Trump and the Secrets of College Admissions

His transparency order will make real the Constitution’s ban on affirmative action

By Edward Blum. He is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Excerpts:

"some have adopted opaque scoring systems that appear to use racial proxies—seemingly neutral factors that effectively correlate with race and can be used to achieve the same racial outcomes as explicit preferences."

"Examples include giving extra weight to ZIP Codes or census blocks with heavily minority populations or awarding large boosts for attending certain majority-minority high schools. Other proxies include “neighborhood wealth index” scores and targeted recruitment from racially homogeneous areas."

"Harvard . . . consistently downgraded Asian-American applicants on subjective “personality” ratings while giving large boosts to black and Hispanic applicants with lower academic scores."