Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.

From KOAT:

UNM students who said in interviews Wednesday that they were unsatisfied expressed frustrations ranging from class availability to a sense of detachment from university decision-makers according to the Performance Effectiveness Report.

UNM’s satisfaction rate has remained at 77 or 78 percent over the past 10 years.

Student satisfaction rates are higher than 95 percent at New Mexico State, Eastern New Mexico and Highlands universities. Students at New Mexico Tech and Western New Mexico report satisfaction rates above 84 percent.

University of New Mexico enrolls the most students of any university in the state, and is one of New Mexico’s largest job-generators. The university enrolls roughly 21,000 undergraduate students, while New Mexico State has 14,572 matriculating undergraduates and Eastern New Mexico and New Mexico Tech enroll 5080 and 1454, respectively.

Higher education has been under a microscope as job prospects have dimmed and additional education has become more valued. New student increases are forcing campuses to find new revenue streams to keep up services, often resulting in admitting more students who pay either higher or a greater percent of their tuition. The trend is most visible at public universities that have set their sights on out-of-state candidates who pay considerably greater tuition than local students — at times three times as much.

Taking into account a student’s ability to weather the financial burden of higher education has increasingly become an ethical dilemma.

Student default rates, as determined by the two-year cohort rate calculated by the U.S. Department of Education, is at a 12-year high, with 8.8 percent of graduates not paying their college loans for 270 days or more. A report issued (pdf) by the New America Foundation found that 15 percent of graduates defaulted, while 21 percent were delinquent on their payments.

But despite the costs and risks of falling behind in payments, arguments college is still worth it price abound.

Individuals possessing a college-equivalent degree can expect to earn 80 percent more than a person with a high school degree. An earlier study from researchers at Georgetown University found a college degree holder can expect to make $1.4 million more than someone with a high school degree.

The trend is most visible at public universities that have set their sights on out-of-state candidates who pay considerably more than local students — at times three times as much.

Anonymity was granted to 462 top admissions officials to offer candid replies to what they look for in the applicant pool. The survey shows most admissions officials interviewed are sensitive to the economic toll college can have on families, and make their selections eyeing a student’s ability to repay their debts. While aid budgets have spiked during the economic downturn, bolstering the reserves means admissions counselors must juggle access and sustainability:

In Inside Higher Ed’s previous surveys, of presidents and business officers, large percentages of colleges have reported responding to the economic downturn by increasing their aid budgets. This survey doesn’t contradict that finding, but shows between 12 and 31 percent of four-year colleges (depending on sector) saying that they are paying more attention to applicants’ ability to pay in admissions decisions, that they are increasing their discount rate (the percentage off the sticker price that students actually pay), and that the increases in discount rate are unsustainable.

Some ten percent of colleges sampled in the survey report admitting students who could pay full price despite their grades and test scores trailing the results of other admitted peers.

Steps are being taken, however, to expand college education to a greater swath of students. The researchers state “there is near universal agreement among admissions directors” that affirmative action measures, even those that look past lackluster secondary performance, are invaluable. And while 12 percent of admissions officials reported their admissions process does not require submitting standardized test results, closer to 25 percent said scores from exams like the SAT and ACT should be optional.

Still, other aspects of an applicant’s means is corrupting the selection process, admissions officials who were surveyed admitted:

Just over 53 percent of admissions directors, for example, report that coaching by college counselors and parents makes it difficult to truly learn about applicants, and just over 25 percent report a serious problem created by plagiarism in applicant essays.

While a quarter of the time, senior school officials influence the admissions team to select certain applicants otherwise not given consideration:

A significant minority of admissions directors report receiving pressure to admit certain applicants — with 28 percent having experienced the pressure from senior-level administrators, and 24 percent having felt the push from trustees and from development officials.

Other facets of the admissions process scrutinized were percentage of surveyed schools who upped their discount rates, the policy of hiring recruiting agents paid on commission to find international candidates and the type and percentage of students — athletes, alumni, minorities, veterans, men, women and foreign applicants — who are given an acceptance letter despite lower-than-average pool-applicant grades.

Taking into account a student’s ability to weather the financial burden of higher education is an increasingly ethical dilemma. Student default rates, as determined by the two-year cohort rate calculated by the U.S. Department of Education, is at a 12-year high, with 8.8 percent of graduates not paying their college loans for 270 days or more. Using a more comprehensive metric, a report issued (PDF) by the New America Foundation found that 15 percent of graduates defaulted, while 21 percent were delinquent on their payments.

