Today, two lawsuits challenging the affirmative action policy of the University of Michigan will be argued before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In both cases, the plaintiffs take the position that the university’s admissions practices unlawfully discriminate against them, due to the university’s policy to take under represented race and ethnicity into account as a “plus” factor.
The dispute over the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy revolves around admissions officers giving an automatic 20 points to all African-American, Hispanic and Native American applicants in the application evaluation process. In comparison, high SAT scores are only given 12 points. The university has based its defense on the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which disallowed quotas for minority student enrollment but permitted race and ethnicity to be taken into account during university admissions.
The University of Michigan is not the only higher-level education institution currently under fire for its admissions policy. The University of Georgia’s use of race as a “plus factor” in its admissions policy was recently deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. The University of California system, on the other hand, is being criticized for the absence of affirmative action in its admissions policy. Since California voters banned the use of affirmative action in state universities in 1996, the UC student bodies have seen a disproportionately large increase in the number of Asian and Asian-American students, alongside a decrease in the representation of other races. Critics there have called for a re-implementation of affirmative action in the UC system to balance out the student body.
With the admissions policies of all of these institutions under attack, perhaps it is also time for Georgetown to review its own use of race and ethnicity in the admissions process. It is likely that Georgetown will likewise have questions asked in the near future about its affirmative action policy.
What is Georgetown’s affirmative action policy?
Georgetown is required by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to ask the racial and ethnic background on its applicants. However, this question is clearly specified to be optional. The University is not required by federal law to use affirmative action in its admissions, however, unlike the state-run institutions which are being challenged for their use of affirmative action, Georgetown has not yet been affected by such rulings.The University’s current affirmative action policy encompasses race and gender, but the manner in which these groups are taken into account is not as formulaic as many might expect them to be. The admissions process is not based on a “point system,” nor is it based on set numbers or quotas. There is no structured system that Georgetown admissions officers follow when it comes to affirmative action; instead, the context of each applicant is the deciding factor in the evaluation process. In simple terms, the more “unusual” the applicant’s background, the more the admissions committee feels that he or she would add to and enrich the campus community.
According to Senior Associate of Admissions Jaime Briseno, who has worked at the Georgetown admissions office for eight years, no one explicitly told him that diversity is a goal of the University. Nevertheless, Briseno feels that being a welcoming place that values diversity is ingrained in Georgetown’s philosophy. At the same time, however, the administration has decided that one-half of the student population should always remain Catholic in order to retain the University’s Catholic identity. Briseno added that Catholic students consistently constitute more than half of the applicant pool, thereby making the breakdown of the accepted applicants almost automatically 50 percent Catholic every year. He said that if the percentage of Catholic applicants drops lower than 50 percent, the University will then take a more active position of maintaining the Catholic identity of the student body.
In order to achieve a student body that resembles the national population, admissions officers favor candidates with backgrounds or qualities that stray from the norm. For instance, the University places value on underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities. “It’s important to know that certain students would stand out in a pool ? because they would be an unusual individual who would add to and enrich the class and community … We hope to get some of the most qualified applicants from whatever background they’re from,” he said.
The process
When applications first arrive at Georgetown, they are divided by the geographic region of the applicants’ high schools. The first person to read each application is the admissions officer assigned to the region. Some applications are deemed “automatic acceptances or denials.” In these cases, the application will then only be read by one other officer. If the application is not placed in the automatic acceptance or denial pile, it will be brought for review before the admissions committee, which is made up of four other officers, at least one of which is a student. Each member of the committee individually evaluates the application, and then the committee discusses whether the applicant is the kind of student the University wants to have in its incoming class. The final decision on the applicant is a joint effort of the committee. At the end of the process, every application is reviewed by the Dean of Admissions. The time spent on one application by each admissions officer averages between 10 and 15 minutes.
“The more unusual your background is, the more different ways the officer will look at you. A standard, strong candidate for Georgetown is someone who is very accomplished academically and on a variety of personal levels. Most people jump through that hoop pretty easily … the pool is pretty strong. It’s those personal qualities, personal experiences, personal backgrounds?this is where race, gender, socio-economic background, any unusual circumstances come into play?that make an applicant stand out,” Briseno said.
“The pool right now for SFS has a little bit more women than men. The admissions committee knows that … and so to the extent that the dean’s office or the program might feel that it would be good to have gender parity, they might take it into account. We don’t say to them, ‘for every male add an additional point,’ we just say that it would be good to have some gender parity, but it doesn’t need to come out perfectly. ‘Just take it into account, just like you would take race into account,’” he said.
