Category Archives: Admissions

Credit: Bing Image Creator. Pry the data from my cold dead digital fingers.

by James A. Bacon

It will be exceedingly difficult to hold an honest conversation in Virginia about the role of race in higher-education admissions and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. College administrators are the gatekeepers of data critical to the discussion and they will not share it.

I have been stymied twice this week in my efforts to acquire admissions data: once by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, and once by the University of Virginia. SCHEV and UVa officials cite various justifications for being unable to supply the numbers, but I believe the underlying reason is that university administrators simply don’t want to make the data available. Why? Because he who controls the data controls the narrative.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling restricting the use of race as a factor in admissions, I have embarked upon the mission of laying out the data available in the public domain: How have admissions and enrollment patterns evolved over the past 1o to 20 years? How have preferential policies for selected minorities fared, as tracked by measures of student thriving such as feelings of “belonging,” drop-out rates, student-loan debt burdens and post-graduate income?

In recent posts, I have documented that males and Whites are slightly under-represented in entering classes at UVa, while my colleague Walter Smith has described UVa’s use of the Landscape platform to provide school- and neighborhood-specific “context” for applicants. Last year Smith shed light on the new racial calculus in UVa admissions by showing how offers to applicants vary by race/ethnicity and legacy status. The Office of Admissions, which was commendably open with its data last year, stopped providing it after we published his article.

The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) maintains a searchable online database of higher-ed statistics regarding enrollment, admissions, tuition & fees, financial aid, student debt, retention rates, and degrees awarded. SCHEV breaks the data into dozens of different reports that are searchable by individual institution. It is an invaluable resource for anyone analyzing higher-ed in Virginia. Continue reading →

by James A. Bacon

As the debate unfolds about how to apply the U.S. Supreme Court ruling restricting the use of race as a factor in college admissions, it would be helpful for the discussion to be rooted in reality. At the University of Virginia, any dialogue should be based upon the recognition that admissions policies have transformed the racial/ethnic profile of the undergraduate student body over the past 10 years.

According to enrollment data published by the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV), the racial/ethnic make-up of students entering UVa for the first time (as first-year students or community college transfers) has changed significantly between the fall of 2013-14 and the fall of 2020-23:

Remarkably, the percentage of undergraduate White students has declined from 59.3% of the entering class at UVa to 46.9% over a single decade. Non-Hispanic Whites are now a minority. Continue reading →

Credit: Bing Image creator. College landscape in the style of William Constable.

by Walter Smith

With the recent U.S. Supreme Court restricting “affirmative action” in college and university admissions, an all-consuming question in Charlottesville is how the University of Virginia might change its policies and guidelines for admitting students.

While prohibiting the use of race as a decisive factor in admissions, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts allowed for holistic reviews that took into account race as part of an applicant’s sum-of-life experiences. Harvard University announced it intends to drive a truck through that loophole. Likewise, UVa President Jim Ryan and Provost Ian Baucom, who last week proclaimed their intent to ignore the ruling as much as possible, have not only lined up a truck but are revving up the engine.

The admissions process at UVa is opaque. The administration has refused, repeatedly, to provide me data concerning students admitted for the fall of 2023 or to answer my deep-dive questions for admissions in 2022, regarding which the Admissions Office was very cooperative… until it wasn’t. In particular, the Office has not been forthcoming about its use of a tool, “Landscape,” developed by the College Board, the same people who administer the SAT exams. Continue reading →

Mark J. Perry

by James A. Bacon

Mark R. Perry, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has filed 841 complaints over the years against universities whose policies and practices discriminate against men. So far, the Office of Civil Rights has opened 28 investigations just based on more than 100 complaints he’s filed for Do No Harm, a Virginia-based organization formed to fight identity politics in medical schools.

In one of his earlier complaints, filed in 2018 against UVa’s Darden School of Business, Perry argued that the existence of eight scholarships (and an external fellowship) reserved exclusively for women violated the School’s own internal discrimination policies.

UVa argued that the scholarships were “independently selected, funded, and awarded by the UVA Darden School Foundation, and do not involve federal or state funds.” Because the female-only scholarships were privately funded, the university argued, they didn’t violate UVa’s internal anti-discrimination policy.

Perry didn’t buy it. “I thought it was a weak defense given the fact that the Darden School Foundation is physically located in the Darden School of Business and uses UVA Darden emails and UVA Darden phones, etc. … It’s probably the case that the Darden School and NOT the Darden School Foundation decides on who gets the scholarships. In that case, UVA is administering the scholarships and that would violate Title IX.” He recently re-filed the complaint, originally lodged with the university’s Title IX office, with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

In previous posts, I remarked upon the 56/44 ratio of women to men at the University of Virginia and asked why, at a university dedicated to “equity,” such an unbalanced sex ratio would prevail. The reasons are unclear. Any analysis based upon publicly available data leaves many unanswered questions. But two things are indisputable: (1) UVa provides many women’s-only scholarships, awards and programs, and (2) the administration has evinced no concern about the gender imbalance or discrimination against males. Continue reading →

by James A. Bacon

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at the University of Virginia is incoherent in theory, arbitrary in practice, and riddled with contradictions. Nowhere is DEI policy more muddled than UVa’s treatment of men and women. UVa’s long-term goal is to recruit a student body that “looks like Virginia” in its racial/ethnic composition. Yet UVa leadership has expressed no qualms about the persistent imbalance of men and women.

Among UVa’s 16,700+ undergraduate students, 54.5% were female and only 45.5% were male — a nine percentage-point differential. The disparity exists across racial/ethnic groups. Only among foreign students are males enrolled in a slightly higher percentage than females.

Why does the disparity exist? Given the university’s commitment to “equity,” why isn’t the ratio close to 50/50? UVa officials never talk about the gender enrollment gap, which is not surprising given that the disparity cuts against the oppression narrative that undergirds the university’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives. To the contrary, university officials are in a state of perpetual angst over the fact that some disciplines, particularly engineering and the sciences, enroll more men than women. No one is distressed about insufficient male enrollment in the social sciences and humanities. Continue reading →