According (PDF) to the College Board, tuition prices have grown an average of 5.6 percent on top of inflation since 2001, translating into a 28 percent jump in tuition costs. While in 2006 tuition at an in-state four-year college was (PDF) $5,804, this year the same stream costs $7,605. Tuition does not include other charges like computers, transport, textbook fees and room and board.

“If any state action should respect racial equality, it is university admission. Selecting those who will benefit from the limited places available at state universities has enormous consequences for their futures and the perceived fairness of governmental action,” lawyers argue in the petition to the Supreme Court.

In 2008 the Washington-based Project for Fair Representation filed a lawsuit on behalf of the same student, Abigail Fisher, and her co-plaintiff Rachel Michalewicz, alleging that UT violated their 14th Amendment rights by using race in rejecting their applications, while minority students with lower grades were admitted.

U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks rejected the argument in that case, writing that the University’s policy was narrow enough in supporting “ a compelling governmental interest,” and therefore constitutional. An appeals court upheld UT’s use of race in their admissions policy this year, according to the Statesman, and the case even drew a brief from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Fisher’s suit is just one of many cases across the country brought by the Project for Fair Representation and dealing with affirmative action. Founded in 2005, the firm led Founded by anti-affirmative action activist Edward Blum in 2005, According to Texas Tribune.

Blum, a visiting fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, was also a senior fellow from 2002-2006 at the Center for Equal Opportunity, which “supports colorblind public policies and seeks to block the expansion of racial preferences and to prevent their use in employment, education, and voting,” according to its website.

Before that, Blum drew controversy for his work as president of the Campaign for a Color-Blind America Legal Defense and Educational Foundation, which was highly critical of the City of Houston’s hiring practices. He also worked as a trader at the brokerage firm Paine Webber, which did business with the city. Houston Mayor Bob Lanier’s criticism of the company for employing Blum led to Blum’s resignation.

The case has brought up discussion of another affirmative action case involving Texas. In 1996 Cheryl Hopwood, an applicant to the University of Texas, law school filed a lawsuit against the state for the inclusion of race in the admission policy. The 5th Circuit ruled against UT, and the Supreme Court declined to review the decision essentially ending affirmative action in admission to public universities in Texas.

Texas Attorney General Dan Morales issued an opinion extending the decision to all state schools, which led to the so-called top ten percent rule in 1997, which granted admission to all students ranked in the top tenth of their high school class to all state-funded universities.

Then in 2003, the University of Texas announced it would reintroduce the inclusion of race in the admissions process, “modifying its policies” to comply with recent Supreme Court rulings to “produce even greater diversity” with a combination affirmative action and “top ten percent” policies.

The 9-7 vote produced five vocal dissenters including Chief Judge Edith Jones, who accused her colleagues of possessing, “an unachievable and unrealistic goal of racial diversity at the classroom level to support the university’s race-conscious policy,” according to the Houston Chronicle.

The Austin American-Statesman reported that the minority opinion is “a stinging dissent” that said the three-member panel had given “total deference to University administrators” when it should have applied “strict scrutiny” to the use of affirmative action.

The vote follows a January ruling by a three-judge 5th Circuit Court panel that upheld a previous decision by U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks, who ruled in favor of UT in 2009. Female plaintiffs Abigail Fisher and Rachel Michalewicz still have the opportunity to petition the U.S. Supreme Court. Patricia Ohlendorf, vice president for UT legal affairs, told The Daily Texan she is “confident in the University’s position” should the plaintiffs appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court due to, “favorable rulings so far and a legal team including the current and former solicitors general of Texas.” The Project on Fair Representation (PFR), a nonprofit legal defense fund that does not agree with race-based admission policy, financially backed the students’ suit.

PFR is an initiative of Donors Trust Inc., a Beltway-based nonprofit that also operates the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, as the Texas Independent has previously reported. Donors Trust specializes in accepting contributions then expending them on conservative causes based on the intent of the donors, who remain one step removed from the final recipients.

PFR has made headlines for its challenges of the Voting Rights Act, including the pending case Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder.

Read the Texas Independent for previous reporting on Fisher v. Texas.

In the suit, the two students cite the state’s “Top 10 Percent Rule,” an admissions process that automatically admits the top 10 percent of a high school graduating class, as a mechanism already in place to ensure diversity and questioned the necessity of considering race in admissions in light of the rule. The measure, enacted in 1997, sought to increase minority enrollment as a result of a ban on race-based admission decided by a ruling in the Hopwood v. Texas affirmative action legal case the previous year. Six years later the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action at the University of Michigan’s Law School in 2003, wiping away the Hopwood decision and reenacting the race-based admission process.

