Just as the Supreme Court of America is poised to make a historic decision that could potentially eliminate affirmative action from the university admissions process, contextual admissions promoting inclusivity are gaining traction in universities across the United Kingdom. The Telegraph has the story.
Any day now, America’s Supreme Court will rule in one of the country’s biggest cases since the pro-choice decision of Roe vs Wade. This time the issue is affirmative action, with positive discrimination in favour of African-American, Hispanic-American and Native American candidates likely to be banished from the university admissions process.
If the Supreme Court justices do rule against affirmative action it will mark the end of a 60-year campaign. The ruling comes just as “contextual admissions”, which aim to promote “inclusivity”, take off in U.K. universities.
The U.S. case is the work of Edward Blum, an investor turned legal strategist who believes that racial diversity quotas have fostered injustice, not equality. Using race as a tool by which to judge student admissions “harms everyone”, Blum, 71, says. “You cannot cure the racism of the past with new racism.”
Blum’s case is against Harvard (an Ivy League private university) and the University of North Carolina (which is state-funded), and claims that preferential treatment given to students of African-American, Hispanic-American or Native American heritage over those who are white or Asian-American violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause, and also appears to go against the 1964 civil rights act introduced by Lyndon B Johnson, which prohibits race-based discrimination.
One plaintiff is Jon Wang, an 18- year-old with exemplary test scores who was rejected by every elite university he applied to on what he believes are racial grounds. According to Students for Fair Admissions, the campaign group Blum set up in 2014, Wang would have had a 95% likelihood of getting into his chosen universities had he been African-American; those chances were slashed five-fold due to his Asian heritage. “Race in America is one of the most polarising issues we face,” Blum says. “It has no place in the admissions process.”
It is an argument which has a personal resonance for Blum, who is Jewish. Criteria for entry to Harvard were rewritten in 1922 to limit numbers of Jewish students, who then accounted for 21% of the institution’s intake – a group who, like Asian-American students today, received high grades yet suffered “demerits” in their face-to-face interviews.
“There is a straight line running from the anti-Semitism of the 1920s to the anti-Asian bias that we see at Harvard now,” Blum believes. Many of those losing out today are from working-class families, says Blum. They are not privileged candidates, he insists, but have parents who have laboured as hotel maids, or handymen.
Affirmative action is disrupting the university selection process in Britain, too. Here, however, the division lies along class, rather than race, lines, with the rebalancing act – known as “contextual admissions” – focusing on state school vs privately educated pupils.
In 2022, 68% of places at Oxford and 72.5% at Cambridge were awarded to state-school pupils – up from 57% and 61% in 2013 (93% of children in England and Wales are state-educated). Last summer, every place for law at Edinburgh University was awarded to students from deprived areas or disadvantaged schools: of 400 applicants living in the country’s poorest postcodes, 168 won a place, while the 555 hopefuls applying from the wealthiest 60% of areas failed to score a single one.
“There’s so much pressure to be able to say, ‘This year we’ve admitted 70% from state schools rather than 55,’” says David Abulafia, historian and life fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. This criteria “is not useful if it results in people who are less capable and less well-qualified being admitted, rather than people who are real high-fliers.”
Worth reading in full.
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I’m not sure I agree with the ‘deferment’ explanation given above.
Students who defer a year have known grades (and other qualities) and will thus already have an accepted place at their chosen institution.
Ie, if a course has 100 students per year and 14 deferred from last year, the institution knows that it will only have 86 places available for this year’s candidates, and it won’t act as though it had 100 places re this year’s offers.
If there are more students that have to go through clearing it can only be because they didn’t meet the grades expected of them.
Sure, this could simply be because of the ‘grade disinflation’ that we’ve seen this year (although it still hasn’t normalised to the pre 2020 levels), but the intention to go through this disinflation process was well telegraphed by the government and exam bodies and I can’t imagine that the HE establishments based their offers on the relative %age grades seen in 2021.
I suggest that the problem is actually that this year’s candidates didn’t sit any GCSEs, but university places were offered with some consideration of the GCSE grades that were gained based on teacher assessment (ie, the teachers guessed). Thus the problem has resulted from a fair number of children having much higher GCSE results than they’d deserved (even taking into account the crazy grade inflation that occurred during 2020), and then getting worse A-levels than their GCSE results might have suggested.
I imagine that there will also be a similar number of pupils who in the end gained far better A-level results than their GSCE results suggested, only because they were ‘the quiet workers’ who the teachers didn’t even realise were capable. We, of course, won’t see the impact of this because the individuals concerned will have simply been happy that they got their first choice.
I’d like there to be an assessment of how much harm this stupid process (‘Guess the result’) caused these young adults, but like everything else related to our mad Covid response it’ll get shoved into the weeds and those whose lives will have been affected will never get any acknowledgement that it occurred.
Elephant in the room is that universities no longer even have a moral duty to preferentially consider domestic students. If a British undergraduate can only be charged a maximum of £9250 per year in tuition fees but their wealthy overseas classmates can be charged £24,000 for EXACTLY the same service, a self respecting, bottom line chasing vice-chancellor would be a fool not to prioritise overseas students.
For example, Imperial currently recruit 61% of their students from overseas.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/strategic-planning/statistics/trend-analysis/student-nationality/
Why, when many bright UK students are left without university places?
Not only tuition fees, but overseas students will pay higher accommodation fees as they tend not to return home in the holidays and they will also be more likely to rent the more luxurious penthouse rooms.
“Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.” Munger
This is also relevant to today’s other education story, about how medical school places are back down to 7,500 a year.
The excuse given, as it always is, is that they can’t simply magic up medical school places — but of course they can — all they have to do is stop overseas medical students studying in the UK. Sure, the medical schools would complain (they make lots of lovely £££s from them), but our nation’s requirements are more important. Anyway, if we said that the medical schools had to meet the home demand before they could start training others then I’m sure they’d suddenly find that it was possible all along to increase training places.
The other excuse given is ‘but it is expensive’ — sure but:
I was really shocked recently when an article in these pages told me that the number of doctors in the NHS had gone from 85,000 30 years ago to 250,000 now. The narrative is always that we need more and need them faster, but it would appear that the problem is how we get the existing doctors to apply themselves to their worklist better.
I have felt for a long time now that the National Health Service had become the National Wellness Service, pandering to all our hypochondria’s and minor ailments and wishes. Certainly the range of treatments and who they are applicable for has mushroomed over time. I’d be interested to see how the average patient visits to the NHS have changed over the last 30 years. Are we just trying to use it more and more.?
Wouldn’t it be really weird if it turned out there was plenty of trained people and funding for them to provide us with a decent health service, but the whole thing was fucked up by legions of non-jobs and unrequired levels of managers getting in the way just to justify their expensive existences..?
The number of medics working part time might partly explain the change in doctor numbers.
The nation’s requirements stopped being a concern of the universities a long time ago.
Recruiting students from overseas could also increase the number of ethnic minority students at a university which will be a huge advantage in the eyes of some vice-chancellors.
Those £400K+ Vice Chancellor salaries have got to be funded somehow
Exactly what I was thinking when I read this article
Trust me, your gov’ts could care less about you. The covid virus is a bioweapon released to do one thing…..depopulate. Very effective so far, more deaths to come. Excess mortality in all countries heavily vaxxed in addition to declining bitprth rates.
Where the hell is Whitty et al and Ferguson – the designers of this awful outcome. Probably collecting their undeserved gongs from the Palace. And as for the Gormless Johnson, don’t get me started.