UT-Austin admissions policy investigation reveals a secret school for dumbbells
UT-Austin's Secret Off-The-Books Admissions System Revealed by Private Eye
Dallas Observer
by Jim Schutze
We've heard endless talk in the last 10 years about the official admissions policies of public universities and whether those policies deprive certain applicants of a fair shot. But that's all been based on the publicly acknowledged admissions policies of those schools.
What about the secret off-the-books admissions system?
Kroll International, a private investigations company, has just turned in its four-months-long probe of admissions practices at the University of Texas at Austin. It blows the doors off.
To every single applicant who ever got turned down by UT, I say this: Your wildest most paranoid imagining of why you got screwed and how they really do admissions at UT was nowhere near wild or paranoid enough.
We're talking about admissions meetings where university officials shred all their notes before leaving the room, like Bookie Bob with his flash paper.
We're talking about kids so dumb and so unqualified in every other respect that the admissions director begs not to have to let them in, but UT President Bill Powers tells him to do it anyway.
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Powers, according to the report, was carrying around his own secret, personal, hip-pocket admissions system by which as many as 300 students a year got into UT. They were called "holds." If you were an applicant and Powers put a "hold" by your name in the admissions computer system, it meant nobody could deny you admission without first speaking to Powers or his muscle, Brazzil.
None of this was mentioned, touched on or even hinted at in an earlier internal investigation when UT supposedly examined its own admissions practices in response to questions raised by Regent Wallace Hall. When UT was doing the investigating, UT came up clean as a whistle and Hall was the bad guy.
The internal UT report concluded: "The inquiry did not uncover any evidence of a systematic, structured or centralized process of reviewing and admitting applicants recommended by influential persons."
And Hall! You may remember what they wanted to do to him. The Legislature went batshit crazy and instituted an abortive attempt at impeachment after Hall suggested the main beneficiaries of Powers' hip-pocket admissions system were influential legislators. Every big newspaper in the state carried howling editorials castigating Hall for daring to suggest ... DARING TO SUGGEST that such a thing could go on. And in Texas! Heaven forfend.
See also: Wallace Hall Was Right About UT All Along http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2014/09/ut_system_wallace_hall_impeachment.php?page=all
Fortunately for truth, candor and the American way, just when UT was about to put its internal report down for its everlasting rest in a nice dry file cabinet somewhere, a whistleblower popped up from the admissions department and dished to officials above UT-Austin in the overarching University of Texas System.
What the whistleblower told them was bombshell enough that they had no choice: They tossed the internal report into the round file and commissioned Kroll to take a fresh arms-length look. That report just went to university officials this week.
The Kroll report cites instance after instance of legislators shoehorning unqualified kids into UT. It even offers up a distinction of sorts for our own Highland Park High School in this area.
Kroll looked at a sample of 73 smelly admissions files tied to legislators. In that sample, four affluent high schools in Texas accounted for 45 percent of the sample. Among the four, Highland Park High School was way out ahead at No. 1 with a third of all the dicey admissions in the whole sample.
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In some of the cases Kroll looked at, it was almost as if you could assume a kid with a close connection to a state legislator would also have serious learning differences: "Two applicants with close ties to state legislators had very low high school grades [GPA range of 1.8 to 2.2] combined with SAT scores in the 800s [combined math and verbal]."
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A question here is what effect all this may have on the Abigail Fisher admissions denial litigation against the university. Fisher has been shot down twice by a federal appeals court in her attempt to show that UT's admissions policy unfairly denied her admission. She filed a writ yesterday with the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case up again, which means her litigation is still alive for now.
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Here are some douchebag highlights from the Kroll report:
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In sum, Kroll's review of the 73 applications in which applicants subject to a [hold] were admitted [despite] sub-par quantitative scores and grades suggests that in some instances factors such as political influence or connections with persons of influence may have played a role
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2015/02/kroll_international_report_bill_powers_ut_admissions.php?page=all
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I'm sure someone will make sure Mr Powers doesn't suffer too much for what he's done.
