|
Edited on Thu Nov-30-06 02:07 PM by igil
Pre prop. 209.
Affirmative action helped some minorities and punished E. Asians to try to get a student body that reflected that national population. The scale (cline) of desirability was blacks > latinos, SE Asians > whites > E. Asians.
As you went from right to left you found lower university GPAs, sharply increasing tutoring services, more need- and ethnicity-based aid (and more aid overall), higher drop-out rates (esp. for the men), and a longer average time to degree. You also got increasing clustering in a handful of majors, things like poli sci, sociology, and ethnic studies. Contra popular belief, the farther left you go, the fewer hours per week--on average, of course--they worked; need-based aid made up for the hours middle-class students had to work, and the effect of wealthy students didn't overcome the trend. Average SESes were pointless; all groups had strongly a bimodal family SES distribution so the 'average' student was much less common than 'less average' students; the reaction when I asked if anybody had crunched the numbers with SES as a variable elicited stares that told me they had and were not about to admit it. There's no necessarily valid inference that can be drawn from that remark, however, and they knew it.
When UCLA ditched the remedial English and math courses at UCLA (subjects A and B, I believe they were called) as part of some budget cuts, the cries of racism were embarrassing but conventionally based on the idea of disproportionate impact being a valid sign of underlying discrimination: The remedial programs served students in an ethnically disproportionate way, essentially the same cline in reverse (with exceptions for non-native English speakers). But all the admits were unconditionally "qualified"; they were just not all equally qualified. Disposing of subj. A and B affected, disproportionately, those on the left side of the cline.
All students admitted met the base requirements, but the admits also fell on a curve: many of the highest scoring students weren't admitted, but the curve was sharply skewed to the right of the pool of qualified high school students. The problem is that the further to the right you go in the cline, the choosier the university was: higher high school GPA, better SAT scores, more AP classes, more community service, etc. This meant that the average composite admission score (before affirmative action was applied) for E. Asians was to the right of that for whites, and far, far to the right of that for blacks. Since the grades were frequently based on some concept of average or mean, the minority students more frequently found themselves on the trailing side of the grade distribution because they were on the trailing side of the curve for admits over all--not an absolute correlation, but one that's good enough to account for a lot of the variance. The tutoring was an attempt to award off-the-books "extra points" to help lesser qualified students to finish. I can only hope that it was completely superfluous; otherwise the minority numbers would have been worse, and the administrators I knew would have been reduced to tears on a daily basis.
In other words, just because you graduate with a bachelor's from UCA doesn't mean you got the same treatment in college or have the same GPA or qualifications. Some of this was reflected in the average students' resume: Longer time to degree, choice of major, lower GPA and fewer honors, fewer merit-based scholarships. Knowing that there were ethnicity-based services (greater aid, more tutoring) available would also ding a minority graduate's degree, even if the graduate *didn't* use any of the services. Without looking at the GPA and other university records you'd never know.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
