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Earlier this week a group called the Center for Equal Opportunity released a 21-page analysis of undergraduate admissions data from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, charging what they call “severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity.” Wisconsin students protested at a press conference announcing the findings, while one Republican state legislator is calling for a formal investigation of the university’s selection process.
Wisconsin is already a political tinderbox, of course, and this is likely to add fuel to the fire. It’s legal under binding Supreme Court precedent to consider race as a factor in college admissions, but CEO claims that UW has gone way overboard, admitting manifestly unqualified black and Latino students ahead of more-deserving whites.
I’ve spent a good chunk of the last two days examining the CEO study, and I’ve found that it’s riddled with serious flaws. UW admissions data don’t show what CEO’s report says they do, and the group’s most dramatic claims are its most poorly sourced. CEO is, to put it plainly, misrepresenting the Wisconsin admissions process in multiple serious ways.
At the top of both the CEO study of UW admissions and their press release touting it, the group makes a breathtaking claim about black and Latino students’ chances of admission to Wisconsin’s flagship campus. “The odds ratio favoring African Americans and Hispanics over whites” in UW Madison undergraduate admissions, they say, “was 576-to-1 and 504-to-1, respectively, using the SAT and class rank while controlling for other factors.”
576-to-1. Wow. Those are some pretty steep odds. But what does the claim actually mean?
Well, let’s start with what it doesn’t mean.
It doesn’t mean that the average black applicant to the University of Wisconsin has 576 times the chance of getting in than the average white applicant. Using CEO’s own numbers, the actual figure is about 1.2-to-1. (And as we’ll see in my next post, those numbers are highly problematic — UW’s own publicly available statistics show that black applicants actually have a significantly lower admission rate than whites.)
It also doesn’t mean that a black or Latino applicant to the University of Wisconsin with grades and test scores similar to the average UW applicant has a chance 576 or 504 times greater of winning admission than a white applicant with identical test scores.
The truth is that the CEO report doesn’t ever actually say what they intend to suggest by the 576/504 figures. The statistics’ meaning, they say, “may be difficult to grasp.” The pertinent equations, they say, “are complex and hard to explain.”
So if the meaning of an odds ratio is so obscure, why use it? Why make it the centerpiece of your media campaign?
It’s a good question. And it has a simple answer:
Because any more sensible way of constructing the question wouldn’t make UW’s black and Latino students look stupid.
The odds ratio is an arcane and obscure statistical concept. (I myself misstated it in the first version of this post, as a glance at the early comments shows.) Put as simply as possible, if P is the likelihood of one thing happening and Q is the likelihood of another thing happening, then P/Q is the way most of us would express the ratio of one thing happening versus the other. If P is 95% likely, and Q is 85% likely, then P/Q is 1.12, meaning that P is 1.12 times as likely to happen as Q. That’s what most of us think of when we think of odds, and it’s what most of us think of when we think of an odds ratio.
But it’s not what the term “odds ratio” means to a statistician.
To a statistician, the odds ratio of P to Q is represented by the following equation:
P(1-Q)/Q(1-P)
To put that in slightly plainer English, the odds ratio of P to Q is P multiplied by 1 minus Q divided by Q multiplied by 1 minus P. I am told that this is a useful concept for statisticians.
But however useful it may be for statisticians, it’s not useful for us laypeople, because it means something wholly different from what we expect it to mean. Let’s see what happens when we plug the numbers from my original example into this new formula.
(.95*.15)/(.85*.05) = 3.35
So the chances of P happening are 1.12 times greater than the chances of Q happening, but the odds ratio of P and Q is 3.35. And that gap isn’t consistent between samples — in some situations the two statistics are quite similar, while in others they’re very different. Change P to 99% while leaving Q at 85% and the relative chance of P inches up to 1.16 times the chance of Q while the odds ratio of P and Q soars to 17.47.
I want to underscore that. When P has a 99% chance of happening, and Q has an 85% chance of happening, the odds ratio of P to Q is 17.47. Obviously P isn’t seventeen times as likely to happen — P isn’t even anywhere near twice as likely to happen. (Twice as likely as 85% is 170%, and when you’re talking likelihoods, 170% is a meaningless concept.) So if I tell you that the odds ratio between P and Q is 17.47 to 1, and you’re not a statistician, you’re not going to be more informed than you were before. You’re going to be less informed. You’re going to be misinformed.
And that’s exactly what CEO is counting on.
Do a Google search for “odds ratio misleading” and you’ll find scholarly articles, journalists’ websites, statistical papers, all sorts of documents all saying the same thing — it’s scholarly malpractice to highlight odds ratios in materials intended for public consumption, because the risk of confusion is so high.
And it’s not only the public who gets confused. Look how Linda Chavez, the Chairman of CEO, summarized the group’s odds ratio findings in the Wisconsin Daily Cardinal this morning:
“The studies show that a black or Hispanic undergraduate applicant was more than 500 times likelier to be admitted to Wisconsin-Madison than a similarly qualified white or Asian applicant.”
