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Studies Suggest U. of Wisconsin Bias Against White and Asian Applicants

Studies Suggest U. of Wisconsin Bias Against White and Asian Applicants
9/13/2011
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Suada Kolovic

As a student, you’ve done everything in your power to put your best foot forward – you maintained a 3.0 GPA in high school, were vice president of the National Honors Society, played on a varsity sports team and constantly volunteered at your local library – but what if, regardless of all your efforts, what mattered most was your ethnicity? According to a report release by the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), that may have been just the case if you applied to the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The CEO, an advocacy organization opposed to racial and ethnic preferences, has released a report accusing the University of Wisconsin at Madison of extreme bias based on race and ethnicity in its undergraduate and law school admissions. The center, which filed a lawsuit in order to obtain the admissions data, alleges that African Americans and Latinos were given preference over whites and Asians. The studies claim that the odds ratio favoring African Americans and Hispanics over whites was 576 to 1 and 504 to 1, respectively. For law school admissions, the racial discrimination was also severe: An African American applicant with grades and LSAT scores at the median for the group would have had a 7 out of 10 chance of admissions and an out-of-state Hispanic applicant had a 1 out of 3 chance, compared to an in-state Asian applicant (1 out of 6 chance) and an in-state white applicant (only a 1 out of 10 chance) with those same grades and scores.

Based on the findings, the CEO chairman Linda Chavez said, “This is the most severe undergraduate admissions discrimination that CEO has ever found in the dozens of studies it has published over the last 15 years. The studies show that literally hundreds of students applying as undergrads or to the law school are rejected in favor of students with lower test scores and grades, and the reason is that they have the wrong skin color or their parents came from the wrong countries.” For more on these studies, click here.

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