Racial Discrimination at UW-Madison Gets Minority Students Admitted, But Almost 50% Don't Graduate
From Linda Chavez, Chairwoman and founder of the Center for Equal Opportunity:
"The campus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison erupted this week after the release of two studies documenting the heavy use of race in deciding which students to admit to the undergraduate and law schools. The evidence of discrimination is undeniable, and the reaction by critics was undeniably dishonest and thuggish.
The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), which I founded in 1995 to expose and challenge misguided race-based public policies, conducted the studies based on an analysis of the university's own admissions data. But the university was none too keen on releasing the data, which CEO obtained through filing Freedom of Information Act requests only after a successful legal challenge went all the way to the state supreme court.
It's no wonder the university wanted to keep the information secret. The studies show that a black or Hispanic undergraduate applicant was more than 500 times likelier to be admitted to Wisconsin-Madison than a similarly qualified white or Asian applicant. The odds ratio favoring black law school applicants over similarly qualified white applicants was 61 to 1.
The median SAT scores of black undergraduates who were admitted were 150 points lower than whites or Asians, while the median Hispanic scores were roughly 100 points lower. And median high school rankings for both blacks and Hispanics were also lower than for either whites or Asians.
CEO has published studies of racial double standards in admissions at scores of public colleges and universities across the country with similar findings, but none has caused such a violent reaction.
Instead of addressing the findings of the study, the university's vice provost for diversity, Damon A. Williams, dishonestly told students that "CEO has one mission and one mission only: dismantle the gains that were achieved by the civil rights movement." In fact, CEO's only mission is to promote color-blind equal opportunity so that, in Martin Luther King's vision, no one will be judged by the color of his or her skin."
Here are links to the reports for undergraduate admissions and law school admissions.
MP: According to this article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the graduation rate for black students at UW-Madison in 2006 was only 52%, indicating that almost one-half of the black students admitted to the University of Wisconsin under special preferences, state-sponsored discrimination, and affirmative action failed to graduate. The proponents of affirmative action always seem to focus mostly on the "front end," i.e. getting minority students admitted as freshmen, but never seem to pay as much attention to the "back end," i.e. getting minority students to successfully graduate. In the case of UW-Madison, the "academic mismatch" that results from race-based preferences does a great disservice to many of the minority students, given that almost half of the admitees fail to graduate.
22 Comments:
I've heard about this, but the whole fanfare is overrated. One of my friends attended the University of Wisconsin, so I've seen the campus. Trust me, you'll be very hard pressed to find any blacks or Hispanics on campus.
"Trust me, you'll be very hard pressed to find any blacks or Hispanics on campus"...
Which particular U of W campus did you visit?
Three years ago at the Madison campus both blacks and hispanics weren't the majority obviously but there still seemed to be quite a few of them...
is it the college degree that causes people to earn more money or is it the qualities of the person who can and will earn the degree?
I would expect that on average the person who has earned a degree is more intelligent, diligent,healthy,ambitious, connected
etc. than the person who did not earn a degree. Also, are they only looking at people with four year degrees or are they including doctors and lawyers and other people with higher degrees?
what percentage of the student body at UM-Madison is non-white?
The article mentions a 52% graduation rate for black students in 2006. I wonder what is the graduation rate for other races.
Juandos,
Demographic statistics for Wisconsin's five largest universities, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Undergraduate Enrollment Statistics Percentage of Population
Men: 46.40%
Women: 53.60%
Non-resident alien: 0.70%
Black non-Hispanic: 7.00%
this is what the outrage is over?
methinks this is yet another example of selective statistic navel gazing...
It's truly amazing, and saddening, that even this level of racism fails to shock. So many people seem content to excuse blatantly racist acts against individuals, rationalizing that these acts somehow benefit a particular underrepresented group.
There are no "group rights", period. Men are endowed with individual rights. Discrimination violates individual rights and is suffered by individuals. You cannot justify discrimination against any individual person by an appeal to "group rights".
Affirmative Action is just a contemporary version of "Jim Crow", demeaning to its victims, and ultimately demeaning to its perpetrators.
Thanks for the link BB...
Where we saw these minority types was in the student union (some class enrollment was happening there) and in one of the student cafeterias...
I would've guessed that between blacks and hispanics maybe 5% of the crowd...
I'd agree that the policies are racist.... but that's not really what the cutline was saying.
the cutline itself could be considered racist by giving the impression that blacks do not do well at college - despite the fact they are given preferences.
but let me ask a question.
if the first 4 generations of a face are enslaved in a new country - how long do the effects of it last?
