A recent op-ed at The New York Times by Peter D. Salins, professor of political science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook addresses the natural experiment of the SUNY schools to assess whether the SATs are an adequate predictor of graduation rates. Turns out they are.
You might remember President Laura Skandera-Trombley's incoherent L.A. Times op-ed in which she put Pitzer on the path to making the SATs optional for students with a 3.5 GPA or who graduate in the top ten percent of their high school class.
This is a common admissions tactic for administrators as there simply aren't enough black and brown kids with the requisite SAT scores for the schools to be "diverse."
Strangely, though, there are enough Asian kids with those scores. Given that a lot of those Asian kids are first generation Americans or immigrants and yet still out-test wealthy black kids, I wonder how much the cultural bias argument holds up.
As Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights points out,
At some schools, preferred-minority applicants are up to 100 times more likely to be admitted than similarly situated non-preferred (i.e., Asian or white) comparatives. Affirmative-action programs at some schools are structured in a way that, beyond a minimum level of qualification, preferred-minority applicants are virtually guaranteed admission.Is Pitzer one of those schools?
I don't know, but as Peter Kirsanow points out in another op-ed, current administrators " fail to tell Asian students that many, if not most, admissions offices discriminate against Asian applicants in a manner resembling the Jewish quotas of the 1950s. How many Asian students know that their odds of being admitted at selective schools are 200 times worse than those of a similarly qualified black or Hispanic applicant?"
