As a result of the so-called “clout list” of applicants to the University of Illinois, the president of the institution resigned, the Illinois governor named six new members to the Board of Trustees, and the board overhauled the university’s admissions process.
One thing that will not result from the scandal is a class-action lawsuit. A federal judge this week smacked down a pair of Chicago-based lawyers who filed the class action on behalf of basically everyone NOT on the list.
In his rejection of the class action, Judge Milton I. Shadur of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois said what parents and high-school students across the land know all too well: Nothing is certain, not even a safety school.
The judge wrote: “Anyone who has had direct (or even vicarious) exposure to the uncertain world of college admissions has encountered instances in which — without any untoward practices at work — a student is turned down by a supposedly “safe” school, or a student (sometimes even the same one) is struck by the lightning of acceptance by a school that would have been thought in objective terms to be out of reach.”
The lawyers for the plaintiff, Timothy Radke, had proposed their client as the representative of a broad class of applicants who had applied to the university and been rejected from 1999 to 2009.
The lawyers, Judge Shadur said, were trying to “springboard” from the “front-page publicity and resulting furor” of the scandal. He dismissed the suit as an “overly expansive effort.”
“Each year, over 20,000 high school seniors from across the nation apply to the university for approximately 7,000 available seats,” Judge Shadur wrote. “By definition, then, some two-thirds of the class as proposed by counsel would not have been admitted in any event.” –Eric Kelderman
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2 Responses to Court Rules That College Admissions Are Kind of Arbitrary Anyway
crunchycon - November 6, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Two in one day!
bpruden - November 6, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Perhaps the attorneys need to narrow down their class to those who were wait listed. By defintion they compose a group of applicants that are admissible but for a lack of space–ie. in this instance the spots taken by the group that got in through their politcal connections. Might not the judge see this as a less arbitrary group than the more wide ranging undefiend groups of those who were denied admission?