DATE: Monday, September 15, 1997            TAG: 9709130017

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: BY JON SANDERS 

                                            LENGTH:   88 lines

DIFFERENT REACTIONS TO AFFIRMATIVE ACTION'S FINAL DAYS

Psychologists tell us the stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. As affirmative action slowly dies, first in California and Texas, its grieving supporters are publicly exhibiting these stages as they seek to preserve diversity in this dawning age of merit-based admissions. Solutions recommended by the University of California's Board of Regents - who are, not coincidentally, the first to reach the acceptance stage - is truly groundbreaking.

Denial. One group of affirmative-action supporters stuck in the denial stage is the Association of American Universities. On April 14, the association of 62 research universities (including Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill) published a large advertisement in The New York Times containing a statement adopted at the association's annual spring meeting in Washington, D.C. The statement contained a new rationalization for affirmative action: Minority students enhance the education of their fellow students. It is on this basis, goes the argument, that ethnicity, race and gender must to be used as consideration for enrollment.

Anger/Bargaining. In the anger stage are officials at the University of Texas at Austin law school, where (non-Asian) minority enrollment has dropped precipitously following last year's Hopwood ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. M. Michael Sharlot, dean of the University of Texas at Austin law school, has called the drop a ``disaster.''

Texas educators have shown some progression into the bargaining stage, however. As Sharlot told The Chronicle of Higher Education, ``the only true solution is for the Supreme Court to take a case and announce a rule that would be of national application.''

What Texas officials and others are overlooking are the very reasons affirmative action is being dismantled in the first place: It is discriminatory, and it harms the very people it is supposed to help. It makes sense that minority enrollment will fall if the primary basis upon which minorities were being admitted was their status as minorities and not their abilities to handle the requirements of the particular university.

The harmful aspect of affirmative action is a domino effect that happens this way: Minority students with merely good transcripts apply to an elite school. Although their transcripts don't quite meet the requirements, these students are admitted in the interests of affirmative action. Unfortunately, they often struggle under the rigors of the university, lose confidence in themselves and either take years to graduate (with poor grades) or eventually drop out in frustration.

Because the students were admitted to the elite school, they didn't seek enrollment in a less rigorous state university or liberal-arts college, where ironically they would have graduated (or done so on time). These schools meanwhile must enroll, in the interests of affirmative action, minority students whose transcripts fall short of their admissions requirements. These students struggle as well, and the cycle continues on down to junior and community colleges.

The most recent study conducted by the American Council on Education found that, in 1994, black students earned only 7.2 percent of all bachelor's degrees although they comprised 10.7 percent of the undergraduate population at four-year institutions, and Hispanic students earned only 4.3 percent of all bachelor's degrees although they comprised 7.9 percent of the undergraduate population.

High minority admission rates are nothing but image-enhancement for the universities without comparable minority graduation rates. Reports, however, tend to focus on minority enrollment. On the other hand, replacing diversity-based admissions with merit-based admissions - even if it results initially in lower admission rates for minorities - would be validated by subsequent rises in minority graduation rates.

Dismantling affirmative action could have another benefit along with increasing minority graduation rates. It could cause real action addressing why minorities are performing at lower levels in the first place. Such action is contained within the University of California board's report.

Acceptance. Drafted by a panel of educators and business leaders created in 1995 by the university's Board of Regents, the report details ways the university can help students from disadvantaged backgrounds - 80 percent of which, the report says, are black, Hispanic or American Indian - achieve the high standards required for admission. The plan would have universities work with schools and parents to boost the admissibility of minority students.

Commissioned to find ways to guarantee continued diversity of the university without using race as a criterion for enrollment, the University of California report - refreshingly - shows the way for diversity to continue the way it should, on individual merit. Its solution can achieve something no court-mandated quota can: increase the ability of minority students not just to graduate but to succeed. MEMO: Jon Sanders is a research fellow at the Pope Center for Higher

Education Reform at the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina-based

free market think tank. KEYWORDS: ANOTHER VIEW

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