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Colleges Express Hope About Admissions Decision Washington June 24, 2004 -- In the wake of the Supreme Court's landmark rulings on affirmative action, college officials Tuesday said the split decisions on the University of Michigan's admissions systems would be more helpful than harmful to their programs. Not many colleges will be adversely affected by the court's 6-3 decision rejecting Michigan's undergraduate admissions system, which automatically awarded 20 points of a possible 150 points to blacks, Hispanics and American Indians, officials said. "There are only a few schools left who do anything like the University of Michigan undergraduate program," said Barmak Nassirian, an official with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Instead, most colleges will now find a "safe harbor" for their admissions policies in the court's 5-4 decision upholding the 1978 Bakke decision and approving Michigan law school's "holistic, individualized" system of reviewing each application, Nassirian said. Those two decisions on admissions policies particularly affect the 25 to 30 elite private colleges and 40 to 50 flagship state universities that are the most selective in accepting students and the most likely to need race-based affirmative action to ensure they have a sufficient number of minority students, officials said. The broader application of the court's decisions, affecting the hundreds of less selective private and public colleges, involves the way the schools structure scholarships, financial aid and recruitment of minorities, Nassirian and other officials said. That issue has been a particular sore point for the Center for Equal Opportunity, which opposes race-based affirmative action and has written letters to 30 colleges and universities, including MIT, challenging scholarships set aside for minorities only. To address those and other issues, college officials and their attorneys -- who Tuesday were still parsing the 13 concurring and dissenting opinions in the court's two decisions -- are calling for a national dialogue. "We're going to have a dialogue nationally, and already there are a lot of meetings being planned," said Marvin Krislov of the University of Michigan. The schools that think they must revise their policies have little time -- most begin accepting applications for the class of 2004 as soon as September or October. One of them is Ohio State University, which uses a point system on five main factors including test scores and class rank to help screen the 20,000 applications for 6,000 openings in each year's freshman class, said Mabel Freeman, an Ohio State admissions officer. A second set of factors considers race and other characteristics. "Certainly we're going to look at ... [the decision] and try to understand every line the Supreme Court said, and then we're going to sit down and start talking here about what it is we need to do," she said. Meanwhile, the University of Texas, the state's flagship college, and Rice University, a private institution, say they too will need to revise their policies, but for a different reason – to revive affirmative action. Both stopped considering race in picking students after the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1995 Hopwood decision banned race-based affirmative action. For the past seven years, that ban has ruled colleges in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. But Monday's decision overturned Hopwood.
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