Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court considered “Fisher II” — the court’s second hearing of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. Abigail Noel Fisher, a white applicant who was denied admission to UT-Austin, sued the university in 2008, arguing that its admissions policy was discriminatory because it allowed consideration of race. In 2014 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the university’s policies for a second time, leading Fisher to petition the high court once again. Although we won’t know the Supreme Court’s decision for several months, the lawsuit itself serves to shed some light on an admissions process called holistic review, used at UT-Austin to admit up to 25 percent of its student body.
What is holistic review? According to an amicus brief supporting the university, “holistic review is a cornerstone of the admission process for many institutions of higher education,” which typically includes “documented admission criteria; consideration of a mix of many academic and nonacademic factors to evaluate individual applicants in line with institutional goals,” and a review process that gives “attention both to each applicant and to the overall makeup of the admitted class.”
The term “holistic” is important because it echoes the wording of the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger. Responding to a challenge to admissions procedures at the University of Michigan Law School, the court gave the green light to the consideration of race in admissions, provided it was part of “a highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file, giving serious consideration to all the ways an applicant might contribute to a diverse educational environment.”
Because of this much-quoted phrase, “holistic review” has become linked in a very real way with racial preferences in admissions. A recent report by the American Council on Education goes so far as to say that “holistic review is now a required practice for institutions that wish to consider race in admissions.” The authors cited the results of an ACE survey showing that colleges that used holistic review as a strategy for increasing diversity found it to be very effective.
Any racial preferences should be explicit, not buried within a mysterious process.
In light of the linkage between racial preferences and holistic review, it is intriguing that William C. Powers Jr., then president of UT-Austin, told The New York Times in 2012 that holistic review was not “designed or motivated by adding to ethnic diversity,” nor was it intended to increase “the numbers of students from private or suburban schools.” What is even more interesting is the beliefs of UT students. The black and Hispanic students interviewed by the Times believed that the holistic admissions program helped affluent white candidates, while the white and Asian students thought that it helped black and Hispanic applicants.
Holistic admissions, it seems, is a sort of Rorschach image on which students project their anxieties about the admissions process. And therein lies the problem: Under holistic review, no one knows the rules of the game.
The UT-Austin website explains that its “holistic review process” includes nine categories of information. Race and ethnicity are among the factors taken into account, listed under “special circumstances that put the applicant’s academic achievements into context.” But how are all the disparate pieces of data (academic background, accomplishments, family responsibilities, and more) weighted and combined? Do all admissions personnel interpret the criteria in the same way? Would a second reading of a student’s application lead to the same admissions decision as the first?
Recent opinion pieces by faculty members and admissions personnel at UCLA, Harvard, and Berkeley have called holistic admissions an “excuse for cultural bias,” a “fig leaf” that obscures the actual decision process, and a “secretive” system bristling with “unspoken directives” and “through-the-looking-glass moments.” If faculty and admissions staff find the process mind-boggling, how are applicants to understand it?
College admissions processes should be transparent — everyone should know the rules of the game. Sociological research suggests that the less specific the demands of college gatekeepers, the more important the role of the candidates’ cultural capital — in this case, knowledge about the culture of academe. Thus, the fuzzier the admissions criteria, the greater the disadvantage suffered by those not already steeped in academic culture.
And indeed, even the Supreme Court seemed baffled by UT-Austin’s admissions process in its December hearing of oral arguments in Fisher II. The justices expressed frustration at the lack of clear information about holistic review. How many minority students were admitted through the consideration of race in the holistic admissions process? How did those students differ from those admitted under Texas’s top-10-percent plan, used to select three-quarters of UT Austin’s students? What were the criteria for evaluating the outcome of the selection procedures? As Chief Justice John G. Roberts asked, “How does the university know when it has achieved its objective?”
Ironically, it is the court itself that has created this state of affairs. In the interest of pursuing a more just society, colleges should be allowed to use preferences for underrepresented minorities. Any racial preferences should be explicit, not buried within a mysterious process. But because using explicit racial preferences would run afoul of the court — and would violate affirmative-action prohibitions in some states as well — institutions try to “find a substitute for race without admitting they are trying to find a substitute for race,” as a former Berkeley admissions director, Bob Laird, has pointedly observed. Ideally, this charade would not be necessary. But when it comes to open, honest racial preferences, the admissions officer’s hands are tied.
Rebecca Zwick is a senior researcher at the Educational Testing Service and a professor emerita at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her book, Who Gets In? Strategies for Fair and Effective College Admissions, is under contract with Harvard University Press.
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