I'm not asserting anything here other than asking the question - which basically is - if your granddad, and his father and his great-grandad were slaves with no access to education - how long do the familial and cultural impacts last?
2nd question - do we not accord "special rights" to native Americans as a result of their treatment?
Again - I'm not advocating a course of action or asserting that we should do something - at this point - I am asking if people believe that discrimination of multi-generations - persists in it's impacts.
"I am asking if people believe that discrimination of multi-generations - persists in it's impacts"...
Well anyone who has spent time either in Europe, Africa, any of the hispanic countries in this hemisphere and is an observer of the human condition will quickly realize what passes for racist behavior and bigotry in the US is a vague shadow of what happens else where...
Consider the contents og U of W constitutional law professor Ann Althouse regarding the witless whining by Chavez: CEO founder Linda Chavez attacks the University of Wisconsin-Madison
the premise for the differential treatment is that the effects of racism is multi-generational.
The point about immigration is valid but I'd just remind that Asian immigrants (and European) immigrants were not exactly give equal rights either.. nor were the American Indians.. nor, for that matter were Women.
and we basically started the idea of past discrimination meriting discriminatory treatment - with women...and blacks after WWII when both were given much more equal opportunity because of manpower shortages - not to explicitly do away with the discriminatory policies against women and blacks.
Indeed, after the war - the policies resumes in many places.
the problem is - it's hard to justify giving hiring preferences to woman based on past discriminatory treatment and not do it for blacks...
that ole slippery slope problem..
AIG, you make a good point about the people coming over from third-world countries and their background in comparison to the African-Americans here in the United States. However, even though I am opposed to race-based admission practices in general, I do believe that the effects of slavery and our country's failure to deal with its racism will be with us for quite some time. Nevertheless, the problem for the majority of African-America students does not reside with access to a quality university education, but rather access to quality instruction in elementary and secondary education. Most African-American students in our country are stuck attending drop-out factories that establish the lowest of standards, inflate grades, and fail to hold students accountable. This is a far bigger problem than race-based admissions; in fact, I would suggest that race-based admission policies are the result of a failed primary and secondary educational system.
Chris, I went to a public high school in NYC. About 60% of the students in the school were black and hispanic. Lots of Asians and lots of Eastern Europeans like myself. The valedictorian of the school was a girl from my country whose family had lived in internal exile because of their opposition to communism. She was born in a labor camp. How come she overcame her historical shortcomings, while the kids born in this country couldn't?
Lets face it, blaming history for current shortcomings isn't very realistic. Politics and culture, in my opinion, play the biggest role today. Where's the Indian Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to protest for the shortcomings of the caste system?
Mark,
To your point of front-end vs. back-end, it's easier to to lower ones standards than to confront the cause of the failure. With what happened over asking the public school teachers to kick in a few bucks toward their retirement, what do you think it would look like if you demanded performance reporting and dismissal of teachers who cannot teach, the only way to actually fix the "back-end" problem.
weighing in.....
I don't think blaming teachers is a solution because when you look at entire schools, entire school systems certain subgroups - as a whole group - no matter who their teacher is - does poorly..
... in part because the way that white kids with good parental support learn is not the way that minority kids with poor parental support learn.
they can be successfully taught but the school itself has to change the curricula and how it is taught - by all teachers.
you're going to have exemplary teachers - who do go the extra mile - but the ones who teach according to the standards set up by the schools - are not "bad" teachers'.
when you look at an entire school that produces poor results for the subgroups - assuming that it is full of bad teachers and they all need to be replaced is dumb.
the problem has been and continues to be that the kids with good parental support - drive the curricula at the schools and the schools orient their curricula to what the parents who are vocal want.
the important thing not well recognized is that quite a number of schools across the country in urban and rural settings do a GOOD JOB of teaching the sub-groups because the school system itself has adapted their curricula to accomplish that - and that has far more to do with performance than having a school full of only "top-performing' teachers.
my view is that as long as we essentially want to blame and not understand why that we'll continue to look for the easy but wrong answers.
Teachers as a group are no better or worse that Doctors as a group or lawyers as a group.
not everyone graduates at the top of their class and with the exception of a few jobs - most workforces are oriented to typical, average, but acceptable performing employees.
the blame-the-teachers idea would be a lot like saying that WalMart good be better if they only hired top performing employees.and not be satisfied with only the "acceptably" performing.
