Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 29
generation friends she formed at school, " it seems like we're
in a system not built for us. And we feel it. "
T
hough Bleemer and Mehta's research clearly articulates
the problem, they are still grasping toward potential
solutions. Major restriction policies are massively
more pervasive at public universities than they are at
private universities, but that doesn't necessarily mean public
schools can or will copy what private ones are doing. The
scholars are now testing a few theories that could explain
the disparity, all of which have to do with intrinsic properties
that are hard to change: that prestigious private universities
have more available resources to move around, smaller
student populations to manage, and an incentive to keep
students and parents paying their high tuition.
Gonzalez, the UC Santa Barbara student blocked from
majoring in communications, has one idea: student outreach.
Though she was behind in college preparation entering
her freshman year, there were resources available to help
her catch up-tutors, faculty advisers, remedial classes. But
as an overwhelmed 18-year-old dumped alone into an unfamiliar
environment, she didn't know where to look. Now
that she does, she wonders: What if that help had come to me?
Things might have been different, Gonzalez imagines, if,
rather than waiting in their offices for her to go to them, faculty
and academic support staff had sought her out and told
her, " Hey, you're kind of at a disadvantage, but there are resources
for you, and people who want to help you succeed. "
Another simple and incremental change that could reduce
the squeeze on minority students is to make major enrollment
conditional on more holistic evaluations, rather
than grades alone: faculty and peer recommendations, for
example. It doesn't completely eliminate the gap, but Bleemer
and Mehta's data shows that fewer minority students are
excluded by holistic admissions in comparable departments
across universities. After they published their research late
last year, the UC Berkeley computer science department
made plans to eliminate its GPA requirement of 3.3 in favor
of a comprehensive model. Eleven other majors will follow
suit next year, including economics, psychology, and data
science, a spokesperson at UC Berkeley told me. Even so,
holistic major admissions is " a second-best policy, " Bleemer
told me. " It strikes me that universities would be better off
just letting students study what they want. "
That, however, would require hiring more faculty members
and staff-which means the university as a whole
spending more money-or reallocating resources from departments
with fewer majors. Either way, these are decisions
that carry political pitfalls for the deans or higher-up
administrators who must make them. At UC Santa Barbara,
for instance, faculty in less popular departments push
back on the idea of making sacrifices for the sake of in-demand
majors, says Tamara Afifi, chair of the department of
communications. If college administrators were to redistribute
that money anyway, they might have to lay off faculty
or let positions lapse through attrition-a decision sure to
be controversial. Taking money from departments like Santa
Barbara's global studies to feed demand in STEM subjects
wouldn't be a one-to-one conversion, either; studies indicate
that teaching technical fields like engineering costs more per
student. And finally, looming above interdepartmental disputes
over resources, the larger UC system is making difficult
decisions about how and where to spend money in its
constituent schools. " It's a big puzzle, " Afifi told me. " And
once you take one piece out it affects everything else. "
Afifi, who just finished her first school year as chair, said
she didn't want to keep a policy that excludes students like
Gonzalez. But for now, she doesn't see another option. The
department has 27 faculty members, 40 graduate students,
and close to 2,000 undergraduate majors. That's up from 1,215
majors five years ago, according to university statistics, with
At UC Santa Barbara,
faculty in less popular
departments push back on
the idea of making sacrifices
for the sake of in-demand
majors. If administrators
were to redistribute that
money anyway, they might
have to lay off faculty or
let positions lapse through
attrition-a decision
sure to be controversial.
little to no increase in faculty or staff. Classes are bursting at
the seams. Afifi recently approached a dean to ask for more
resources, arguing that they should be redistributed from
departments with less demand. The dean agreed that something
should be done, and then passed her on to a higherup
administrator, who agreed that something should be
done, and then passed her on to someone else-and so on.
" They agree, " she said, " but they don't give us the funds. "
To ultimately solve this problem, then, universities
must gather the will to rise above internal politics and deliver
resources where they're needed. Until that happens, students
like Savannah Gonzalez and Maria Tinoco will be deprived
not only of hundreds of thousands of dollars in future
earnings, but of their dreams, as well.
Rob Wolfe is an editor at the Washington Monthly.
Washington Monthly 29
Washington Monthly - September/October 2022
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