Although colleges can no longer employ racial preferences in admissions, several legal scholars said they believe schools can still consider race in recruiting strategies. The Supreme Court, in turning away another recent legal challenge, has also signaled — at least for now — that it’s permissible for colleges to pursue diversity as an end goal so long as racial preferences aren’t the means to achieve it.
Of the scenarios we’ve shown, an expanded recruiting strategy requires the most work from colleges. But it’s also “the big overlooked gold mine here,” said Richard Sander, a law professor at U.C.L.A. who has worked on admissions strategies at the law school level.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/09/upshot/affirmative-action-alternatives.html
Category: nonshat
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Can You Create a Diverse College Class Without Affirmative Action?
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Hear from four TJ freshmen admitted under controversial circumstances
It’s a terrible title, but the article makes the rare decision of asking students what they thought.
I think TJ was right to get rid of the admissions test, because it makes it more fair for everyone. Now, people who can afford to spend thousands of dollars on test-prep programs won’t have an advantage over people who can’t. I think a lot of students agree with me.
But the debate seems to be really political now, and driven mostly by parents. I don’t think students have been heard very much.
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Boston: Exam school test administrator clashes with BPS over use of admissions test
Boston Public Schools have for years misused the test results that help determine admissions to its coveted exam schools, in a way that makes it harder for “underrepresented” students to win admissions, according to the organization that administers the controversial exam.
The fairness of the admissions process to the three exam schools—Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science—has been a contentious subject in recent years. Several civil rights groups and community organizations have argued that the admissions process, based half on student grades and half on their scores on the test, called the Independent School Entrance Exam (ISEE), has disadvantaged low-income students, particularly Blacks and Latinos.
“Given that it’s an exam that is completely foreign to students and requires parents and outside resources to help prepare them, it doesn’t make sense as a tool for identifying which students are going to be able to succeed in a rigorous academic environment,” said Joshua Goodman, an associate professor at Brandeis University. Goodman authored a 2018 study that found the school system’s reliance on the ISEE potentially blocked thousands of students of color from accessing the exam schools.
Instead, Rochon said in a Wednesday morning interview, the four sections are intended to be considered individually as part of a broader assessment of an applicant’s merits—which ideally should also include student essays, letters of recommendation, and other elements. Too much emphasis on a summary test score can disadvantage students from more marginalized groups. But Rochon added that “it is obviously up to the citizens of Boston to decide how to weight academic achievement…with the really important issues around equity and access.”
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How One ‘Ordinary’ Brooklyn High School Produced Six Nobel Laureates, a Supreme Court Justice, and Three Senators
Verba, it turns out, was a graduate of James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York. So is Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. And the Senate minority leader, Charles Schumer. And even a former Republican senator from Minnesota, Norm Coleman.
At least six Nobel laureates also attended the school: Gary Becker and Robert Solow in economics, Arthur Ashkin and Martin Perl in physics, and Baruch Blumberg and Stanley Cohen in medicine.The secret doesn’t seem to have been any of the obvious factors. It wasn’t a particularly wealthy group of students, like, say, those who attend Phillips Andover Academy or other private high schools that have produced lots of prominent professionals.
“An ordinary middle- and lower–middle-class high school,” is how Verba described it in a 2011 interview with the Annual Review of Political Science.
It was, Fish said, “just a district school,” not a magnet school and not an exam school that required for entrance a high score on a competitive standardized test.