and necessary) to expand the pool of candidates from traditionally underrepresented groups by targeted recruitment efforts for those groups.
I think the same is true for colleges. For a college looking to broaden its diversity, whether ethnic, gender, geographical, or other, it is entirely appropriate to develop recruitment initiatives that reach a broader array of students from underrepresented populations.
There is a clear difference between preferential recruitment and preferential admission. Colleges have an obligation to give fair consideration of the credentials of every single applicant. They don’t have an obligation to “invite” every student whose PSAT scores are at a certain level to apply.
If test scores were perfect predictive tools, it might be appropriate to expect the same test score parameters for every group of students. But they are not. We know that test scores correlate with family income, and that they disadvantage, or at least don’t predict success, for all segments of an applicant pool. Different recruiting standards is not the same thing as different admission standards.