(College Park, MD) A new study released today by the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) documents evidence of discrimination based on race and ethnicity in admissions at the University of Maryland at College Park. African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinos are admitted with significantly lower undergraduate grade-point averages and SAT scores in the fall freshmen class of 2021 than whites and, again to a lesser extent, Asians. The study suggests the University will have to make substantive changes to its admissions procedures if it is to comply with the Supreme Court rulings in SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina, which forbid schools from using race or ethnicity as a factor in admission.
CEO chairman Linda Chavez noted that the study shows UMD continues to use race and ethnicity to boost enrollment of black and Hispanic students, even though the gap between median white and black students’ test scores had narrowed somewhat over the last two decades, as had the gap between white and Hispanic students’ scores.
“It is encouraging to see that both black and Hispanic admittees are preforming at higher rates on standardized tests than their predecessors in previous years,” Chavez said, “but they still underperform both white and Asian students. The lowest performing quartile of Asian students admitted had higher ACT scores than the top performing quartile of African American students, and the median scoring Asian students did as well as the top performing quartile of white students.”
CEO president Devon Westhill said: “Black applicants were more likely to be admitted than any other racial or ethnic group, almost three times as likely as whites. But that racial preference does black students no favor as they graduated at the lowest six-year rate of any racial or ethnic group.”
The study is based on data supplied by the University. The study was prepared by Dr. Althea Nagai, a research fellow at CEO, and can be viewed on the organization’s website, www.ceousa.org. CEO has previously released studies on preferences in admission at Maryland colleges in 2000 and 2001 (also available on the website), including the University of Maryland School of Medicine and undergraduate admissions at UMD College Park.
The Center for Equal Opportunity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational organization that studies issues related to civil rights.
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