Wider Fallout Seen from Race-Neutral Admissions

If race-conscious admissions are eliminated at the nation’s professional schools, the United States will likely witness a dramatic decline in the number of black and Hispanic doctors and lawyers, according to forecasts prepared by associations representing medical and law schools.
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, if its member schools relied strictly on academic measures for admissions, the proportions of black, Hispanic and Native American medical students would fall from the current 11 percent to no more than 3 percent. The situation is similar for the nation’s law schools, particularly highly selective ones, the Law School Admission Council said.
As the Supreme Court deliberates in two cases that challenge race-conscious admissions at the University of Michigan, attention has been focused on the potential impact on undergraduate education nationwide. But experts say the consequences could be worse for minority students who aspire to professional schools, where competition for seats is keener and alternatives are fewer.
”The best estimate that we have is that without race-conscious admissions, the number of African Americans in an entering class of 350 would fall below 10,” said Jeffrey Lehman, dean of Michigan’s law school. In the past decade, Michigan has enrolled 21 to 37 black first-year law students per class. ”If there were a way to enroll more underrepresented minorities without considering race, we’d do it,” he said. ”It is not that we like being race-conscious.”
Michigan’s law school, which is considered highly selective, admits students who average 165 on the Law School Admissions Test and a grade-point average of 3.5. Last fall, 4,461 law school applicants nationwide achieved or exceeded those grades, according to a brief the Law School Admission Council filed at the Supreme Court. Of those students, the council said, 29 were black and 114 were Hispanic.
Luis Lovato would be the first to say that he might not have made it to medical school without affirmative action. Raised by a single mother, he made stellar grades in high school. But juggling part-time jobs as a tutor and food service worker, he struggled as a college student.
When it came time for medical school, he said, his grades were ”on the low side.” Still, he was accepted, his application boosted by his history of leading community health initiatives, his participation in a summer enrichment program for aspiring medical students and, perhaps most critically, an admissions regime that considered race and ethnicity in evaluating applicants.
Lovato graduated with honors in 1996 from the UCLA medical school, where he is an assistant clinical professor of medicine.
”Getting into medical school, I definitely benefited from affirmative action,” he said. ”But once I got there, I really excelled.”
Opponents of race-conscious college admissions contend that they violate the constitutional rights of whites and Asian applicants. Racial diversity, they say, may be a worthy goal, but should be achieved through race-neutral means.
”By discriminating on the basis of race at the point of competition, innocent individuals are injured in their constitutional rights,” Kirk Kolbo, an attorney representing the plaintiffs challenging Michigan’s law school and undergraduate admissions policies, told the Supreme Court during oral arguments April 1.
Terence Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, the public interest law firm that filed the cases against Michigan, said selective law schools and medical schools could achieve significant racial diversity simply by adjusting their admissions requirements.
”Their projections assume that if you eliminate racial preferences, you don’t make any other changes in your admissions policies,” he said. ”There is no reason they have to look at just grades and test scores.”
The Bush administration and others have also suggested that colleges turn to race-neutral strategies to achieve diversity without triggering the resentments and legal challenges that often accompany race-conscious admissions plans.
”It will take time, creativity and constant attention by government and university officials to pursue effective race-neutral policies,” said Secretary of Education Roderick Paige. ”However, as Americans we owe it to our heritage and to our children to meet those challenges head on, rather than looking for short cuts that divide us by race and betray the nation’s fundamental principles.”
In states where racial preferences have been banned in recent years –among them California, Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia and Washington–colleges and universities are expanding their recruitment efforts. They are instituting programs aimed at improving minority student achievement as early as elementary school and embarking on programs that give preferences to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Florida, Texas and California have guaranteed admission in state schools to students who graduate in the top tier of their high school classes.
For the most part, those approaches have restored significant levels of racial diversity to all but the most selective undergraduate programs. A study by the Century Foundation, a New York-based research organization, projects that if economic affirmative action replaces race-conscious admissions at the nation’s most selective 146 colleges, the result would be a small drop in the number of black and Latino undergraduates.
But achieving diversity through race-neutral means has proven much more difficult for professional schools. Part of the difficulty is that low-income whites and Asians, on average, score significantly better than middle- and upper-income blacks and Hispanics on standardized tests, making them more compelling candidates under most race-neutral admissions scenarios.
In 2001, for example, underrepresented minorities from families with incomes of $80,000 or more averaged 21.9 on the Medical School Admission Test; whites and Asians from families with incomes under $30,000 averaged 25.7 and 25.5, respectively.
”Accounting for economic hardship will not level the admissions playing field for minority and non-minority medical school candidates,” the Association of American Medical Colleges asserted in a brief to the Supreme Court.
At the University of California, the percentage of black and Latino students in the medical and law schools has dropped since race-conscious admissions were eliminated in 1996.
This year, black and Latino students make up 16.5 percent of the first-year medical students at California’s five state-run medical schools and 16.2 percent of the first-year students at its public law schools. In the final years of race-conscious admissions, blacks and Latinos consistently accounted for more than 20 percent of the enrollment in those schools. The declines occurred even though the University of California employs an array of race-neutral strategies aimed at boosting minority enrollment.
UCLA’s law school adopted an economic affirmative action program that admits some students based on a mix of academic factors and economic obstacles they overcame. This year, 13 percent of UCLA’s law students are black or Latino. In the small group considered socioeconomically disadvantaged, 40.5 percent of those admitted are black and Hispanic.
At UCLA’s medical school, efforts to boost diversity include outreach to minority high school students, a summer program that prepares disadvantaged college students to apply to medical school and another that gives special help to disadvantaged students who have been rejected in the first round of medical school applications. Admissions officials also give special scrutiny to disadvantaged applicants of all races.
”If you’re not going to have affirmative action, you are going to have to have something in place to help students who have difficulty getting through the pipeline,” said Patricia Pratt, director of the Office of Academic Enrichment and Outreach at UCLA’s medical school.
The college-level programs have established excellent records of increasing student grade-point averages and getting students into medical school. But officials said the programs reach many fewer students than the race-conscious admissions program did.
Medical school officials said that training black and Latino doctors is crucial not only for the sake of diversity but also to help ensure that there are medical professionals willing to practice in poor and minority communities, which are typically underserved by doctors. Numerous surveys of minority medical school graduates have found that they are far more interested in practicing in poor communities than other students.
”When you’re looking for medical students, there is a lot more to it than grade-point averages and test scores. Nobody has shown that the best doctor is necessarily the one with the best grade-point average and MCAT scores,” said Neil Parker, senior associate dean at UCLA medical school. He added that nearly every student admitted to UCLA’s medical school goes on to graduate.
In evaluating medical school applicants, he said, UCLA considers a broad array of factors beyond academic credentials, including applicants’ passion for medicine and ability to connect with patients.
Those are the qualities that Gilberto Hernandez Jr. believes set his medical school application apart. His undergraduate grades at UCLA were average, as were his scores on the Medical College Admission Test. But Hernandez believes he was admitted into medical school because of his volunteer work with medical outreach programs, the upward trend in his grades toward the end of his college career and the fact that UCLA considered socioeconomic and other factors in evaluating applicants.
Hernandez earned five letters of distinction at UCLA medical school, where he is scheduled to graduate next month. ”I think people understood that I was qualified,” he said, ”but I just didn’t have the numbers.”