Colleges and universities should use alternatives to race in working to create a diverse student body, Boston University professor Glenn Lowry said Saturday in the Photonics Center.
Lowry, director of BU’s Institute of Race and Social Division, spoke during part of a larger weekend symposium in the Photonics Center, called ‘Blacks and Asians in the Making of the Modern World: A Conversation Across Fields.’
Lowry called his method of achieving diversity without looking at race ‘color-blind affirmative action.’ College should use an equation to predict the success of their applicants, rather admit students using crude judgments based on their race, Lowry said.
‘Color-blind affirmative action’ is ‘an indirect way to provide diversity [that is] not motivated by racial goals,’ Lowry said.
The equation takes several factors into account, Lowry said, including students’ SAT math and verbal scores, their mother’s and father’s educations, family incomes and high school ranks. Each characteristic would then be placed into equations to predict student’s expected college performance, he said.
Lowry’s equation, or something similar, would eliminate the need for a ‘race box’ on college applications, though colleges could still count on culturally diverse freshman classes, he said.
‘There is an effort to try to find an alternative way for diversity to be pursued without regards to race,’ he said.
The method also has the potential to ‘abandon discrimination between students,’ Lowry said. The equation also provides a way for colleges to accept students who are projected to perform the best during their years at a school, he said.
Lowry said he came up with his equation through an extensive process of tabulating performance and characteristic statistics for students entering seven different colleges in 1999, though he did not reveal whether BU was one of the colleges.
Each accepted class was cut in half to make a ‘hypothetical’ class, and the class’ applications were placed through his equation. Lowry said college performances predicted by the equation correlated with the student’s true academic achievements.
But Lowry said colleges can also use other methods to work toward increased diversity by not overtly focusing on race.
Schools that judge applicants primarily on test scores can be unfair racially, he said. Considering applicants without requiring test scores can help increase diversity, he said.
Other plans, like Texas public colleges’ admittance of students within the top 10 percent of their high school classes regardless of location or circumstances, also help diversity without considering race, he said.
‘This rule works well in states where students are relatively segregated,’ Lowry said.
But such plans are not without pitfalls, he said.
‘Race alternatives can work,’ Lowry said, ‘but at a cost.’
Because only those with near-perfect SAT scores would decide to report their scores to schools where that information is not required, those who decide to opt out of reporting their scores could be hurt, Lowry said.