Comprehensive review will restore cultural diversity in classroom

Greenfield is a professor of psychology. She has been a member
of the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with
Schools, and was a member of the Life Challenges Subcommittee this
summer. This article, while informed by her experience on CUARS, is
her opinion and does not represent an official CUARS position.

By Patricia Greenfield

Today the UC Board of Regents will vote on a proposal for
comprehensive review in undergraduate admissions. Comprehensive
review provides an important tool for achieving the goal of
diversity in the legal environment of Prop. 209.

In the proposal, comprehensive review is defined as a
“process by which students applying to UC campuses are
evaluated for admission using multiple measures of achievement and
promise while considering the context in which each student has
demonstrated academic accomplishment.”

At UCLA, we have been doing comprehensive review for a number of
years. If the regents pass their proposal today, this process will
no doubt be extended to virtually all applicants.

Several working groups of the UCLA Academic Senate Committee on
Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools have been
working all summer to improve our system of comprehensive review,
while maintaining its good features and making it feasible for the
annual review of approximately 42,000 freshman applicants to
UCLA.

The juxtaposition of two directives from the regents and from
the people of California has created the central issue of UC
admissions policy: how to maintain representation of diverse groups
within the university while obeying the law and the regents. The
first directive, a resolution of the Regents of the University of
California on May 20, 1988, included the following:

“Mindful of its mission as a public institution, the
University of California seeks to enroll, on each of its campuses,
a student body that … demonstrates high academic achievement or
exceptional personal talent, and that encompasses the broad
diversity of cultural, racial, geographic and socioeconomic
backgrounds characteristic of California.”

A second directive, Proposition 209, was voted into law in
November, 1996:

“The state shall not discriminate against, or grant
preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of
race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of
public employment, public education or public
contracting.”

Prop. 209 followed on the heels of a similar (1995) resolution
from the regents, SP-1, which also banned racial or ethnic
preferences in admissions. A dilemma followed: How can we maintain
representation of diverse groups within the university (1988
regents’ resolution) while obeying the law (Prop. 209) and
the regents (SP-1)?

The initial effect of SP-1 and Prop. 209 was the precipitous
decline of already underrepresented groups in the UC system; the
most severely hit were Native Americans, followed by African
Americans and, third, Latinos. Although the population of these
groups has since almost recovered in the UC system as a whole, this
has not been the case at the two most selective campuses, UCLA and
Berkeley. At UCLA, groups that were already underrepresented on our
campus before SP-1 and Prop. 209 ““ Native Americans, African
Americans and Latinos ““ are even more underrepresented in
2001.

However, the improvement and more widespread use of
comprehensive review has the potential to regain lost ground on the
regental goal to achieve “broad diversity of cultural,
racial, geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds characteristic of
California.”

Comprehensive review must be both fair and comprehensive. The
CUARS system offers both: comprehensiveness by including 1) an
academic review based on multiple criteria such as grades, course
difficulty, AP exams, SAT I and II, participation in intellectual
activities such as science fairs; 2) a personal achievement review
including such things as student government, sports, community
service and artistic achievement; and 3) a review of life
challenges.

What are life challenges? Life challenges are barriers that make
it more difficult for an applicant to present the qualifications
necessary for admission to UCLA. Life challenges are theoretically
independent of ethnic group membership. In practice, however, they
are not. Different groups, because of their history and current
situation, encounter different challenges with different
frequencies. For example, the children of Latino immigrants often
encounter the educational challenge of having parents who may not
have had the opportunity even to complete elementary school, let
alone high school.

This challenge would be almost nonexistent among African
Americans or Euro-Americans, for example. Additionally, all
underrepresented groups experience the challenge of poor schools.
Similar to the concept behind President Richard Atkinson’s
ELC (Eligibility in the Local Context), low school quality is one
of the factors that the UCLA Admissions Office currently credits as
an important life challenge.

Virtually any given life challenge can be experienced by any
group and constitutes a barrier independent of race or ethnic group
membership.

Indeed, many challenges that are part of the life challenge
evaluation ““ for example, physical disabilities of self or a
family member ““ are shared more or less equally by all
groups, both over and underrepresented in the UCLA population.

To take into account life challenges in undergraduate admissions
is consistent with Prop. 209 because the challenges are given equal
weight in the admissions process no matter who experiences them:
white, black, Latino, Native American or Asian. They do not involve
preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or
national origin.

The way life challenges have been incorporated into the UCLA
admissions process in the past is the following: For any given
level of academic competence, that level is deserving of more
recognition if it has occurred in the presence of significant life
challenges.

The assessment of life challenges has never been a substitute
for academic competence; instead, it has been a complementary
dimension in the admissions process.

It has also been a complement to the assessment of personal
achievement. A given level of personal achievement is also more
credible in the admissions process if it has been achieved in the
presence of significant life challenges.

After the admissions cycle of 1999 was complete and the freshman
class admitted, I carried out a statistical analysis of the
relationship between life challenge and underrepresented
status.

Would it be possible to demonstrate a connection between the
number and severity of life challenges and membership in an
underrepresented group?

In 1999, life challenge evaluation of applicant dossiers
involved assigning points for different types of challenge; points
were added up for a life challenge score.

What I found was that life challenges are not equally
distributed among different ethnic groups. As the level of life
challenge rises from zero points, the proportion of admitted
students from statistically under-represented groups (African
American, Latino and Native American) also rises, and the
proportion of admitted students from statistically overrepresented
groups (Asian American and Euro-American) declines.

