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After Ruling, 3 Universities Maintain Diversity in Admissions
By GREG WINTER
Two of the major universities that were forced by the Supreme Court to abandon affirmative action policies that awarded extra points to minority applicants have experienced only slight declines in the racial diversity of the students they admitted for the fall.
To maintain those levels, however, the universities spent far more on admissions than before.
At the University of Michigan, the focal point of the court's decision, black, Latino and American Indian students accounted for 10 percent of this year's accepted students, a decrease of one percentage point from 2003. Yet Michigan spent $1.8 million more to evaluate applicants this year, a 40 percent increase.
At Ohio State University, the same racial groups, often referred to as underrepresented minorities, make up 10 percent of this year's admitted class, compared with 12 percent the year before. And at a third campus that scrapped its point system, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the percentage of black, Latino and American Indian students who were accepted remained about 7 percent.
"To those who would like to call the decision a big defeat for the university, I think these numbers show that is not the case," said Julie Peterson, a University of Michigan spokeswoman. "The changes in our admissions process did not signal any change in our commitment to having a diverse student body."
