Ever since Gann came to Claremont from Duke Law in 1999, she has stressed diversity. In 2004, she defended Kerri Dunn, a visiting psychology professor who faked a hate crime against herself and her car (Dunn was imprisoned for insurance fraud).
Claremont McKenna College, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles, has earned international infamy for fraudulently misreporting its SAT scores to game the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Richard Vos, dean of admissions since 1987, resigned in disgrace Monday, starting a nationwide debate about the role of SATs in higher education and the integrity of Claremont’s admission process. But absent from any analysis is this: Vos began falsifying SAT scores in 2005, right around the time Claremont began to institutionalize racial preferences. An investigation of the data since released suggests that Claremont manipulated the school’s scores to cover up admittance of under-qualified minority students.
Pamela Gann, Claremont McKenna College’s president
Every spring, Claremont reports SAT scores from the preceding fall entering class to U.S. News & World Report. For the class admitted in 2004, its scores and data are sent in March 2005 and published in the fall issue.
The timing is relevant here because, in 2004, Claremont began admitting its first of four classes from the Posse Foundation, a full-scholarship program for inner-city students from Los Angeles. Ten students were admitted per year into a class of about 250 students, for a total of 40 students over four years. The students were personally interviewed by Vos and Gann, according to a press release from the college’s website in late December 2003, but in his 2005 report to U.S. News–the first year Posse students were admitted–Vos began falsifying SAT scores. The actual and manipulated mean SAT verbal and math scores are below; the median are accessible here.
In 2007, Claremont began admitting students from QuestBridge, another scholarship program for students from poor and largely minority backgrounds. Posse has partnered with such schools as Bowdoin, Brandeis, Bryn Mawr, Colby, DePauw, Grinnell, Middlebury, and Vanderbilt; QuestBridge has partnered with some thirty-one other colleges, including most of the Ivy League, M.I.T., Pomona, Oberlin, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Williams.
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