Briseno said that he looked at the affirmative action process as an evaluation of the “value-added” that each candidate is bringing to the University. Since the University strives to have a student body that is both national and international in background, representing a variety of points of view, it is the applicants who promise to bring more “value” to the University that will find their way most easily through the admissions process.
Since most of the applications that Georgetown receives are from Caucasian students from upper-middle-class, public or private schools, Briseno said that it is often difficult for admissions officers to decide which of these potential students will most enrich their class.
“The candidates are all evaluated on an academic and personal attributes, and so from the academic standpoint, most of the committee members won’t differ much in their evaluations because most students are strong. Even if you’re not at the top of your class, but you’re in the top 15 percent of your class at a strong high school, you can still do the work here,” he said. “So the issue is not so much that we need to get all number-one students … We know that overall, students in the applicant pool will be from the top 15 percent of their class, so that they can do the work. [Therefore], it’s the personal attributes that allow us to shape the class.”
It’s more than a race thing
Aside from under represented racial and ethnic minorities, other groups that receive additional consideration by Georgetown’s admissions officers are children of alumni and children of Georgetown faculty or staff. Being a member of one of these groups does not entail automatic acceptance. Instead, these applications may be given greater consideration than they otherwise might have received. If an applicant is a strong candidate, being a son or daughter of an alumnus or alumnae may be the deciding factor that gets him or her in. On the other hand, having legacy will not do much for a weak candidate, according to Briseno. “It’s relative to how much of a push they need,” he said.
Georgetown students speak out
In general, Georgetown students hold very strong opinions on affirmative action in theory. However, the majority of students have little-to-no knowledge of Georgetown’s actual policy. As a result, a number of students harbor misperceptions about the true degree to which affirmative action has affected their college experience.
Former Voice staff member, Donald Sherman (CAS ‘02), an African-American student, came to Georgetown from a predominantly white, private high school in New York. After being at Georgetown for three and a half years?during which time he has worked at the University’s Affirmative Action office?Sherman said that he thought there was little that the University could do to improve its affirmative action policy.
“I don’t think Georgetown can really do anything, at least in terms of admissions because the fact is, Georgetown has an affirmative action policy and seems dedicated to it. What Georgetown can do is encourage its students to get involved in the Washington community and help kids, so that they can develop skills that are necessary to go to college,” Sherman said.
” I think that some program is necessary in order to remedy the disparities that exist between white educational attainment and minority educational attainment, but I’m not sure that affirmative action is the best means by which to attain that end,” Sherman said. “I am African-American, but I did not grow up in abject poverty. I had the opportunity to attend private school and was someone on his way to college regardless, and affirmative action sent me to a Georgetown, rather than a GW. The problem that I have with affirmative action is that it benefits people that are already going to college; it does nothing for the people who are never on the track to college to begin with,” he said.
Founder of the Georgetown University Multiethnic and Biracial Organization, Justin Williams (CAS ‘03), said that the results of affirmative action were what differentiated college from high school. “In a university, part of the experience is diversity and meeting people who are different from you?that’s what makes it different from your high school, where you’re only around people from your town,” he said.
Williams, who comes from a New Jersey high school where Caucasian students made up only 42 percent of the population, said that he felt that the University needed to strengthen its affirmative action policy. “When I look at the demographics of Ivy League schools, they have a much higher percentage of African-American students, Asians and Hispanics. I think that one thing that holds us back is that we do try to get a homogenous group of people,” Williams said.
Michael Ybarra (SFS ‘02), a biracial senior, said that he felt that affirmative action sometimes causes unnecessary tension between University students. “It’s possible that students can be made to feel like they don’t belong there,” Ybarra said. “The reason the current system is in place is because there was a deeply-ingrained system in place that put ethnic minorities at a significant disadvantage, [and] because they weren’t able to tap into the system of higher education ? I think that it certainly had its place, [but] as society moves forward, the policy should as well,” he said.
Jessica Schang (SFS ‘05), a Caucasian first-year student, said she felt academic qualifications should be the overriding factor in the admissions policy. “It’s kind of unfair if they would take a whole bunch of applications and pick the minority students and say that this is what we need to make Georgetown a more diverse school,” Schang said. “I think getting into school should be based on academics and what kind of person you are, and not necessarily what category you fit in,” she said.
First-year student Rashida Roberts (SFS ‘05), who is African-American, said she sometimes feels other students assume that she was admitted solely because of her minority background. “After talking to people about what schools I got into, some people automatically assumed that I got in because of affirmative action. I had to try to prove myself … I felt like I was challenged to defend the fact that I got here on my own accord,” Roberts said.
