After the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action this summer, admissions officers nationwide are using race to evaluate applicants with the Court's express permission.
Still, not much has changed for many institutions' evaluation processes. And as the application process gears up, procedures at Penn and other universities remain largely unaltered.
"We're following the tenets of the court order and continuing to use race as an element in the process -- but not the element," Penn Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson said.
"It is the larger public universities... that work through formulas... that have had to come up with new ways of evaluation," Associate Director of Admissions at Columbia University Peter Johnson said.
Indeed, several larger, public universities are making changes to their admissions processes in order to comply with the ruling.
Most notably, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor -- whose evaluation process came under the Supreme Court's fire this summer -- has overhauled its undergraduate admissions evaluations.
"The application is completely revised" to include more questions and more essays, Michigan spokeswoman Julie Peterson said.
Additionally, "the review process is substantially different," she added.
Each application is reviewed by at least two people and then presented before a committee. Michigan "threw out the point system" entirely, Peterson said.
The university is putting greater importance on each student's family background and economic status than before.
"In 2002, only 20 percent of [Michigan] freshman came from" families whose annual income was below $50,000, Peterson said.
"We're hopeful that this process will help us to continue to recruit a diverse student body [and to do] a better job of tracking social economic status."
Peterson said that admissions officers this year are "all a little frazzled."
"It's an improvement, but it is a lot of work to make a big transition."
The University of Texas at Austin is facing an even bigger transition -- the potential move from a 7-year-old race-blind admissions process to the reinstatement of affirmative action.
Still, Texas Deputy Director of Admissions Augustine Garza said that no changes to their admissions process would be made until after the fall of 2005.
In 1996, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision in Hopwood v. The University of Texas outlawed the use of race in admissions decisions in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
However, the Michigan decision last summer overturned this ruling, and Texas is now faced with the task of re-evaluating its procedures.
Since 1997, the university has operated under the "Top 10 Percent Law" -- which grants automatic admission to the top 10 percent of graduates from Texas' high schools.
By 2002, minority representation at Texas had returned to a pre-Hopwood level.
Now, however, the university must reconcile several factors -- the Top 10 Percent Law, its efforts to decrease the student population and its desire to implement affirmative action.
"Our administration clearly wants to use affirmative action," Garza said. But he said "any kind of implementation" of race-based admissions has been tabled until 2005 because the state requires universities to "give [their] public one year's notice of any changes" to admissions procedures.
While Garza said he was unsure what effect such changes could have on the demographics of future classes nationwide, Stetson said he expects "relatively little, if not no, impact."
"We were pretty much on par with the system that the Supreme Court" sanctioned, University of Maryland, College Park admissions counselor Kori Smith said.
The decision simply gives the green light to universities to consider race as one type of diversity.