See that? “More than 500 times likelier.” This isn’t true. It isn’t what CEO claims. An odds ratio is NOT an expression of the relative likelihood of two events. But here’s the head of CEO pretending otherwise in the student newspaper of the very university under discussion.
The California State Senate has passed a bill expanding financial aid to undocumented students in the state’s public colleges and universities. The California Dream Act now goes to the Democratic-controlled State Assembly, which is expected to pass it next week. Governor Jerry Brown has not said whether he will sign the bill, but he approved similar legislation this summer and is considered likely to do so again.
Undocumented students make up about one percent of enrollment at California’s public colleges and universities, a rate of attendance far below undocumented immigrants’ representation in the state’s population (in the range of two or three million out of a total of thirty-seven million).
Charlie Webster, the state chair of the Maine Republican party, has produced documents claiming to show that over two hundred of the state’s college students have committed fraud by voting in Maine while paying out-of-state tuition.
This is a lie. It’s an evil lie. It’s just … jeez.
Here’s the deal. If you move to Maine for college, you have to pay out-of-state tution your first year. And your second. And your third. And your fourth. And your fifth. You have to pay out-of-state tuition forever, in fact, until you demonstrate that you have “established a Maine domicile for other than educational purposes.”
And as long as you’re attending college full-time, you’ll be “presumed to be in Maine for educational purposes and not to establish a domicile.” Again: Forever.
You can arrive in Maine fresh out of high school, move into your own place, live there 365 days a year. Work there, spend summers there, get married there. Finish your undergraduate degree, go on to grad school. But as long as you’re still a student, you’re “presumed to be in Maine for educational purposes and not to establish a domicile,” and the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise. (“No one factor can be used to establish domicile,” by the way. “All factors and circumstances must be considered on a case-by-case basis.”)
Paying out-of-state tuition isn’t evidence that you don’t live in Maine, in other words. It’s not evidence of anything at all. Out-of-state tuition is a revenue stream for the university and the state, and as such, it’s designed to put every possible burden on the student who’s looking to get out from under it.
Which brings us back to Charlie Webster.
What Webster is doing here is deploying a state regulation designed to deprive Maine’s college students of their money as a mechanism to deprive them of their votes. There’s no other way to describe it. Take their money, take their votes. Justice, fairness, and the Supreme Court of the United States be damned.
It’s really that simple.
Jesse Cheng announced on Monday that he would be stepping down as Student Regent of the University of California system. The announcement came just days before the final Regents meeting of his term.
The student conduct office at UC Irvine, Cheng’s home campus, ruled in March that Cheng had sexually assaulted a former girlfriend the previous fall. He appealed the finding, stepping down only after his appeal was rejected. (Cheng had admitted to sexual assault in an email to the woman, but later claimed that the confession was false, and written under pressure from his accuser. He was arrested in connection with the incident a few weeks after it allegedly occurred, but released without charges.)
In an era in which the University of California has pursued student activists with the aggressive use of both criminal and campus judicial sanctions, the mild treatment of Cheng — who, though he now denies any wrongdoing, both admitted to and was found guilty of sexual assault — stands out. In particular, it contrasts dramatically with how the university and local prosecutors have treated the “Irvine 11,” a group of students who are currently facing trial for allegedly disrupting a campus speech by the Israeli ambassador to the US.
I’ll admit that I’m ambivalent about the charges against Jesse Cheng. I know Jesse, and I’d like to believe that he’s not capable of what he’s been accused of. But whatever my personal thoughts on his case, the fact is that he was found by a student conduct board to have committed a sexual assault, and given his confession, it’s difficult to argue that the board’s conclusion was egregiously in error.
That Cheng received probation, and was allowed to keep his seat on the UC Regents until he himself chose to give it up, while the Irvine 11 saw the student organization to which they belong suspended and now each face the possibility of six months in jail? That’s not right. That’s not proportionate. That’s not legitimate.
And that disproportion, that illegitimacy, casts the whole University of California judicial system, as well as the UC’s relationship with law enforcement, into question.
Update | Read this post from Reclaim UC for more on the university’s recent history of bungling sexual assault charges. Seriously. Go read it.
A Republican-backed voter ID bill, one of the most stringent in the nation, passed Wisconsin’s State Assembly last night. The bill now goes to the State Senate, where it seems assured of passage.
Wisconsin is one of a long list of states considering similar legislation this year. Though voter fraud in Wisconsin is minimal — sources say only twenty votes were cast illegally in the state’s most recent election — the law would impose new barriers to voting among students, the elderly, and the poor, all of which are traditionally Democratic constituencies. At a time of massive budget cutbacks, moreover, the legislation carries an estimated $7 million pricetag.
One last-minute change to the legislation makes its aims crystal clear — though it was originally drafted to be implemented next spring, supporters rewrote it to take effect immediately on passage … just in time, in other words, to be deployed in the upcoming special elections which will decide the fate of state legislators targeted for recall over their recent budget votes.
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