Ummm.... DougR, it was the University of Michigan that is being challenged. Michigan State University has a similar policy, as do quite a few institutions of higher leraning in the States. The problem is that if they did NOT have such policies, they were accused of being racially biased against minority students based on cultural biases.

Now then, having worked at one of the two Universities named above, and having a daughter who recently graduated from the other one, I'm going to throw in by tuppence.

It is all well and good to aim for a diverse student population. It is also well and good to not have any quotas at all. The fact remains that both schools have "automatic admits" to the undergraduate programs - and by the way, unless I've remembered wrong, the suit was over admission to the Law School, not the undergraduate program. Along with those, there are the folks who simply are not qualified for admission - poor exam scores, low grades in high school, no "other" circumstnaces. There are also students who are admitted under controlled circumstances - that is, borderline academics, sub-par in some cases, but good athletes in the money sports. Then there are the bulk of the population.

These are the folks that someone has to look hard at before admitting or rejecting. The "not qualified" folks are normally reviewed by hand (unless things have changed in the last couple of years, which I doubt) to make sure they are really not up to snuff. These reviews don't take much effort, in reality. The rest of the folks take a LONG time to review - and that is where the problem comes in.

If there were really "set" hard and fast rules, there would be no need for people to soft through the information they do when making a decision. You could program a computer to make all the decisions and that would be that. It takes the human being to work on the details and to deal with the sticky stuff. Like most things, the people who take their jobs very seriously put a LOT of thought into the process. Others don't.

Finally - these same Universities get regularly charged with being biased because the minority/tracked student retention rate does not always fit what some ya-hoo thinks it should be. That is, kids wash out. They don't cut it. Somehow, it is the University's fault if this happens. One of those schools name above had a hard-and-fast rule against first year undergrads having an automobile on campus. The published reason was because of the lack of parking. While this was a problem, the BIG reason was the number for students who took the car, went home and did not come back after the first major set-back. The retention rates shot WAY up after instituting the rule against cars - even though they were accused of bias by INSTITUTING the rule.

Seems you can't please everyone - sometimes, ya can't please ANYONE.

Cheers -

Lunch is over - Pete