college admissions

In Rebuttal: Yes, Socioeconomic Status Should Matter in Admission to Selective Colleges

Last week, George Leef of the James G. Martin Center took issue with Kenin M. Spivak’s article in Minding the Campus that advocated normalizing college admissions data for socioeconomic status. Leef’s thesis was that students denied admission to selective colleges have not been harmed. Last year, I wrote “Socioeconomic Status—The Good Kind of Affirmative Action?” […]

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“Test-Blind” Is Another Tool for Discrimination

In recent years, many higher education institutions have abandoned standardized testing in their admissions processes or made these tests optional, arguing that SAT or ACT scores do not reliably project student performance and that these tests have built-in biases against underrepresented minorities (URMs). As of February 9, 2022, over 1,820 accredited U.S. colleges and universities […]

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Misreading Polling Data on Race

Caught up as we still are in the post-Floyd hysteria, the nation is seemingly transfixed on rooting out “systemic racism,” whatever and wherever that is. And with both the upcoming presidential election and a Black Lives Matter-like Proposition 16 to revive racial preferences on the November California ballot, accurate polling and survey data on racial […]

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News and Fake News About College Admissions

As demonstrated by both the complaint that Harvard discriminates against Asians (the Boston federal district judge’s decision is presumably imminent) and the furor over the spreading pay-to-admit scandal of rich parents buying their kids’ admission to selective colleges, affirmative action remains a hotly contested matter of ongoing public debate. The latest brouhaha comes from Washington […]

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Most Americans Reject Race-based College Admissions

A large majority of Americans—73 percent—say that neither race nor ethnicity should be factors in deciding which students are granted admission to colleges and universities. Only 7 percent think race and ethnicity should be major factors, and 19 percent favor allowing them to be light factors. The survey was conducted by Pew Research Center in […]

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Asian students

Admissions Stacked Against Asians–It’s OK with the Feds

The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has dismissed the longstanding discrimination complaints of Asian Americans, giving Ivy League and other institutions a green light to continue chromatically contouring the results of their “holistic” admissions processes so that applicants who are black or brown or red consistently are admitted with lower academic scores than […]

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NOT IN AN ELITE COLLEGE? NO WORRIES!

Frank Bruni is a New York Times columnist who has figured out something important – many Americans are completely caught up in the costly, pointless, and often damaging obsession with getting their children into our supposedly elite colleges and universities.  His new book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, is his effort at […]

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