Conservative commentators and pundits have often decried the recent "life challenges" loophole in college admissions. This loophole is one more way that colleges can "diversify" their populations without using race - and without having to enforce strict academic standards. If an applicant doesn't quite make the SAT cutoff but overcame obstacles, then perhaps they should be given points just for trying. That seems to be how the colleges use it, at any rate.
However, Alec Mouhibian of Liberty Magazine, who is very skeptical about the wisdom of judging life's hardships for admissions credit, writes about the topic at length in FrontPage Magazine, where he notes that the "life challenges" category can be defined broadly enough to include mental illness:
...The latest trend in university admissions is rewarding "life challenges"-- a broad criteria that includes mental illness...An article in the July 12, 2002, Wall Street Journal (the source, unless otherwise noted, of all quotations here) reported the adoption of a new admissions system by the University of California, which has been applied in its two elite schools: UCLA and UC Berkeley.
The main feature of this new system: a beefy portion of credit allotted for a category entitled “life challenges.” The definition of “life challenges”: “a wide range of personal, family or psychological obstacles,” among them “immigration hardships, living in a high-crime neighborhood [and] having been a victim of a shooting.”
The reason, as served up by Carla Ferri, director of UC undergraduate admissions, is: “You bring in students that can tackle the academic programs with enthusiasm, with strength and with purpose. That’s what we’re looking for.”...
As Mr. Mouhibian rightly wonders how such qualities are going to enable a student who's done poorly in high school to do well in college, the expected flood of "sob stories" on college admission forms has appeared:
...“The new standard has led to a flood of sob stories on college-application essays, in some cases after university staffers have coached minority students on how to identify and present their hardships.” The UC system spends $85 million a year on its outreach program. The outreach workers, “Besides helping college-bound students pick courses…coach them on how to write the essays that are a part of their college applications.” One such outreach worker from UCLA, reports the article, recently gave students at a high school “examples of life challenges that could help the students gain admission, such as having to do homework in the bathroom for lack of any other quiet place to study.”
My mother, who grew up in rural South Carolina, actually didn't live in a house with indoor plumbing until she was 16. Nevertheless, she found places to study (certainly not in the outhouse), and I'm certain that she would have been offended by any college admissions officer who gave more weight to her living conditions than to her good grades and stellar SAT scores. In fact, she would have considered her living situation to be none of the admission officer's damn business, and she would have been right.
Having to study in the bathroom gets you extra credit in admissions? What parent is going to buy their kid a desk and provide them with a well-lit room in which to study after reading that? And what parent is going to be happy knowing that their kid's application is nothing but a laundry list of whining about how life has screwed them over, and that they had to study in horrible places like bathrooms (which the parents are presumably paying for)?
Let's continue:
One need not ponder much about the implications of encouraging and basing admission-criteria on mope over merit, tears over temerity, sob over substance and, most bluntly of all, excuse over excellence. It’s more pernicious than merely acting as a clinic for irresponsibility; it’s a dagger in the heart of those students who hold any degree of dignity or integrity. The article mentions such a person, Ms. Hyejin Jae, who was spurned by both Berkeley and UCLA despite an impressive GPA and a 1410 SAT score, because she didn’t want to shed light on the fact that she’s the daughter of a struggling Korean-immigrant pastor. “I didn’t want too much of a pity party,” she said.
Poor Ms. Jae, so out of touch with the current college situation. She had no idea that her parent's struggles, which were completely out of her control, were more important to UCLA than what she herself accomplished through hard work.
So if Ms. Jae was rejected, who got in?
...Bianca Martinez (daughter of a breast-cancer patient) got admitted to UCLA with an 1110 SAT score, Dania Medina (whose sister has Down syndrome) with an 1100, and Rosaura Novelo and Susana Pena (both daughters of lower-income fathers) with sewer-pit scores of 980 and 940, respectively, while the average accepted SAT score at UCLA is around 1350.
Ms. Martinez complained about her mother's breast cancer on her college application? That's just -- morbid. And inappropriate. It's an illness, not a tool to be used to gain admission. It's right on the edge of using the misfortunes of others for personal gain. I suppose I was reared with too much proper Southern manners and discretion, but I cannot imaging writing about my mother's life-threatening illness on as cold and impersonal a document as a college application - and for some admissions officer to read? For them to know something so personal about me, or about my family members? Absolutely not.
It's not, as Mr. Mouhibian notes, a coincidence that the applicants with sob stories and bottom-feeder SAT scores have Hispanic surnames. The "hardships" loophole appears to be affirmative action under a new name, which means that even if Ms. Jae had outlined her parents' woes on her application, she probably would have been rejected just for being Korean. UCLA's already got too many of those, you see, and admitting another wouldn't be productive for making "the student body as reflective as possible of the state’s population," which is a stated goal for California's schools.
There's more - much more - so go read the whole thing. I just have to quote Mr. Mouhibian's comment on the SAT crusade before I go:
Just look at the latest hysterical crusade to ban the SAT test. Apparently, the SAT is an Anglophile. Why? Because certain minorities don’t do as well on it. Ergo, it’s “culturally-biased.” Such a claim is automatically disproven by the fact that Asians and Caribbean blacks both routinely outperform whites on the aptitude test. But forget the proof—the only way that a math-and-grammar exam is inherently biased against certain races is if an innate characteristic of those races is stupidity!
And, as many affirmative-action proponents would like you not to notice, the assumption that certain minorities are inherently incapable of doing well on standardized tests is indeed the assumption that must be made in order to claim wholescale "bias" of these exams. Such assumptions pass for "progressive" thinking these days, which is a sad thing.
Posted by kswygert at August 5, 2003 12:58 PM