>>> I'd agree that the policies are racist.... but that's not really what the cutline was saying.
the cutline itself could be considered racist by giving the impression that blacks do not do well at college - despite the fact they are given preferences.
"Cutline"? Are you referring to the HEADline?
As far as that "impression", that's entirely in YOUR racist head.
Mine interpreted it exactly as it was meant, that racIST admission policies at UW-M admit underqualified students who, no doubt due to the exact same reasons (having nothing specific to do with race AT ALL) they were not otherwise more qualified than the others, caused them to FAIL.
It isn't the race that's relevant, it's the racIST admission policies favoring inadequately prepared students solely based on their official RACE.
The gist is obvious -- by practicing this soft BIGOTRY towards blacks, you give them no credit for accomplishing things on their own. You do not push them to accomplish things of their own accord, and make excuses for their failure to accomplish things of their own accord.
The best solution is to stop telling them it's all the white man's fault that they are having issues and address the cultural issues holding them back. The ones that lead to accomplished black people being denigrated, sneered at, and otherwise treated like dirt because as a group black people have largely failed to absorb the GOOD elements of the white ethic, while retaining their own cultural uniqueness -- the same things that make orientals**, only slightly less discriminated against than blacks until just 50-70 years ago, able to succeed in BETTER percentages than whites and yet retain their own distinct cultural identities -- just as a white person can appreciate their Italian or German heritage, so, too, can an American of Japanese or Korean or Chinese heritage be both an accomplished, proud, and capable American while also someone who values the land of his ancestors, and the accomplishments of others from that land.
There is a BALANCE. Orientals have found it, thanks to the fact that white people largely ignored them and didn't "help" them.
It's been denied blacks not because they are incapable of anything because of their skin color, but because excuses for NOT succeeding have been handed them because of their skin color.
The time has long-since come that blacks need to recognize the flaws in their own cultural values which lead to massive black incarceration, low levels of educational accomplishment, and generally high levels of misery and disappointment.
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**Sorry, I refuse to use the insultingly stupid and ignorant term "asians" to refer ONLY to those from a narrow region of the entire massive continent of ASIA, which includes Arabs, Persians, Indians, Georgians, White Russians, Kurds, Turks, and so forth.
It is "THE FREAKIN' ORIENT".
The term refers to people from that REGION, and it really takes one of the Perpetually Indignant to find something massively offensive in the term. Since the PIs are nothing but social bullys attempting to keep their opponents off balance, I reject their idiotic attempts to do so. "Eph You, PI."
And, frankly, when the Japanese stop using the term "barbarian" to refer to ANYONE not Japanese, and the Chinese stop using the term "devil" to refer to ANYONE not Chinese, I'll begin to worry about how THEY might feel about MY terminology when it's not overtly insulting, like, oh, "chink" or "slant".
"the cutline itself could be considered racist by giving the impression that blacks do not do well at college - despite the fact they are given preferences."
You have this backwards. Those given preferences don't do well BECAUSE they are given preferences.
If a failed admission test indicates an individual isn't well qualified to attend a particular school, they don't suddenly become better qualified by admitting them anyway. They are set up for failure, and may resent the fact that their admission wasn't due to their own individual capabilities, but due to their skin color.
"I do believe that the effects of slavery and our country's failure to deal with its racism will be with us for quite some time. "
They will be with us until those who are preoccupied with such things lose their obsession.
The best way to promote colorblindness would be to quit asking question about race and ethnicity.
"Nevertheless, the problem for the majority of African-America students does not reside with access to a quality university education, but rather access to quality instruction in elementary and secondary education."
Perhaps if public money was attached to the student instead of their street address, parents could make better choices for their children.
"This is a far bigger problem than race-based admissions; in fact, I would suggest that race-based admission policies are the result of a failed primary and secondary educational system."
A perfect example of a failed public policy attempting to correct for other failed public policies.
I don't understand why race is ever considered. I think I heard once without discrimination by universities against high scoring Asians, they would dominate California universities. I am an eastern European American for the record. I think this type of stuff comes under intentions triumph results category.
The reason that most blacks or Latinos don't graduate from the University of Wisconsin is climate. I am a Puerto Rican who went there and it's a very racist place, largely because of the left. As a person of color at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, you are largely a sociology project and not a person.
The reason that most blacks or Latinos don't graduate from the University of Wisconsin is climate. I am a Puerto Rican who went there and it's a very racist place, largely because of the left. As a person of color at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, you are largely a sociology project and not a person.
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