UT has struggled with maintaining diversity among its student body population throughout the years. The university set a precedent in fall 2010, enrolling more non-white students as first-time freshman than white students, however, they may be merely playing a long game of catch up, according to a Texas State University study highlighting the detrimental impact on traditionally underrepresented minority enrollment catalyzed by the Hopwood case. While the total number of Black and Hispanic students steadily increased within most major academic departments prior to the ruling, the study found immediate significant drops among black and Hispanic enrollment following theHopwood decision. Additionally, research indicated the Top 10 Rule to be ineffective at offsetting Hopwood‘s impact by boosting minority inclusion, as the total Black and Hispanic enrollment numbers failed to increase with the implementation of the Top 10 Rule.

Similarly, an American Bar Association report focusing on the UT Law School found a dramatic drop in minority enrollment post-Hopwood. Black enrollment dropped more than 90 percent in the first year, from 38 students to four, and Mexican-American enrollment dropped nearly 60 percent, from 64 to 26. Without affirmative action, the author wrote, many law classes would have no African-American or Mexican-American students.

Dr. Boyce Watkins at theGrio lists some of the disheartening statistics about the disproportionate effect the recession has had on African-Americans.

In January 2009, black unemployment was 72 percent higher than white unemployment (7.8 percent to 13.4 percent) according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In January 2010, that difference has risen to 80 percent (9.6 percent to 17.3 percent). The white unemployment rate rose by 1.8 percent during 2009, while the black unemployment rate rose by more than twice as much, 3.9 percent. While we know that black men have it worse than black women when it comes to employment levels, black female unemployment grew by more than four times that of white women (4 percent to .9 percent). All the while, black men are sitting on an unemployment rate of 19.5 percent, a 3.7 percent rise since the start of the year…Black teen unemployment is 80 percent higher than that of white teens (43.5 percent to 24.1 percent), presenting another serious long-term problem.

The stimulus package was meant to target groups — like construction workers, who are predominately male — who were disproportionately affected by the economic downturn. And yet African-American workers continue to lose their jobs and remain jobless at a disproportionate rate.

Titania Kumeh at Mother Jones knows why: The stimulus isn’t helping African-Americans in part because it isn’t helping the urban poor. She cites a new report by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity that shows that because the stimulus wasn’t targeted at African-Americans and didn’t address some of the unique barriers faced by African-American communities, it simply isn’t working as effectively for African-Americans as it is for the rest of the country. Worse yet, because the stimulus monitoring system isn’t designed to track outcomes by gender or race, there’s virtually no way for the government to notice, except in retrospect as it examines unemployment data broken down by race.

What does this say for the rest of Obama’s initiatives? It indicates that leaving race out of the conversation or the solutions will do little more than make the issues more palatable to those who oppose affirmative action. It also shows that the roots of economic disparity might well differ based on race, and might require different solutions based on race — or else the historical status quos, like African-American unemployment being stuck above 10 percent, will remain.

In case anyone missed the point, Buchanan argues that the prize committee “reinforced the impression that Obama is someone who is forever being given prizes — Ivy League scholarships, law review editorships, prime-time speaking slots at national conventions — he did not earn.” The idea that Obama didn’t “earn” his 2004 DNC speech is, needless to say, sort of crazy.

Sessions repeatedly tried to suggest that Sotomayor had contradicted her promise during her earlier confirmation hearing to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the law, including Supreme Court rulings barring racial quotas, by ruling against the firefighters.  But Sotomayor patiently explained that neither quotas nor affirmative action were at issue in the Ricci case. Rather, “the question was what’s a city to do when there’s proof that its test disparately impacts a particular group?” The Supreme Court created a new standard to reach its decision — one that was not even argued to the Second Circuit, she said.

Sessions did not let up, however. “Ricci raised important questions we have got to talk about as a nation,” said Sessions, noting that Judge Jose Cabranes — “also a Hispanic judge on the court”, said Sessions — voted to rehear the case.”You could have agreed with him, but you didn’t,” he said.

And so it went. What’s clear from this morning’s exchange is that just as Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sotomayor’s other Democratic supporters will toss her softballs to support her nomination, Sessions and his Republican colleagues who oppose this nominee are prepared to give her a very hard time.

