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COLLEGE ADMISSIONS AND RACE



Nov 30, 2001



MARINA DEL REY, CA--The University of California Board of Regents' new admissions guidelines will destroy fairness and objectivity and promote racism--while cunningly protecting the university system against racial discrimination charges, said Dr. Edwin A. Locke, senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

These new 'flexible' policies, said Dr. Locke, will downgrade academic qualifications--grades and tests scores, like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)--and will allegedly use factors such as a student's 'struggle against poverty or athletic or artistic ability' to subjectively determine who gets admitted. Does anyone believe for one minute, despite explicit disclaimers to the contrary, that race will not be brought back as a factor in admissions?

Dr. Locke noted that in spite of the fact that affirmative action is against state law, in May the regents voted to drop a six-year ban on affirmative action. Clearly the regents are looking for a way around the law with their new admissions guidelines. Previously, students who were discriminated against due to race could show that they should have been admitted because their test scores and grades were better than those who were admitted. And if they took their case to court, they usually won. Now, the university can say, 'We used a holistic admissions procedure based on numerous factors that vary from student to student, and we decided that student X had a special combination of qualities that we wanted and student Y did not.' The new subjective guidelines offer a student rejected because of his race no chance of winning in a court of law.

Admission to college, said Dr. Locke, should be based on objective not subjective criteria. The most objective measure of a student's academic abilities is the SAT. It is blind to race, gender, age, politics, religion, national origin and sexual orientation. The SAT has an added advantage over grades because everyone takes the same test and the test is scored the same way for everyone.



ARI senior fellow Dr. Edwin A. Locke is available for interviews.

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