UC Minority Admissions

* Re “Affirmative Action Had Real Merit,” Commentary July 10: Prof. Jerome Karabel attributes the reduction in minority admissions at University of California medical schools to the reversal of affirmative action. He failed to note, however, that there has been a 30% increase in admissions offers to top minority students at UC medical schools (see Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante’s Jan. 31 commentary). Accordingly, equal access is being achieved notwithstanding the UC anti-affirmative action policies.

Perhaps an increase in scholarships and other incentives to minority students offered admission would help to assure their enrollment at UC rather than at competing schools.

STUART SHELBY

Santa Monica

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* Karabel’s commentary on the consequences of ending affirmative action at the University of California is insightful. I would hasten to add, however, that UC and other highly selective universities have a long way to go before the “redefining of merit” becomes a reality and overreliance on standardized tests becomes a faded memory. Last year at the UCLA Law School, if you had a 3.75-plus college GPA, a mere five points on the LSAT was the difference between a 66% chance of admission and a 10% chance. There is little wonder why there were only two African Americans in UCLA Law School’s 1999 entering class of over 300 students.

While the LSAT has no correlation with success in the legal profession, it continues to disproportionately exclude promising students of color across the nation. For example, in just-released articles in the Texas Journal of Women and the Law and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, I documented how white applicants have much higher admission rates than minorities, even among those with equivalent college grades. Over a five-year period at 175 law schools, whites also had cumulative admission rates of 72%, compared with 46% for African Americans and 60% for Latinos.

These sobering figures suggest that even when affirmative action is still permissible, the institutional pressures that contribute to standardized tests being given near-magical reverence will continue to misshape the legal profession and higher education generally.

WILLIAM C. KIDDER

Researcher, Testing for the Public

Berkeley

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Karabel is wrong. Affirmative action belongs in kindergarten, not college. If the minority students were given equal access to a quality education, they would not need special help in getting into college nor should they get it. Fix the schools. Then society would not be a problem!

LARRY L. SEVERSON

Fountain Valley