Admissions Studies Find Flaws

College admissions “percent plans,” which guarantee admission to top high school students and have been lauded by President Bush as race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action, do not make a significant difference on their own in maintaining ethnic diversity, according to two reports released Monday.

The studies by Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project analyzed the experiences of public universities in California, Texas and Florida as each has struggled to achieve racial diversity without the explicit racial preferences of affirmative action plans. But for those race-neutral alternative percentage programs to work, they must be combined with outreach, financial aid and support programs that are often race-conscious themselves, targeting underrepresented minority communities, the reports contend.

As the U.S. Supreme Court revisits the affirmative action issue this spring, taking up two cases from the University of Michigan, the Bush administration has called on the court to replace race-based affirmative action in the nation’s colleges and universities with race-neutral approaches that offer admission to a percentage of top students in each high school.

The administration has pointed to the percentage plans at the University of California and its counterparts in Texas and Florida as workable alternatives to affirmative action. For UC, the plan offers admission to students who rank in the top 4% of their graduating class and meet other eligibility requirements; in Florida, to the top 20%; and in Texas, the top 10%.

But the authors of the Harvard studies say the three programs are not effective. None of the campuses studied yet reflect their states’ diverse college-age populations, with the most elite institutions -- UC Berkeley and UCLA -- having the greatest difficulty. At Berkeley, the percentage of black freshmen declined from 6.7% in 1995 to 3.9% in 2001 and Latino from 16.9% to 10.8%, the study said; affirmative action was last used in 1997.

The researchers reserved their harshest findings for Florida. That state’s plan has led to the admission of very few students who would not have been enrolled under previous admission policies, the reports said. The Florida percentage plan actually has benefited whites and Asians more than African Americans or Latinos, the two groups most underrepresented at the state university system’s top two campuses, according to the Harvard studies.

“These plans are not the alternative to affirmative action,” said Harvard researcher Patricia Marin, who coauthored one of the reports, which focused on Florida. “This is not the answer for colleges trying to maintain diversity at their campuses.” The other report compared systems in the three states.

But the studies were disputed Monday by the White House and the Florida governor’s office and elicited skepticism at some of the universities involved.

All three states have tried to maintain, or even increase, the percentage of African American and Latino students on their university campuses in the years since affirmative action was banned -- by voter referendum in California, by a court decision in Texas, and in Florida, by executive order of the governor.

A University of California spokeswoman said Monday that the UC’s 3-year-old policy of guaranteeing admission to the top 4% of graduates from each of the state’s high schools was not specifically intended to increase diversity, although she said it has helped with that effort.

The program “has multiple goals,” said Nina Robinson, a director of policy and external affairs in the UC president’s office. “And while we think it has made a positive contribution to diversity, we would agree that it has not turned the situation in California around.”

Robinson also noted that the program, called Eligibility in Local Context, was one of a series of recent admissions changes at the university aimed at increasing access to the UC for many students, not just underrepresented minorities. The university’s regents last year also endorsed a major shift in the admissions policies to allow personal achievements to be considered for all freshman applicants.

In Florida, meanwhile, Gov. Jeb Bush had a stronger response, saying the Florida State University System’s Talented 20 program is just one part of a comprehensive effort that has increased diversity. Florida and the federal government have filed friend-of-the-court briefs with the Supreme Court, siding with the plaintiffs, two white students, in their argument that University of Michigan unfairly discriminated against them by giving some admission preferences to minorities.

The Harvard group seeks to discredit the state’s admissions program “through the use of sterile and shallow data analysis,” Jeb Bush said in a statement. “These programs have helped inspire students to attend college and to be successful once there.”

At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan said President Bush “continues to support race-neutral policies to achieve diversity on college campuses,” including the plans detailed in the Harvard reports.

The authors of the Harvard studies, as well as the co-director of the Civil Rights Project, have openly stated their belief that affirmative action is the best and most effective method for colleges and universities trying to keep their campuses racially diverse. But they said the center’s ideology played no role in the two reports, which relied on data from the universities, state agencies, state reports and documents, and interviews with university and high school officials.