I’ve been very disappointed in my alma mater, in its continuing racist efforts to give preferences to students not on the content of their character or quality of their academics, but purely on the color of their skin, not to mention its defiance of the law and Supreme Court rulings against this egregious behavior. It now turns out that, in an ongoing effort to continue to illegally discriminate, it has been withholding data and lying to the courts:
Before the UM clamped down on CIR’s request for data, Sander was able to confirm his earlier finding that the undergraduate system may have produced fewer harms than the law school system. For one thing, the newly-produced data showed that a substantial number of minorities with strong credentials attend the UM undergraduate college. These students could have been admitted without any consideration of race and presumably resisted offers from more competitive schools to attend the UM. It was thus possible for Sander to compare, for the first time, the academic records of UM undergraduate minorities who did not receive a racial preference with those who undoubtedly did.
According to Sander, there were dramatic differences between the two groups. Undergraduate blacks at the UM who were admitted without a preference had a graduation rate of 93% — higher than the rate for comparable white students, and far higher than the graduation rate of the school as a whole. In stark contrast, UM undergraduate blacks who received a preference had a graduation rate of 47%. If Sander is right, it raises a real question whether this latter group benefited from the UM’s heavy use of race or whether they would not have had better academic outcomes at less prestigious schools.
While Judge Lawson now has dismissed the case, the reason probably has less to do with the law and more to do with the what the evidence was starting to show about the real harms of the preferential admissions policies followed for years by the UM and other schools. For the time being, Judge Lawson has sidelined the effort to get a full decade’s worth of data as part of this litigation. But given what even three years worth of data seems to show, schools like Michigan will find it increasingly difficult to keep this data secret. If even the “holistic” use of race makes it difficult for minority students to compete academically, the moral and legal imperative to publicize and analyze this information becomes great.
This has done a real, damaging disservice to the minorities in whose supposed interest these misguided programs were designed. Instead of going to a school better suited to their abilities and succeeding, many of them flunk out in the face of the stiff competition in Ann Arbor or, if they make it through, fail the bar, when they may have been successful lawyers going to a second-tier law school. Of course, I suspect that the response of the geniuses who came up with this scheme would be to insist that they be given additional bar scores for their skin color to level the field…
In any event…
All of this is a far cry from last January when Mary Sue Coleman, Governor Granholm and the rest of the political establishment said they would keep Prop. 2 tied up in legal knots for years. While BAMN’s decision to sue seemed like a good idea last year, it’s a good idea that turned into their worst nightmare. Too bad for them.
Don’t look for any boo hoos from me. This seems like poetic justice.
Does that 47% figure differentiate between students who dropped out versus students who transferred to other universities?
I’m not arguing your premise, which seems sound to me, just pointing out one possible objection.
I would expect that dropouts outnumber transfers by a fair margin, as transferring is more work than dropping out. But some of those students might have transferred to a more suitable environment.
Utter nonsense.
Writing from Europe, America
I’m trying to figure out what this demented and ignorant rant from Europe has to do with the subject of the post.
Just be thankful he managed to hit the right blog! 😉
Just be thankful he managed to hit the right blog!
Why be grateful? The comment has no value, or negative value. I wish that he’d polluted someone else’s blog with it.
Translation: Europeans like Obama because he’s a fellow socialist?
I’m trying to figure out what this demented and ignorant rant from Europe has to do with the subject of the post.
Absolutely nothing. He just wants to use your bandwidth as his personal blog, rather than pay for his own. Parasites are like that.
“Just be thankful he managed to hit the right blog! ;-)”
I’ll bet this is just a random comment on a random blog, and that our brave Anonymous Euro-toady has left the same comment on many other random blogs. It has just that air of unoriginality.
Yes, well, unfortunately, by subsidizing their defense all these decades so that they could build their welfare states, we’ve encouraged many Europeans to become parasites. This one is all too typical.
I’m just glad that so many of them have resisted the temptation, despite the incentives.
Why be grateful? The comment has no value, or negative value. I wish that he’d polluted someone else’s blog with it.
I could have been sarcastic here. It’s been known to happen. And speaking of polluting someone else’s blog, it appears that anonymous has indeed taken your advice. Apparently, their post was so good, that they copy/pasted it to Camille Paglia’s s Salon article (titled “Hillary’s slick willies”). I was unable to find the comment there, maybe Salon deleted it for some odd reason.
I’ve got to laugh at the spammer who’s probably an US Obamatron hiring a spam-bot (or maybe he rented one from the Ronulans). It’s predicated on the notion that it should matter greatly who the Europeans like or not, isn’t that a typical Dem mindset as showcased by the Kerry campaign in ’04? And of course it failed, because it’s nonsense and for that matter Europeans wouldn’t be any more united on who they like than Americans are.
S/he/it spammed:
“Obama is well liked in Europe because he is exceptionally bright.”
Most in Europe aren’t even paying any attention and couldn’t give a damn any more than most Americans would care about European elections.
Then s/he/it spammed:
“He [Obama] stunningly fails to incorporate the �one liner� hack soundbite style-before-substance politics America is famous for.”
Most likely this is only because of how stupid s/he/it is but imagine just how poor the coverage on Obama would have to be for Europeans to not even be aware of the hope-change-hope mantra! That said I wouldn’t be surprised if most Europeans didn’t even recognize his name.