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With racial preferences banned, university officials say they examine applications and essays for signs of adversity.
By BARRY KLEIN
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 28, 2001
Alexia Alvey, a senior at Seminole High School, wants badly to be accepted into the University of Florida. She has good grades, a decent test score and is editor of her school yearbook.
Here's the problem: Alvey, 17, comes from a stable, two-parent home and attends a predominantly white, middle-class high school. She has not suffered physical abuse or economic deprivation. The required essay she submitted with her application was about saving money for a trip to Europe.
Though Alvey doesn't know it, her background will do little to help her get into UF, and may actually hurt her.
For that, she can thank "One Florida," the year-old policy that forbids the state's 10 public universities from using explicit racial preferences to build a diverse student body.
Nowhere is it having a bigger impact than at UF, where officials have spent the last year revising their admissions guidelines in hopes of avoiding a meltdown in minority enrollment.
A high SAT score, for example, now counts no more toward admission than two years of attendance at a high school in a low-income neighborhood. It still helps to be in the National Honor Society, but it helps more to have grown up in a high-crime neighborhood or to have overcome poverty or family dysfunction.
Critics call the changes a subterfuge.
"These are just proxies for race -- a way to get around the elimination of preferences," says Ward Connerly, the California businessman who has led campaigns to overturn affirmative action in several states, including Florida.
UF officials acknowledge that many of the factors now being considered correlate strongly with race. But admissions director Bill Kolb says the changes also will benefit white students who succeed in overcoming obstacles.
The goal, he says, is to identify applicants who have something different to offer the UF community.
"This won't make up for the loss of affirmative action, but we think it will bring about a more multicultural student body," Kolb says.
That goal has never been more important to UF, the state's largest and most prestigious university, and historically, one of the whitest.
UF didn't have its first black graduate until the mid 1960s. Even with the help of affirmative action, its African-American enrollment has rarely exceeded 7 percent. That compares with about 12 percent for Florida State University and 10 percent at the University of South Florida.
So when Gov. Jeb Bush announced last year that he was ending the use of racial preferences, UF administrators started scrambling for ways to at least maintain the diversity they had.
Many of the ideas being incorporated this year -- the first in which all Florida freshmen will be admitted under One Florida -- are borrowed from California and Texas. Both states also outlawed the use of racial preferences in recent years.
No one is calling their ideas a cure-all. The elite universities in California, for example, are still struggling to restore minority enrollment to the levels achieved under affirmative action.
But you have to try something, Kolb says.
At UF, the result has been what administrators call a "holistic review."
The new process still places a heavy emphasis on academics. About half of the admission offers UF will make this year will be based almost entirely on grade point averages, standardized test scores and the difficulty of an applicant's course schedule.
It's a tough standard: The median GPA for freshmen admitted last fall was 3.9. The median SAT score was 1,270.
But the holistic review offers applicants who don't make the cut another way to get in. Instead of earning a polite denial letter, their packets now will be re-examined by "readers" trained to look for non-academic attributes.
That can include special talents, such as creative writing or science fair awards, or extracurricular activities such as volunteer work and after-school jobs.
But the university wants most of the readers' attention focused on the two essays each applicant is required to submit. The goal, according to the university, is to identify students who can contribute to the cultural vitality of the campus.
Applicants who demonstrate "cross-cultural understanding" get extra points. So do those who say they have overcome personal hardships or challenges.
Not every difficulty receives equal weight:
"A significant proportion of applicants may discuss the death of grandparents, or a parent or even the divorce of parents," said the section of the admission guidelines titled Life Challenges. "While this certainly will be taken into account, greater weight should be given to applicants who have never had interaction with one of their parents."
All of the readers interviewed for the story said the university has emphasized that they are not to consider race when doing the reviews.
But several said they are concerned about the subjectivity of the process.
"You can't help but bring your own experiences to the evaluation," says Vivian Fiallo, a guidance counselor at Hillsborough High School.
"Frankly, I don't think essays are a particularly effective tool for making a university diverse,' says Susan Kaineg, a guidance counselor at Seminole High. "You can only get so much out of a 250-word essay."
Connerly, the affirmative action opponent, has other problems with the new emphasis. He says it will cheat both students and taxpayers by lowering standards.
"The tragedy here is this does nothing more than substitute a misery index for academic achievement," he says.
Connerly says students will quickly learn to tailor their stories to fit the university's needs.
The guidance counselors don't think so.
"Students actually tend to understate the obstacles they face," Kaineg says. "They tend to avoid talking about anything that's really personal."
That was the case for at least six local students who recently mailed their essays to UF. All said they had no idea the university was interested in hearing about challenges in their life.
"I think they want to see whether you can communicate effectively," says Evan Eleff, 18, a senior at Hillsborough High.
"I don't want to write about stuff like my income," says Kristin DiVito, 17, a senior at Seminole High. "That's not about who you are."
Kolb, the UF admissions director, disagrees. A student's socioeconomic status, he says, is one of many factors that can add to the complex tapestry that is a university campus.
That's what the new guidelines are about, Kolb says.
"We think this will contribute to diversity," he says. "Of course, we don't know that for sure. That will take a couple of years."