Dive Brief:
- Rebecca Zwick, author of the forthcoming book "Who Gets In? Strategies for Fair and Effective College Admissions," argues that the secretive admissions processes created to meet the standards of “holistic review” end up being unfair in their mystery.
- She writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education that holistic processes like the one used by University of Texas at Austin’s admissions system, now under review for a second time by the U.S. Supreme Court, disadvantages students with less cultural capital and seems to be interpreted differently by every ethnic group on campus.
- While Supreme Court justices expressed frustration with the murky outlines of holistic review at UT-Austin, it was the same court that required institutions to find proxies for race-based affirmative action when it decided the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger case.
Dive Insight:
Zwick argues colleges and universities should be allowed to maintain explicit preferences for underrepresented minorities, “in the interest of pursuing a more just society.” But state law in some places, including Texas, prohibits it, and the Supreme Court has heavily restricted it. Some have begun to advocate more strongly for class-based preferences. This method would inevitably help some low-income, underrepresented minorities, but for campuses looking for the benefits of racial and ethnic diversity, it might not go far enough. There are still many more poor whites than there are poor blacks and Latinos combined.
As long as competition for the best schools remains high, there will be students looking to place blame externally for their denials of admission. The question is whether governments and courts will allow them to precipitate major policy changes because of it.