News Item
"Christian Science Monitor" featured Pace University's President Marvin Krislov in "Debating an evolving definition of ‘diversity’ on campus"
"Christian Science Monitor" featured Pace University's President Marvin Krislov in "Debating an evolving definition of ‘diversity’ on campus"
Amid increased scrutiny after the Harvard case, college admissions officers cull the next round of candidates with an eye on all the different ways a student body can be ‘diverse.’
Contemplating new practices
Which is more distinguishing: test scores or what you represent? Should a student’s race, socioeconomic status, gender identity, political views, obstacles overcome – their “distance traveled,” in admissions-speak – all be treated as potential forms of merit? How can admissions officers, asks Ms. Smith, “be fair when you have all these competing and logical arguments for a place at the table, a place on campus, a voice being recognized and heard?”
A complicating factor this admissions season, she says, is that campuses are worrying that unhappy applicants could trigger “some level of scrutiny or legal challenge for how they admit students.” Some 40 years of case law have set rules for the use of race in admissions, but at colleges across the country, leaders wonder whether they need new practices if not new rules.
“It’s hard to argue that race and ethnicity is not important, but it is not the only form of diversity,” says Marvin Krislov, president of Pace University in New York. Colleges, he says, require “people of different viewpoints: religious diversity, urban, rural, economic, public school, private school.”
Mr. Krislov was vice president and general counsel at the University of Michigan in 2003 when the Supreme Court ruled in Gratz v. Bollinger that automatically awarding underrepresented minorities 20 points in admissions (out of 100 needed) was unconstitutional, because it “ensures that the diversity contributions of applicants cannot be individually assessed.” Racial bonus points, in other words, overwhelmed the larger goal of picking applicants based on individual qualities and accomplishments.
Yet admissions is always about more than the individual’s record. It matters, says Krislov, “how the person fits in relative to others.” What do they bring that is unique, yet enhances a community? A challenge specific to Harvard, says Julie Park, associate professor at the University of Maryland College of Education and author of “Race on Campus: Debunking Myths with Data,” is that Asian-Americans are raised such that “applying to Harvard, it’s in the Kool-Aid.”
That culturally embedded value, she says, means that Asian-Americans are “more likely to throw their hat in the ring whether they feel they are competitive or not.” It creates an applicant pool that is broader for Asian-American than for whites, who tend to apply only if very qualified.
It can also produce “an underlying sense that a lot of these kids look similar on paper,” says Arun Ponnusamy, chief academic officer of Collegewise, a large private college counseling company, who has worked in admissions at the University of Chicago, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mr. Ponnusamy, who graduated from the University of Chicago, says many Indian-American and Southeast Asian-American students like himself “played a lot of tennis, a lot of us played chess and a lot of us were No. 1 or 2 in our class.”
That sameness presents an admissions challenge. Ponnusamy has seen strong candidates (over his career, he has reviewed some 7,500 admissions files) sticking within familiar boundaries. Rather than presenting themselves as eager to take risks and wrestle with new ideas, many students seemed to “just want to go to a great school, get a great job, and have a nice life.”
Copying a formula for success is “where Asian kids get jammed up,” he says. Yet, such achievement takes tremendous effort, frustrating those who push themselves to check the right boxes only to find admissions more of a crapshoot than expected.
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