Bacon's Rebellion

License-plate readers discriminate. Some readers might think that automated license-plate readers are a good thing: They help law-enforcement authorities capture lawbreakers. But if your priority is protecting illegal immigrants, that’s a big negative. License-plate readers, you see, were used to track down four people who escaped from an ICE detention center in Farmville. According to VPM News, federal authorities accessed Richmond’s license-plate reader system to catch the runaways. “If ATF had formally requested access for that purpose, I would have denied it,” said Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards a week ago. Virginia ACLU director Chris Kaiser finds the ICE’s use of the cameras disturbing, says VPM. “Even with the guardrails, the more likely it is they’re going to be used in a discriminatory manner or to target vulnerable communities, like immigrants.” Yes, ICE does tend to “target” immigrants. Illegal ones. They’re in the business of border enforcement!

Now for some actual discrimination… Some medical schools continue to discriminate on the basis of race in admissions, finds Do No Harm in a national survey of med-school admissions based on MCAT scores and admission rates. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited racial preferences in college admissions, Old Dominion University’s Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) is one of the worst. At EVMS the admission rate at the same MCAT score for Black applicants is four times the rate for Asians, and significantly higher than that for Whites. At the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, by contrast, Asians were admitted at the highest rate, Whites at the lowest rate, and Blacks in between, although the differences between groups were much smaller. The University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University declined to participate in the voluntary survey, a likely sign that they have something to hide. “Overall, while schools aren’t admitting many students from the very bottom of the performance distribution,” the study says, “they are admitting students from the center at the expense of those at the top.”

Why does college cost so much? One reason is that it takes longer to graduate. And why does it take longer to graduate? Two things, according to Minding the Campus (MTC). First, degree requirements are bloated. States MTC: “A standard bachelor’s degree requires about 120 credit hours, but at least 25 percent of those are unrelated to the degree itself, and probably 10 percent are completely useless. … Categories like ‘Social & Cultural Diversity’ often translate to semesters spent in courses unmoored from academic rigor and laden with ideological messaging, which not only keeps students in college longer but also delays maturity.” Second: high schools suck. “An increasingly large number of students arrive for college seriously deficient in reading and writing ability,” says MTC’s Glenn Rickets, “and so they need to register for remedial courses simply to get up to speed.”