Affirmative What?
Posted on June 17, 2008
Filed Under News, The Daily Prereq | By Max Baumgarten
Breaking story! Hold the press! Unrepresented minorities will make up 10.5 percent of the Class of 2012 at the University of Michigan, a .3 percent drop from the Class of 2011.
Before you write this post off as another update on stagnant statistics, let’s quickly revisit the 2003 Supreme Court Case Gratz v. Bollinger. That wacky judicial branch ruled it was illegal for Michigan to dole out points based on race in the admissions process. Ever since, Michigan and its affirmative action policies (or lack thereof) have been subject to ridicule, praise, and everything in between. The larger question is: Does dropping an affirmative action policy adversely affect minority enrollment? Well, in the UC system, for example, the answer is yes, duh, and of course — UCLA witnessed a 50-percent decrease in enrollment of underrepresented minority students after they dropped their program. But Michigan is a different story altogether: the class of 2010, the last to be chosen prior to the Supreme Court smackdown, was made of up 12.6 underrepresented minorities. Our highly-trained mathematics genius at the PreRreq calculated that is only a 2.1 percentage drop (12.6- 10.5=2.1) in minority enrollement.
While we can detect a minor drop, these numbers aren’t earth-shattering. But they represent a state of complacency. Just because the percentage isn’t as low as some might have feared doesn’t mean that the post-Gratz v. Bollinger era is actually on the right track.
(Source: The Michigan Daily)
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