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“NOT EVEN ONE JUSTICE APPROVED SOTOMAYER IN RICCI CASE,” blares the headline of a statement from Wendy Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, on the Supreme Court’s decision.

“Frank Ricci finally got his day in court, despite the judging of Sonia Sotomayor, which all nine Justices of U.S. Supreme Court have now confirmed was in error,” she writes.

Huh?  Today’s ruling, as I noted before, was 5-4. Five justices voted to require the city to present more evidence — what the Supreme Court calls “a strong basis in evidence” — that if the city had not thrown out the results of a promotional exam that had a disparate impact on minorities, then it would have been legally liable to any racial minorities denied promotions who sued under the civil rights law.

Setting aside, for a moment, whether that evidentiary burden makes sense, there’s no question that only five of the nine justices supported it. The other four were just fine with the law the way it was, and believed that the city had presented sufficient evidence to satisfy its decision.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the four justices in dissent, questioned the court’s “newly announced strong-basis-in-evidence” standard and recites in painstaking detail the evidence supporting the city’s decision. She went on to note that since the majority is announcing “a new legal rule,” then it should remand the case to allow the lower courts to apply it, since they didn’t have notice before that that’s what the rule was. “[T]he ordinary course is to remand and allow the lower courts to apply the rule in the first instance,” she wrote, chastising the majority for not following that usual course and instead deciding against the city of New Haven.

Within hours after the decision, conservatives had turned this notion that the majority should have remanded the case if it was going to decide a new legal rule into the idea that the four dissenting justices had repudiated Sotomayor and the reasoning of the Second Circuit panel on which she sat.

“This was a unanimous decision that the 2nd circuit was incorrect,” said Gail Heriot, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law on a conference call organized by the Federalist Society this morning. “Nobody agreed with Sotomayor. Nobody.”

As Long continues in her release:

“Usually, poor performance in any profession is not rewarded with the highest job offer in the entire profession.

“What Judge Sotomayor did in Ricci was the equivalent of a pilot error resulting in a bad plane crash. And now the pilot is being offered to fly Air Force One.

Well, that’s not how Justice Ginsburg and her co-dissenters see it, as they made clear in this passage:

Applying what I view as the proper standard to the record thus far made, I would hold that New Haven had ample cause to believe its selection process was flawed and not justified by business necessity. Judged by that standard, petitioners have not shown that New Haven’s failure to certify the exam results violated Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision.

UPDATE: Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has weighed in with his view of today’s Supreme Court decision in the Ricci case, and — suprise! — he reads the 5-4 decision as a 9-0 against Sotomayor, just like Wendy Long and the Federalist Society lawyers do:

Today’s decision is a victory for evenhanded application of the law. Saying the earlier decision was “antithetical to the notion of a workplace where individuals are guaranteed equal opportunity regardless of race,” the Supreme Court saw the case for what it is: a “race-based decision” that violates federal law. And while the Justices divided on the outcome, all nine Justices were critical of the trial court opinion that Judge Sotomayor endorsed. [Emphasis added.]

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Notwithstanding her much-decried “wise Latina woman” claim, it turns out Sotomayor is no liberal activist hell-bent on replacing the Constitution’s equal protection clause with a new section mandating affirmative action, as some of the Republican criticism would suggest.

Instead, CRS reports, via Secrecy News: “Perhaps the most consistent characteristic of Judge Sotomayor’s approach as an appellate judge has been an adherence to the doctrine of stare decisis, i.e., the upholding of past judicial precedents.”

According to the nonpartisan research service, Sotomayor’s other prominent characteristics include “a careful application of particular facts at issue in a case and a dislike for situations in which the court might be seen as oversteping its judicial role.”

Hardly a judge who plans “to use her seat on the Supreme Court to advance liberal policy preferences,” as former Attorney General Ed Meese, who’s helping direct her critics, has suggested.

Ricci’s attorney Karen Torre … appeared on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto with two of the cases other plaintiffs last Friday, but Ricci himself, who declined to comment for this story, was a no-show.

Prior to issuing the statement, Torre told POLITICO that both she and her client felt that print outlets had distorted the facts of the case — though she did not specify which outlets had done so, or when — and that Ricci would not answer questions related to Sotomayor’s nomination.

“We’re not giving interviews regarding anything other than our case, we’re not entertaining questions about anything my client thinks or I think about the nomination,” she said.

This story doesn’t matter quite as much if Torre and Ricci decline Charles Krauthammer’s advice and don’t testify in the Senate hearing against Sotomayor.