Still counting by race
REES, MATTHEW
Still Counting by Race by Matthew Rees Old habits die hard at the University of California. A law passed by the state's voters in 1996 prohibits UC schools from using race or gender in admissions,...
...Instead of UCLA or Berkeley, some of these students should have attended a less competitive school, like UC-Santa Barbara or Chico State...
...A law passed by the state's voters in 1996 prohibits UC schools from using race or gender in admissions, but that hasn't stopped them from trying to determine the racial breakdown of the students they admit...
...and come this fall, says spokesman Ken Swisher, "we're expecting an increase in minority admissions...
...These statistics weren't widely reported...
...I finally found them in the Sacramento Bee...
...The press ate it up...
...Hispanic admissions are off 53 percent at Berkeley and 33 percent at UCLA...
...For the entire University of California, black admissions fell from 3.5 percent of the admitted class to 2.8 percent...
...In the state universities, already 7.5 percent of the students are black, 22 percent Hispanic...
...In the press, King's comments were almost completely ignored...
...Racial and ethnic pressure groups dismiss this wealth of educational opportunity and focus instead on how grades and test scores exclude many blacks and Hispanics from California's most selective public universities...
...At first blush, the numbers seem startling...
...Amid all the hand-wringing about declining minority admissions, some good news has been overlooked: The incoming freshmen at Berkeley and UCLA have the strongest academic profiles in the schools' histories...
...As Mickey Kaus pointed out in Slate, when the six other UC schools released their numbers—two days after Berkeley and UCLA—the decline in admissions of "underrepresented" minorities wasn't dramatic...
...When the Los Angeles Times ran a box listing black and Hispanic admissions at UC schools, it simply omitted Riverside and Santa Cruz...
...Some of the more apocalyptic stories left the erroneous impression that the blacks and Hispanics not admitted to Berkeley and UCLA were being denied the opportunity to go to college...
...But UC officials proved resourceful...
...Matthew Rees is a staff writer for The Weekly Standard...
...And none of the reporting bothered to explain where these two campuses fit in California's vast three-tier system of higher education...
...At UCLA and Berkeley, about 60 percent of blacks and 70 percent of Hispanics graduate within six years of enrollment...
...But actually, university officials are obsessed with race and ethnicity...
...As for the admissions process throughout the University of California, a candid assessment came from provost Judson King...
...Community-college graduates can transfer with relative ease to a UC school and even have a shot at Berkeley or UCLA...
...UC administrators emphasize they only want to obtain a more complete demographic profile of admitted students...
...Armed with this bad news, the chancellors at Berkeley and UCLA held press conferences on March 31 to announce the decline in the number of blacks and Hispanics admitted to this fall's freshman class...
...The discovery that 80 percent of the admitted students whose race was previously undetermined are white or Asian bolstered their case, making the black and Hispanic percentages of admitted students even smaller than had at first appeared...
...The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle all gave the story frontpage treatment (the latter two papers also ran editorials the same day...
...The corresponding figure for whites is 83 percent, and for Asians 86 percent...
...Hispanic admissions fell from 13.3 percent to 11.9 percent...
...But the numbers aren't nearly as bad as they seem...
...This year, a formidable obstacle loomed: More than 13,500 applicants left the "ethnic identity" box blank on their application forms (up 154 percent from last year...
...Half of the Berkeley applicant pool had grade-point averages of 4.0 or higher, while the average GPA for students admitted to UCLA was 4.19 (an A in an Advanced Placement course counts for 5 points...
...Black admissions are down 64 percent at Berkeley and 43 percent at UCLA...
...But you had to dig to find the numbers presented this way...
...The headlines trumpeted the fact that black and Hispanic admissions were "off sharply" (New York Times) or had "plunged" (Washington Post, Los Angeles Times...
...They might have a legitimate gripe if blacks and His-panics were graduating from California universities at roughly the same rate as whites and Asians...
...He pointed out that overall, the numbers show that UC's plan to offer admission to the top 12.5 percent of graduating seniors "is working and that we are able to admit a good many students of all types...
...We are seeing these campuses returning to a race-exclusive status," fumes NAACP Legal Defense Fund official Theodore Shaw...
...In 1996 they were uniformly opposed to the California Civil Rights Initiative (Proposition 209), and now they're intent on broadcasting its disparate impact...
...In fact, Berkeley and UCLA are the flagships of the eight-campus University of California—in addition to which California has another 22 four-year public colleges (confusingly called "state universities"), such as San Francisco State and San Diego State, and 107 two-year community colleges (where a full-time student pays just $144 a semester...
...More than four out of five of the applicants who had left the box blank turned out to be white or Asian...
...The lesson...
...Without informing the students, they retrieved their SAT tests—which also include an "ethnic identity" box—and found the information they were looking for...
...Meanwhile, black admissions to UC-Riverside went up 42 percent, and Hispanic admissions to UC-Santa Cruz increased 7.4 percent...
...Why would a university engage in racial snooping...
...Sadly, they aren't...
...Not all of the dropouts have flunked, but many have...
Vol. 3 • April 1998 • No. 32
