Re: Sarah Palin's Family Allegedly in Alaska House Party Brawl
According to our Right Wing friends, the only reason Obama was admitted to those good schools is because of Affirmative Action, being black gave him a pass.
>" Of the many enduring questions about Barack Obama’s past, perhaps none figures more than that of his still-unreleased academic records. But a series of articles written in Occidental College’s student newspaper, The Occidental, in 1978-1979 sheds new light on how Obama may have been admitted through the liberal arts college’s renewed, “hard nosed” and “rigorous” commitment to increasing the numbers of black and Chicano students and faculty on campus.
Federal privacy laws prohibit anyone, save Obama, from releasing material from his academic years, but contemporaneous documentation from the time gives strong indication of how he might have been admitted to the Southern California liberal arts college, despite an admitted lackluster academic performance at Punahou School, an elite Hawaiian prep school.
Fortunately for Obama, he applied to Occidental during a time of declining enrollment of blacks and Latinos and an invigorated commitment to increase the racial diversity of the faculty, student body, and “diversify” the curriculum. The year that Obama applied to Occidental College the numbers of black and Hispanic students was at an eight-year low. Indeed, only eighteen blacks matriculated at Occidental in the fall of 1978, down seven from 1977.
“In recent years, a marked decrease in the number of minority students attending college has provoked complaints from black and Chicano leaders as well as concerned college administrators,” wrote The Occidental’s Bill Davis and Tom Hammitt in “Minority enrollment plummets” on January 19, 1979. “The number of students of minority background at Occidental has declined sharply over the past two years. Fewer blacks and Chicanos attend the college than at any time during the past eight years. Current admissions reports show a 10% decline in the number of minority applicants compared to this date last year.”
Obama May Have Been Admitted to Occidental College Because of Race
The student union on the campus of Occidental College. (Photo: Occidental College website)
The decline in admissions came as Occidental was increasing its standard for admission. “Efforts to upgrade the academic standards for minority students accepted by Occidental are another cause of the decline in representation of minority students on campus,” the same article reported. “It used to be that we’d take (minority applicants) if there was any chance of them succeeding. Now we’re being more selective,” Dean Benjamin Culley said. To help attract a higher quality minority student, Culley awarded financial aid differently based upon race. “Black and Chicano students, who comprise 10.2% of the student body, will receive approximately 33% of the funds available through his office,” Culley told the student newspaper.
Associate Dean of Students Yolanda Garcia suggested that the college had been race-norming, or adjusting scores on standardized test to have separate curves for different racial groups. Davis and Hammitt wrote that “some ethnic distinctions are made in the admissions process, particularly with regard to SAT scores” in regards to their interview with Garcia. It still wasn’t enough. As part of the consequences of a phenomenon that would later be known as the “mismatch effect,” Occidental was having difficulty attracting a quality minority student body, in large measure because the students eligible for admission to Occidental were going to higher ranked schools, like Stanford, instead. Fewer blacks and Latinos were completing their academic careers at Occidental than whites..."<
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Ever Wonder How Obama Got into Occidental College? We May Have Found the Answer | TheBlaze.com