Claremont Independent

In the last issue of The Claremont Independent, we noted that Claremont McKenna had taken a "hiatus" from QuestBridge, a program that places high-achieving, low-income students with selective colleges. Students successfully matched with a college receive full scholarships.

According to Dean of Admissions Richard Vos, Claremont McKenna made the decision to take a "leave of absence" from QuestBridge. "We simply could not afford to make additional full-scholarship commitments for the coming year," Vos wrote to the The Claremont Independent, and the "decision means that there will not be any QuestBridge National College Match students enrolling at CMC in the Class of 2013."

But investigations into QuestBridge by the Claremont Independent question the ethics of whether Claremont McKenna should continue to be involved with QuestBridge. The Claremont Independent has learned that QuestBridge's partner schools often disproportionately discriminate against qualified Asian and white students in favor of blacks and Hispanic students.

Much of the debate surrounding racial preferences in American higher education conflates issues of class and race. Proponents of affirmative action argue that race ought to be a "plus" factor between similarly qualified students, with preference for admission going to what colleges consider "underrepresented minorities." While supporters of racial preferences in admissions often justify this policy on the basis that "underrepresented" minorities are poorer than their contemporaries, recent data obtained from the web site of QuestBridge and through its public relations office indicate that all of the students are poor or lower middle class.

For the Class of 2011, the national QuestBridge program accepted 1594 finalists, including myself. One would expect, if QuestBridge is truly only seeking to offer opportunity to disadvantaged students, that the next step would be to select the most qualified of these. Indeed, of that pool of 1594, colleges gave scholarships to 103. Yet startlingly, the data reveals not an effort to determine who is most qualified -- the 103 selected actually had slightly lower average SAT scores than the original 1594 -- but an overt attempt to skew the scholarships in favor of underrepresented racial minorities. Only one percent of finalists were Native American, but fully 16 percent of full scholarship winners are Native American. Fifteen percent of finalists were listed as Hispanic (21% in you include other/no response), but 29% of scholarship winners were Puerto Rican (3%), Hispanic/Latino (11%), Mexican American, Chicano (15%). Only 13 % of finalists were black, but 25% of scholarship winners were. Meanwhile, 37% of finalists were White/Caucasian, but only 15% of scholarship winners were white. 27% of finalist were Asian, but only 11% of scholarship winners were Asian (4% and 9% of scholarship winners were listed as Asian American or Asian (including sub continent))

The QuestBridge classes for Claremont McKenna and Pomona College have been either too small or are commendably racially diverse. Not so, with Scripps College. In its four years as part of the QuestBridge Program, Scripps College has never admitted a white or Asian student. For the Class of 2010, 5 out of 6 Scripps students are Hispanic, and one is black. For the class of 2011, three out of three are Hispanic. For the class of 2012, four of five are Hispanic, while one is black and finally, for the class of 2013, two out of three are Hispanic, and one is black.

The Claremont Independent sat down with Patricia Goldsmith, Scripps College's dean of admission, to find out how the Quesbridge process works.

"Students apply to QuestBridge, QuestBridge identifies about a thousand finalists, giving those students an opportunity to enter the QuestBridge schools they would like to be considered by. We look at those students, read their files very carefully and then we have a committee process wherein we decide which of the finalists are going to be getting the scholarship," says Dean Goldsmith.

Responding to charges that QuestBridge is only for minorities, Goldsmith stressed that QuestBridge is for low-income students and said that QuestBridge is currently at work to see if it can find a way to include low-income Jewish students, a prospect she found promising.

But when pressed with the racial disparity at Scripps College, Goldsmith appeared to backpedal: "We have elected to use our scant resources to bring in the traditionally underrepresented students." The phrase "traditionally underrepresented minorities" tend not to include poor whites and Asians who aren't well represented on America's campuses, due to their socio-economic status.

This finding is significant as QuestBridge seeks to help only low-income families and on the FAQ questions page, it says that the program is not only for "minorities." In addition to Scripps College and Pomona College, over twenty colleges participate in the program, including Amherst, Columbia, Notre Dame, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Williams, and Yale. Nationally, according to the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, 59% of college students oppose racial preferences, although local figures are hard to come by. In contrast to Scripps, Richard Vos of Claremont McKenna's admissions says that when Claremont McKenna was a part of QuestBridge, it did not discriminate on the basis of race. "The nature of the QuestBridge applicant pool was (and probaly still is) such that it is very racially diverse in the first place," he said.

The debate here at the Claremont Colleges must now be a frank one. Are we willing to openly practice racially-biased admissions? Or, more broadly, should we even treat race as a fundamental quality of character at all? Either way, we must engage the issue publicly and head-on.

Charles Johnson CMC '11 is editor of the Claremont Independent.