How successful has Georgetown’s policy been?
While Georgetown has come a long way from its days of an all-white, Catholic, male student body, the statistics for the current first-year class show that still only 23 percent of this year’s enrolling student population was composed of students from a racial minority . This percentage, nevertheless, constitutes an increase from last year’s 20.25 percent racial minority student enrollment, and a more obvious rise from the 19.90 percent minority student enrollment in the 1990 incoming class.
Within these percentages, between the years of 1990 to 2000, the relative enrollment of black students at Georgetown steadily declined, as did the relative Hispanic student enrollment. The enrollment of Asian students at Georgetown, on the other hand, has increased relatively since 1990, beginning at 5.29 percent in 1990 and rising to 9 percent in 2001, making them the most widely-represented racial minority group on campus.
Director of Special Programs Ellen Nelson van Bever said she felt minority groups have become more vocal on campus in her nine years at Georgetown. “Where I see a big difference is with the voice and strength of minority groups on campus ? There is a much more centralized force,” she said.
“I think that Georgetown is more representative racially of the general population than ? other schools,” Sherman said. “But I think that can be misleading if you have a bunch of people, be they black, white, Asian, that come from the same experience … They need to really think about how the potential student will contribute to the University, not just how the University looks on a color basis.”
Williams disagreed, saying that the University did not even provide a visual illusion of a diverse student body. “I think the fact that I can walk around campus and recognize almost every black person … the fact that there are only 380 of us at a school of about 6,000 people is ridiculous. I definitely don’t think that this is a diverse school and it needs to be improved,” Williams said. “The fact that in most of my classes that I am the one, or one of the two, black students in a class of 50 people … in no way constitutes diversity.”
The administration’s take on the situation
“I don’t know how happy or unhappy students are here. My general sense is that they are not unhappy, but I would say that we’ve been successful from the standpoint that we don’t have a problem with students leaving a year after they come here,” Briseno said.
Briseno said one of the reasons he thinks Georgetown’s affirmative action policy is successful is that in comparison to first-tier private schools like the University of Pennsylvania or Harvard University, Georgetown’s minority applicant pool is relatively sizable. “We’re a Catholic school ? that in and of itself may appeal more to students, or less to students. We may have a smaller proportion of minority candidates here, but I don’t think that’s due to Georgetown not being a welcoming place,” he said.
“Could we do a lot better? Probably, and I think to address those issues, then we’re looking at students of minority background who are not mainstreamed,” Briseno said. “If you are a Latino student who is coming from a suburban background, who is affluent, who is not on financial aid, you’re probably not going to have any issues here. But there will be that component of the Latino students that we admit that we do reach out for ? who are on high amounts of financial aid. For those students, we could probably do a lot better if we had the financial aid to provide for them,” he said.
Director of the Center for Minority Educational Affairs Dennis Williams said that he thought Georgetown’s affirmative action policy has been successful to a certain degree. “Obviously the admissions office has been successful in diversifying the student body, considering that in 1968 it was overwhelmingly white and male. I do not, however, believe that racial minority students are adequately represented at the University,” Williams said.
CMEA works with the admissions office to help encourage racial minority students who have already applied to enroll at Georgetown once they have been accepted.
“I can’t say whether a change in policy is necessary to achieve a better representation of minority students at Georgetown. It is possible that could be achieved by what I consider an improvement in practice rather than policy,” Williams said. “We could recruit more aggressively, for example.”
Where does that leave us?
The brochure sent out to all prospective Georgetown students boasts that “Georgetown students are distinguished by their notable diversity ? No matter what their cultural experience has been, students who join this community will hear languages spoken which they do not speak, meet people from countries that they have not visited and be exposed to people of religious faiths that they do not themselves profess.” While these claims are not false, the degree to which they ring true to students already on the Hilltop may not be quite as strong as the University would hope.
The Georgetown admissions office is given the complicated task of deciding who and what type of student the University wants to bring into its community. The University’s affirmative action policy demonstrates that it is committed to promoting racial, ethnic, gender and geographic minorities in the university setting. At the same time, academic excellence and quality of the application are never sacrificed. In short, the University is going about the process of diversifying the student body in the best way it knows possible.
As much as they may try, admissions officers will never be able to fully recognize the complex sides that each applicant brings to the table solely from the boxes that they check, or the essays that they write. When an applicant’s “fate” is decided in a matter of minutes, it is not surprising that universities receive angry accusations from individuals like Gratz, Hamacher and Grutter. “In the end, we have to go with what’s in the file,” Briseno said. “That’s all we can go on.”
