Racial Discrimination at UW-Madison Gets Minority Students Admitted, But Almost 50% Don't Graduate

From Linda Chavez, Chairwoman and founder of the Center for Equal Opportunity:

"The campus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison erupted this week after the release of two studies documenting the heavy use of race in deciding which students to admit to the undergraduate and law schools. The evidence of discrimination is undeniable, and the reaction by critics was undeniably dishonest and thuggish.

The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), which I founded in 1995 to expose and challenge misguided race-based public policies, conducted the studies based on an analysis of the university's own admissions data. But the university was none too keen on releasing the data, which CEO obtained through filing Freedom of Information Act requests only after a successful legal challenge went all the way to the state supreme court.

It's no wonder the university wanted to keep the information secret. The studies show that a black or Hispanic undergraduate applicant was more than 500 times likelier to be admitted to Wisconsin-Madison than a similarly qualified white or Asian applicant. The odds ratio favoring black law school applicants over similarly qualified white applicants was 61 to 1.

The median SAT scores of black undergraduates who were admitted were 150 points lower than whites or Asians, while the median Hispanic scores were roughly 100 points lower. And median high school rankings for both blacks and Hispanics were also lower than for either whites or Asians.

CEO has published studies of racial double standards in admissions at scores of public colleges and universities across the country with similar findings, but none has caused such a violent reaction.

Instead of addressing the findings of the study, the university's vice provost for diversity, Damon A. Williams, dishonestly told students that "CEO has one mission and one mission only: dismantle the gains that were achieved by the civil rights movement." In fact, CEO's only mission is to promote color-blind equal opportunity so that, in Martin Luther King's vision, no one will be judged by the color of his or her skin."

Here are links to the reports for undergraduate admissions and law school admissions.  

MP:  According to this article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the graduation rate for black students at UW-Madison in 2006 was only 52%, indicating that almost one-half of the black students admitted to the University of Wisconsin under special preferences, state-sponsored discrimination, and affirmative action failed to graduate.   The proponents of affirmative action always seem to focus mostly on the "front end," i.e. getting minority students admitted as freshmen, but never seem to pay as much attention to the "back end," i.e. getting minority students to successfully graduate.  In the case of UW-Madison, the "academic mismatch" that results from race-based preferences does a great disservice to many of the minority students, given that almost half of the admitees fail to graduate.