The relationship between life challenge and underrepresented
status is a linear one: The higher the score of life challenge, the
more likely an admitted student is to come from an underrepresented
group.

What do these findings mean? It means that life challenge
assessment successfully identifies the barriers that keep the
number of underrepresented group members down in UCLA’s
population. It also means that, to the extent that life challenges
are taken into account in admissions, we can level the playing
field for all applicants, not just for underrepresented minority
groups.

The statistical analysis also demonstrated that consideration of
life challenges makes the university more accessible to
underrepresented groups.

In other words, the statistical analysis showed that, small as
the number of underrepresented minorities were in the 1999 admits,
the number would have been smaller still if life challenges had not
been taken into consideration.

However, life challenge assessment can, for the freshman class
of 2002, be made much more effective in redressing
underrepresentation within the constraints of Prop. 209.

The effectiveness of life challenges between 1996 and 2001 was
limited in part by SP-1, which not only banned preferential
treatment by race or ethnicity, but also provided that “not
less than 50 percent and not more than 75 percent of any entering
class on any campus shall be admitted solely on the basis of
academic achievement.” Therefore, the life challenge factor
could be considered for only half the class, at most.

Today’s proposal for comprehensive review would eliminate
the “academic achievement only” category altogether. If
it passes, one obstacle to achieving the goal of diversity in the
legal environment of Proposition 209 will be removed: Life
challenges can be taken into account in admitting the whole class,
not merely a fraction.

A second limitation of life challenge assessment has been the
omission of many important barriers that individual applicants
face. One of these is neighborhood quality, which, among other
effects, shapes the applicant’s all-important peer group.

To respond to the need for a neighborhood quality measure, the
chair of CUARS, geography professor Nicholas Entrikin, has used
geographical information systems to assess neighborhood quality
from zip code and census information on characteristics such as
poverty level and the proportion of parolees living within a zip
code area.

To live in an area in the lowest quartile on this measure will
be considered a life challenge. This is an example of CUARS’
recent work to improve the fairness of the life challenge system by
figuring out ways of measuring additional barriers that can be
assessed in every application.

How can we make comprehensive review not only comprehensive but
also fair? One way is to make sure that the evaluators of applicant
dossiers have a clear set of criteria for making their
judgements.

Because of the limitations of the human brain, social scientists
have found that multiple judgments based on specific criteria are
generally more reliable (i.e., yield more agreement between raters)
than a single global judgement based on general criteria.

Another important condition for reliability is to hold many
factors constant to reduce the number of variables being evaluated.
The system that CUARS has developed and is proposing for the campus
has both these characteristics.

Agreement between raters equates to fairness: Interrater
reliability means that all applicants will be evaluated by the same
criteria to the maximum extent humanly possible.

Another aspect of fairness relates to how the proposed life
challenge scale will enter into admissions decisions. For example,
how do we ensure fairness to those applicants who have not been
challenged in these ways?

One criterion of this type of fairness would be to limit the
proportion of “challenged” admittees from each academic
rank group (based on a nonformulaic weighting of multiple criteria)
to no more than the proportion of “unchallenged”
admittees from the next higher academic rank.

In addition, the lower the academic qualifications, the greater
the degree of challenge required to compensate for it. Such
criteria and weightings ensure that life challenge is a complement
to academic and personal achievement, not a substitute for
them.

Another potential benefit of comprehensive review and the
removal of the “academic only” admissions category is
that we can admit students with high potential for accomplishment
in many fields, such as government, arts and community service
““ not just future academics.

For many years, Harvard has declined to accept a class made up
entirely of National Merit Scholars or 1600 SAT scorers in favor of
a balanced class of future musicians, politicians, writers,
artists, etc.

In this way, Harvard has produced students who are interesting
to each other and leaders in every field imaginable. UCLA has the
applicant pool to do likewise. The removal of an “academic
only” layer based primarily on grades and test scores opens
up this same possibility for UCLA.

Furthermore, there is evidence that the greater consideration of
personal achievement will also result in more balanced group
representation without using race or ethnicity in the admissions
process.

In UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television,
comprehensive review is routine and required. In order to select
from UC-eligible applicants, the school gives each applicant an
opportunity to have an audition, interview or portfolio evaluation,
as well as an evaluation of a professionally oriented essay and
questionnaire.

The result of this process is ethnic diversity. Approximately 39
percent of incoming students (both before and after Prop. 209 and
SP-1) are from groups that are grossly underrepresented in the rest
of the campus. These students have very low attrition and very high
success rates.

But in order for comprehensive review to diversify talent as
well as ethnicity in the College of Letters of Science, we must
make changes in our criteria of success at UCLA.

For the immediate future, we can put more weight on attrition
and less on freshman GPA as tests of our admissions success. At the
same time, we need to work to develop new measures of student
success at UCLA.

As a teacher, I feel that SP-1 and Prop. 209 have deprived us of
something very precious in both undergraduate and graduate
education: diversity of cultural and ethnic viewpoints in the
classroom and the laboratory.

This loss is especially noticeable in my psychology and honors
courses on culture and human development. These courses were built
around the opportunity for students and teachers to learn from each
other’s family backgrounds and life experiences.

Since SP-1 and Prop. 209, some cultural backgrounds and ethnic
experiences are systematically missing from the seminar table and
lecture hall. Comprehensive review, if implemented as suggested
here, can bring them back.

Greenfield has researched and written about child and adolescent
development, family life and school experiences of all the major
ethnic groups in California, as well as related issues in Chiapas,
Mexico and Senegal, West Africa.