Okay, I’ll try not to keep talking about the U of M Admissions Lawsuits until something new turns up, but I couldn’t pass up on this. The headline says it all: 3 See College Suit as a Way to Show They Belonged
The thing is it’s not about diversity and affirmative action. It’s about the fact that the 3 plaintiffs assumed that they would be accepted, because they thought so highly of themselves they couldn’t imagine that they wouldn’t get in.
But Mr. Hamacher, 23; Ms. Gratz, 25; and Ms. Grutter, 49, are ultimately pursuing a more personal goal: an acknowledgment from the nation’s highest court that, but for being white, they were amply qualified to attain what was denied them.
So, let’s say either of the two undergraduate candidates had scored a 95 (the rough guideline is 100/150 to be accepted). A minority candidate scores 100, but subtracting the 20 minority bonus points, they really only scored an 80. They have 15 points to make up to be “as deserving” of getting into U-M. Maybe the minority is out of state. That’s 10 points right there. Maybe the minority’s high school doesn’t offer AP classes, but their GPA is the same. There could be a difference of up to 8 points there. There’s your difference. Can you say that, based on that, the minority student is fundamentally less qualified to attend?
Like Mr. Hamacher and Ms. Grutter, Ms. Gratz argues that her life would probably be better had she been admitted to Ann Arbor. After her rejection, she said, she lost so much confidence in herself that she gave up her intention to become a doctor, even before she had enrolled as a college freshman.
“To me, this was a failure,” said Ms. Gratz…. She graduated with a math degree from the University of Michigan in Dearborn and is now a manager at a technology company in San Diego.
Uh, that sounds like a self-esteem issue to me. It’s not up to the University to assuage her personal feelings of self-doubt. Plus, it sounds like she’s doing better than I am right now.
All three plaintiffs acknowledge that they had been relatively confident they would be admitted to Michigan and had done little to line up comparable backup choices.
DING DING DING! But wait, it gets better….
Mr. Hamacher, who grew up in the rust-belt city of Flint, spent Saturday afternoons in the fall watching Michigan football games with his father. When it came time to apply in January 1997, Mr. Hamacher described his options as “U. Michigan and everyone else.”
*sniff*
After being rejected, Mr. Hamacher resigned himself to attending one of the more regional colleges to which he had applied, including Saginaw [Valley] State and Central Michigan.
Like everyone else does when they don’t get into their top choices. They go to their safety schools.
Though happy to be working in the budget office in the city recreation department in Flint, while taking graduate courses in public administration at night at a branch of Central Michigan University in Flint, Mr. Hamacher said he still wondered what might have been. “I just felt a wrong had occurred,” he said. “I was never able to choose.”
OMG, get over it. Regardless of why you think you didn’t get in, this shit happens to lots of students all the time. Would you be suing Harvard if you didn’t get in there because you spent fall Saturdays dreaming about wearing a sweater casually draped over the crisply ironed shoulders of your oxford shirt and beating Yale at cricket and now you’re feeling mildly disappointed and less than excited to be going to SUNY-Binghamton because that’s the only other place you remembered to apply to?
Ms. Gratz also had little in the way of choices. She had applied to one other selective college, Notre Dame, but only as a lark at the last minute, she said. She was rejected there, and for that she blames herself for spending only two weeks on her application, compared with the three months she spent perfecting her submissions to Michigan.
I did not spend a total of three months on all seven of my college applications. Granted, law school is a little different. But still, she “had little in the way of choices.” Again, not the University’s fault or responsibility. She got into Wayne State and passed on that. If it was feasible for her to apply to and presumably attend Notre Dame, why hasn’t she applied to/gone anywhere else?
Mindful that the Michigan law school was seeking diversity in its class, she said she thought her high grades and respectable test scores, combined with her life experience, would make her a shoo-in.
“Here I was, presenting an application that had to look totally different from what typically comes in,” she said in an interview that, like the others for this article, was monitored by phone by a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
Let’s repeat the key words: she thought she’d be a shoo-in.
“If the University of Michigan wanted to give someone an advantage because they were disadvantaged, that’s fine,” said Ms. Gratz, the first in her family to attend college. “But I know that our Constitution says we don’t treat people differently based on their skin color.”
What she just said: “I don’t really understand exactly what the issue is here. I’m just mad because I didn’t get in.”
