Dequantifying diversity: affirmative action and admissions at the University of Michigan

Abstract

To explore the limits of quantification as a form of rationalization, we examine a rare case of dequantification: race-based affirmative action in undergraduate admissions at the University of Michigan. Michigan adopted a policy of holistically reviewing undergraduate applications in 2003, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional its points-based admissions policy. Using archival and ethnographic data, we trace the adoption, evolution, and undoing of Michigan's quantified system of admissions decision-making between 1964 and 2004. In a context in which opponents of the system had legal avenues to engage a powerful outside authority, we argue that three internal features of the University's quantified admissions policy contributed to its demise: its transparency, the instability of the categories it quantified, and the existence of qualitative alternatives. Our analysis challenges the presumed durability and inevitability of quantification by identifying its vulnerabilities and suggests that quantification should be understood as a matter of degree rather than a simple binary.

Making a Civil Rights Claim for Affirmative Action

“…Admissions officers across the country adopted his conception of diversity in their public discourse and construed affirmative action as diversity management (Lipson 2007). The institutionalization of affirmative action was facilitated by other field-level factors in addition to the Court’s decisions, such as isomorphic pressures on admissions offices and administrators’ professional norms (Lipson 2007), the demands of bureaucratized decision making (Hirschman et al, forthcoming), and universities’ efforts to sell applicants on universities (Berrey 2011; Stevens 2007)—and sometimes in response to campus activism.…”

The Editorial Meeting at a Little Magazine: An Ethnography of Group Judgment

“…Formally, however, one of the clearest analogies to my case is college admissions, which also involves relatively private group evaluation that first considers a few immediately perceptible criteria, and then turns to holistic deliberation concerned with a vague notion of fit (see Stevens 2009). The similarity is particularly striking in cases where admissions offices have dequantified their activity in order to preserve key institutional goals (Hirschman, Berrey, and Rose-Greeland, 2016). However, eneralization-or speculation-in this direction does not sit easily beside norms about what ethnographers are expected to pay attention to in the field and report in publications (on striking such a balance, see generally Small 2009 andDuneier 2011).…”

Standardizing Biases: Selection Devices and the Quantification of Race

“…Porter (1995) argues that quantification is a weapon of the weak, used by experts who have lost their authority to make unchallenged decisions. Yet scholarship has paid much less attention to the conditions under which quantification provides that authority (Hirschman et al 2016), particularly when related to such controversial subjects such as race and equality.…”

“…But while many selective universities turned to individualized review, Michigan began creating a system of quantified admissions. Faced with increased application volume and tight budgets, Michigan sought to enroll a diverse student body in as efficient a fashion as possible (Hirschman et al 2016).…”

“…Quantification seems to provide a rational, objective tool for standardizing decisions (Porter 1995). But there is more than one way to use numbers to make a given decision, numbers are not value free, and not all numbers carry the same air of objectivity and rationality (Hirschman et al 2016). Racism is itself easy to standardize.…”