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Virginia Admissions Conflicts: Residence, Region, ?Diversity?

Admissions to very selective public universities like the University of Virginia (or at least nominally public; UVa receives only 8% or so of its operating budget from the state) are trickier and more fraught with conflict than admission to selective private institutions. There are debates, for example, over how many students to accept from out of state as well as which parts of the state are favored over others.

Virginia is now enjoying another of these hardy perennial controversies, as state legislators have introduced several bills recently to limit out of state admissions. As the Washington Post reported two days ago,

RICHMOND -- Valedictorian Phillip Wears boasted a 4.01 grade point average, served as captain of his lacrosse team and won awards for photography and television production when he graduated from South County Secondary School last year. But he still couldn?t get into the University of Virginia. ?He was kind of shocked more than anything,? said his mother, Millie Wears of Fairfax Station. ?It?s a Virginia school. You have a student who has a 4.0. How can you say no??

State legislators say they think they know the answer: An increasing number of Virginia students with top grades and impressive test scores, many from populous Northern Virginia, are losing slots at the state?s premiere schools to out-of-state students....

?We?re in a situation where we have the ?University of New Jersey-Charlottesville? campus and the ?University of Pennsylvania-Williamsburg? campus,? Del. Timothy D. Hugo (R-Fairfax) said. ?I think that needs to come to an end.?

The same point, with quotes from other legislators, was made in the Richmond Times Dispatch a few weeks ago. These legislators, and the parents they represent, are agitated because they see their sons and daughters denied admission to the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, and William and Mary in favor of out of state students, and the anger is especially intense in populous Northern Virginia. That region has an additional grievance, seemingly voiced less in this most recent round of complaints but always present, because, as this data from 2000?2002 shows (no reason to think this has changed), Northern Virginia applicants to UVa have the highest test scores in the state but the lowest percentage of acceptances.

For their part, university and state education officials make two main arguments: money and, you guessed it, diversity. Regarding the money, they note that reducing the number of out of state students would be very expensive, since those students pay a much higher tuition.

At U.Va., each 1 percent drop in the number of out-of-state undergraduates would cost the university about $3 million, [executive director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Daniel] LaVista said.

The 31 percent of out-of-state undergraduates there account for 63 percent of the school's tuition revenue, said Carol Wood, a U.Va spokeswoman.

The diversity argument in the recent flurry of complaints has been quite attenuated, where it has not been silly, such as when ?Del. Joseph D. Morrissey (D-Richmond) said that schools would be ?boring and sterile? places if they admitted only Virginians who want to study law and medicine.? Well, yes, but of course all the students admitted from Virginia are not in pre-law or pre-med.

But there is another diversity argument ? actually, a ?diversity? argument ? that current critics of out of state admissions curiously are not making but should make: that admissions officials and university minority offices actively recruit out of state in order to increase the numbers of black and Hispanic students.

I?ve discussed the problem (at least I think it?s a problem) of recruiting out of state minorities a number of times. For example, UVa chief diversity officer William Harvey has been quite explicit about this, as I noted here in discussing one of his speeches:

This was the problem Harvey addressed in his recent speech:

Harvey noted that Latinos and Hispanics currently comprise approximately three percent of the University undergraduate population, while Latinos and Hispanics make up approximately seven percent of the Commonwealth's population.
....
The number of Latino/Hispanic faculty members at the University is also considered inadequate, Harvey noted.

And the solution, or part of it:

Harvey said as one-third of University students are not from the Commonwealth, the University should actively recruit students from states with large Latino/Hispanic communities.
....
?Our faculty recruitment is not nearly as strong as we would like,? Harvey said. ?We need to be much more vigilant.?

So, because Hispanics are ?underrepresented,? they should be rounded up and brought in from other states, and the faculty should be more ?vigilant? in its recruiting. A friend of mine was involved in recruiting at UVa this year, and to require him to be more ?vigilant? for minority hires would have meant insisting that he keep his eye out for them about 36 hours a day.

But does the number of Hispanics at UVa really represent a problem that needs to be solved? Consider:

Approximately 37 percent of Latinos and Hispanics who apply to the University are accepted, Harvey said. According to the Office of Admission Web site, 38 percent of students who applied for admission in the fall of 2004 were accepted.

Since The University turns away large numbers of qualified students, including many who could provide ?diversity? on any number of grounds, is it really a good idea to spend scarce resources to persuade students who are not now applying to apply?

Another example: according to UVa data for the class entering in Fall 2005 that I summarized here,

• 7% of the applicants were black;

• 12.3% of the admittees were black;

• 29.4% of the non-black applicants were admitted;

• 57.1% of the black applicants were admitted.
  

And, as I asked here, ?what was the reaction among officials at UVa? to the fact that the black admission rate was so much higher than for other groups? The answer (quoting from an article in the Cavalier Daily):

?You have to attribute that high-yield rate to the excellent job that the Office of Admission has done this past year,? African-American Affairs Dean M. Rick Turner said. ?They were on a special mission to really cull the country, enticing the very, very best African-American students to come to the University of Virginia....?

Finally, here is my discussion of data in an article that appeared in the Washington Post back in 2003:

A front page story in today?s Washington Post discusses discrimination in admissions at the University of Virginia ... against applicants from Northern Virgina.

Of the current sophomore, junior and senior classes, 47.7 percent of Northern Virginia applicants to the university's College of Arts and Sciences were admitted, compared with 54.5 percent from other urban and suburban regions, such as the Richmond and Norfolk areas, and 54 percent from rural communities.

This despite the fact that Northern Virginia?s schools are generally considered the strongest in the state, and one school, the highly selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, typically has a UVa admission rate of 80% or more.

In a very interesting and unexplored comparison, the article points out ? but does not analyze in any way ? that black applicants are accepted at a significantly higher rate.

Black applicants appear to have had an edge in the process. Though as a group they had lower SAT scores, about 69 percent were offered admission, higher than any other racial [or geographical!] subset.

Does this very high acceptance rate reflect only applications from blacks who are Virginia residents? The article doesn?t say. Are out of state blacks with low scores accepted at a higher rate than white or Asian or Hispanic Virginia residents with high scores? The article doesn?t say.

So far as I know, UVa has never released data that would answer this question.

If the legislators who are examining out of state admissions are serious about their effort, they will confront the degree to which the decision to ?cull the country? in search of racial and ethnic ?diversity? discriminates against residents of Virginia.

Full post as published by Discriminations on February 26, 2009 (boomark / email).