Colleges do no favors

By Roger Clegg

Suppose a state university decided it was admitting too many Jews and put a ceiling on the number it would admit. A federal court strikes this down as unconstitutional. And so, instead, the state puts its demographers to to work and comes up with other admissions criteria that would appear to be neutral but were picked to make sure that the same ceiling was kept in place.

Would that be legal? Of course not. And that is just what the state of Texas has done. Change "Jews" to "whites and Asians," and the rest of the preceding paragraph can stay the same. The law is very clear that a state can't adopt criteria that are neutral on their face if the aim is to achieve a predetermined racial or ethnic mix.

Texas will protest that it wants only to be inclusive of blacks and Mexican-Americans, not exclusive of whites, Asians, Native Americans and other Hispanics. But if there is such a thing as "underrepresented" groups, then there is such a thing as "overrepresented" groups. You can't have one without the other.

Nobody advocates - certainly not those who design and administer the tests - that admissions be determined solely by the SAT or ACT, but everyone also knows - certainly Texas knew - that it is silly to try to predict a student's success in college without considering his or her standardized test scores, except in a few extraordinary cases.

But that is what Texas now does, and we all know why.

Texas apparently is willing to do almost anything to avoid confronting the real question: Why do so many blacks and Mexican-Americans do so poorly on the SAT and ACT compared to other students?

The answer is lousy public schools and bilingual education, fatherless children, parental failure to demand the best from children, and too many kids' self-professed unwillingness to "act white" by studying hard.

The "10% rule" tries to sweep these problems under the rug.

It won't work. The failure-to-graduate rates will see to that, as studies by the Center for Equal Opportunity and others have shown.

It does students no favor to admit them to schools they won't finish.

Roger Clegg, a native Texan, is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington, D.C.

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