The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning, based on this Associated Press article in the Charlotte Observer, that North Carolina’s community colleges must admit illegal immigrants.
David Sullivan, the system’s general counsel, wrote in a memorandum this month that “colleges should immediately begin admitting undocumented individuals,” highlighting the phrase in bold type. State regulations require the colleges to admit undocumented applicants who meet the basic requirements of either having graduated from high school or being at least 18 years old, he said. More than 20 of the colleges now have written or unwritten policies barring admission to illegal immigrants.
Mr. Sullivan said his directive was based on a 1997 opinion by the state’s attorney general at the time — Michael F. Easley, a Democrat who is now governor — which said that the colleges could not impose nonacademic criteria for admission.
That’s funny. I’m sure the University of North Carolina “takes race into account,” as the saying goes, as “one of many factors,” as the other popular saying goes, in undergraduate, graduate, and professional admissions. That makes race at least one criterion considered in admission, but to the best of my knowledge Attorney General, now Governor, Easley never complained about that. Maybe he thinks race and ethnicity are academic criteria.
Perhaps voters could ask his former aide, Hampton Dellinger (discussed recently, here), now a candidate for lieutenant governor, about that.
ADDENDUM [29 Nov.]
I’ve just been reminded that the invaluable Center for Equal Opportunity has done a detailed study of preferences in North Carolina colleges (as well as studies in several other states). Among its findings:
- All six public colleges and universities in North Carolina that we studied — NC State and UNC at Asheville, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Wilmington — show a substantial qualifications gap between black and white applicants who have been accepted for future enrollment;
- The odds of admission at five of the six schools studied indicate a strong degree of preference in admissions given to blacks over whites. These odds ratios range from 177.1 at NC State to 3.4 at Chapel Hill. The odds of admission at Greensboro, 0.97, indicate that preferences do not operate there;
- There is no evidence that Asian applicants receive special preference at any North Carolina colleges and universities. In fact, there is evidence that Asian applicants with the same academic qualifications find it somewhat more difficult to obtain admission than do their white counterparts. At every school studied, the odds of admission favor whites over Asians.
The odds ratio at North Carolina State are particularly impressive, or something. As the authors of the study commented, “NC State’s results are as high as we found at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where the comparable odds ratio was 173.7 to 1.”
Outdoing pre-Prop. 2 Michigan in granting preferences is quite an achievement. Apparently, however, this dramatic evidence that applicants to NC State and other state colleges were not treated without regard to their race or ethnicity (blacks better, Asians worse) was not sufficient to lead Attorney General, now Governor, Easley to suspect that some “nonacademic criteria” were and are being weighed in the admissions process.
John, this report found that:
“There is no evidence that Asian applicants receive special preference at any North Carolina colleges and universities. In fact, there is evidence that Asian applicants with the same academic qualifications find it somewhat more difficult to obtain admission than do their white counterparts. At every school studied, the odds of admission favor whites over Asians.”
AT EVERY SCHOOL STUDIED, THE ODDS OF ADMISSIONS FAVOR WHITES OVER ASIANS.
WELL, THIS IS NOTHING NEW.
This is also true in the Ivies and the Elites, the elite graduate schools, as well as the professional schools of medicine, law and business.
I would call this effect on Asian Americans the reverse “Cascade Effect”, which was defined by Professor Sanders of UCLA. More qualified Asian Americans are displaced by less qualified students of all other races and ethnicities, in varying degrees of decreasing order in the pecking order of selectivity of said schools, or down the food chain, from the most selective schools, the Ivies/Elites, then to the elite state schools and lastly, to the not so “elite”, third tier schools, or the bottom of the pecking order/food chain.
This does not surprise me at all and this indeed illustrates the coming of the “new Yellow Peril” or of the the old “Yellow Peril” which never really went away , especially during the last two decades, where studies were done to verify this fact, especially at the private Ivies and Elites such as Brown and Stanford.
From the Espenshade and Chung Study,
Please click on the commentary on the study by Espenshade at Princeton.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S11/80/77I23/index.xml?section=topstories
Removing consideration of race would have little effect on white students, the report concludes, as their acceptance rate would rise by merely 0.5 percentage points. Espenshade noted that when one group loses ground, another has to gain — in this case it would be Asian applicants. Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic students, with an acceptance rate rising from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent. Typically, many more Asian students apply to elite schools than other underrepresented minorities. The study also found that although athletes and legacy applicants are predominantly white, their numbers are so small that their admissions do little to displace minority applicants. The authors based their work on models previously developed in a 2004 study where they looked at more than 124,000 elite university applicants’ SAT scores, race, sex, citizenship, athletic ability and legacy in combination with their admission decision. This more recent study honed in on more than 45,000 applicants. Both studies are part of the multidimensional National Study of College Experience, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Here is the link to the Princeton study. This is the complete paper from Princeton U., “The Opportunities Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities”, by Espenshade (Chair of Sociology at Princeton) and Chung,
http://opr.princeton.edu/faculty/tje/espenshadessqptii.pdf
Asian American applicants are the ones who lose with the use of race preferences in admissions. Whites don’t forfeit spaces for race based AA favoring blacks and Latinos. Asian Americans are being punished and discriminated against in this process. This is independent of the use of the legacy and athletic preference for whites because this study corrected for this. Asian Americans have much lower admit rates based on their race because they are the only non-preferred group in admissions and are discriminated against based on their race alone.
I’m guessing the distinction for N.C. State is that it’s an engineering school…and the way admission is handled at State is by the individual college (I was in the Physical & Mathematical Science college when I attended.)
Some of the colleges are notoriously difficult to get into — Engineering and Design, I remember being the toughest. Look at this link:
http://www7.acs.ncsu.edu/uga/fradmiss.htm
Though they claim almost all of the colleges are “highly selective”,the First Year College is most definitely not selective compared to Engineering or Design, and the humanities & social sciences college is also not as selective (it’s an =engineering= school. Many of the people who end up in CHASS dropped out of one of the science/techy colleges.)
So I would be interested in knowing what the stats are college-by-college. I have a feeling that a lot is being swept under the rug in the First Year College (set up for weak students, truthfully) and maybe Education or CHASS. It would not require vastly unfair thumbs on the scale if most black students being admitted are applying to the First Year College and most of the Asian students not being admitted are applying to Engineering. Reminds me of the old Berkeley grad admissions study. The ratio is way out of whack, but it may seem more reasonable when broken down to the level where admissions decisions are being made.