CEO Releases New Studies Documenting Racial and Ethnic Preferences in U of A and ASU Admissions

CEO StaffRacial Preferences

The study is based on data supplied by the universities themselves. The study was prepared by Dr. Althea Nagai, a resident fellow at CEO, and can be viewed on the organization’s website, www.ceousa.org . The executive summaries of the studies are attached.

CEO chairman Linda Chavez said: “Racial discrimination in university admissions is always appalling. But the degree of discrimination we have found here, at both schools but especially at Arizona State, is off the charts.” She noted that the odds ratio favoring African Americans over whites was 250 to 1 at the University of Arizona and 1115 to 1 at Arizona State. “As a result, nearly a thousand white students during the years we studied were denied admission even though they had higher undergraduate GPAs and LSATs than the average African American student who was admitted–and over a hundred Asian and Latino students were in the same boat with them.”

CEO president Roger Clegg agreed, and stressed that, not only was race weighed, but it was weighed much more heavily that residency status. “For instance, a white Arizonan in 2007 was about eight times less likely to be admitted to the University of Arizona than a black out-of-state applicant, and at Arizona State he would be twelve times less likely to be admitted.”

CEO also analyzed undergraduate and medical school admissions at the University of Arizona, but found less statistical evidence of discrimination there, based on the data provided by the university pursuant to an information request filed by CEO and the Arizona Association of Scholars (AAS also joined CEO in its request for data from the University of Arizona law school). 

Arizona State University

 College of Law

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University of Arizona

 College of Law

  


The Center for Equal Opportunity is a nonprofit research and educational organization that studies issues related to civil rights, bilingual education, and immigration and assimilation nationwide.