wkllaw

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > State -- University of California marks decade of race-blind admissions
BERKELEY – A fit of spring-cleaning led Eric Brooks to a box of old newspaper clips. Inside were stories from 1997 when he was the lone black student to enroll in the incoming law school class at the University of California, Berkeley, following the end of affirmative action admissions.
He didn't read them. That box doesn't hold pleasant memories.



Advertisement “I felt bad for myself at the time because of my situation, but worse for the people who were denied admission,” said Brooks. “That ate at me for my entire time there.”
Ten years later, a lot has changed. The numbers of black and other underrepresented minorities at the University of California have rebounded at the undergraduate level, although they haven't kept pace with high school graduation growth for those groups. At the same time, there's been a redistribution within the system, with more blacks and Hispanics going to lesser-known branches of the 10-campus system and fewer to the flagships of Berkeley and UCLA, a trend that troubles some.

Meanwhile, Florida, Texas and Michigan have rewritten admissions rules and colleges nationwide are bracing for more change with Ward Connerly, the UC regent who started it all, taking his campaign for race-blind admissions to more states next year.

“The legacy of California's consideration of this issue ... has been a national front on the issue of equity in American society,” said David Hawkins, public policy director for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “This debate just will not go away.”

Connerly agrees.

“If things unfold the way I am predicting they will unfold, I think we are witnessing the end of an era,” he said.



The debate over affirmative action begins with how you define affirmative action.

To Connerly, it's a system of “racial preferences” that he argues only drive a wedge between people. To his opponents, it's a way of recognizing that not every student starts out with the same advantages, that poor schools, often attended by high numbers of minorities, may not have enough teachers, textbooks or even desks to go around.

The debate came to UC in 1995 when, in a bitterly contested 14-10 vote, the system's governing Board of Regents voted to stop looking at the race of applicants, a change effective for graduate students in 1997 and for undergrads the following year.

In 1996, Connerly took the movement statewide, chairing a successful Proposition 209, which banned consideration of race in public hiring, contracting and education. A similar measure passed in Washington state in 1998.

Texas affirmative action policies fell in 1996 with a federal appeals court ruling.

In Florida, Connerly launched a campaign similar to Proposition 209. Then-Gov. Jeb Bush opposed the measure as divisive but implemented his own “One Florida” plan eliminating the use of race or gender in public hiring, contracting and higher education.

Affirmative action struck back in 2003 with what seemed to be a major victory. The Supreme Court, ruling in two University of Michigan cases, said race could be used as a limited factor in college admissions.

But Connerly and his supporters promptly countered with a successful initiative campaign last fall banning consideration of race in Michigan admissions.

What has it all meant?

In Texas and Florida, lawmakers guaranteed eligibility to high school students who graduate at the top of their class (Top 10 percent in Texas, Top 20 in Florida). UC has a similar program, but on a smaller scale, guaranteeing eligibility to the top 4 percent of graduating classes.

In Florida, figures released last fall showed black students made up 13.7 percent of enrollment in state universities, compared to 14.2 percent when One Florida was implemented in 1999. Hispanic enrollment increased from 14.1 percent to 16.9 percent.

At the University of Texas at Austin, minority enrollment dropped after the 1996 federal court ruling, but has since rebounded. Last fall, 1,914 black students enrolled compared to 1,911 in 1996.

At the University of Michigan, officials say they won't defy the ban on race-based admissions, but they won't give up on diversity. “We don't believe that we can deliver a 21st-century education if we're not a diverse learning community,” said Julie Peterson, associate vice president for media relations and public affairs.

In April, Connerly and his supporters announced plans for initiative campaigns in more states, including Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arizona.

That's left university administrators across the country scrutinizing their policies, said Hawkins. “To be an admissions officer in this environment is very challenging.”



The year Brooks became a critical mass of one, there were 14 black students admitted to UC's Boalt Hall School of Law, but none attended.

He'd been admitted the year before but deferred admissions, putting him in the doubly uncomfortable position of being the last black student admitted under the old affirmative action policies.

Boalt has made changes since 1997, stepping up recruitment, asking students to write longer personal statements and looking at students' socio-economic background.

Last fall, 13 black students enrolled in the incoming class, a big increase from 1997 but still below the mid-90s totals of 20 or more.

“The bottom line on Proposition 209, from where I sit, is it has continued to suppress enrollment,” said Ed Tom, director of Boalt admissions. “It certainly has not expanded the number of African-American applications we have received over time.”

Does it matter if the numbers of black students dip at elite campuses?

“Not to me it doesn't,” said Connerly. “As long as all of our kids have an equal chance to get an education.”

UC administrators have responded to the tumbling numbers by revising admissions policies to take a more comprehensive view of candidates by considering their economic background and whether they overcame hardship.

But critics say the campuses still don't represent California as a whole.

And more blacks and Hispanics are graduating from high schools now than 10 years ago, meaning the gap between those numbers and UC enrollment has widened.

“When segments of the population are missing in the classroom, it's less than what we consider to be ideal,” said Susan Wilbur, director of UC's undergraduate admissions. “We are no better today as a proportion of our total class than we were in 1995.”

Interestingly, Asians, who did not benefit under affirmative action, now make up 36 percent of admissions, up from 33 percent in 1997. At Berkeley, Asians are the biggest ethnic group, making up 39 percent of last fall's freshman class. That makes Asians overrepresented since California is roughly 44 percent white, 35 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Asian and nearly 7 percent black.

Connerly thinks the growth in Asian admissions since '97 shows they were being discriminated against under the old system.

But Van Nguyen, a Berkeley student of Vietnamese descent and a member of a regent-appointed task force studying the impact of dropping affirmative action admissions, sees discrimination in the new system as well.

“I don't think it's a liberal-conservative issue.” he said. “It's really, Do you believe in equality? Do you believe in access? Do you believe in everyone having an equal shot to get to Berkeley? If you believe that then we need to really rethink this 209 issue.”



These days, Brooks can stroll the halls of Boalt Hall without qualms. His first visit wasn't so easy.

Administrators helped to alleviate outside pressures by screening mail and dealing with numerous interview requests. And he survived, making friends, passing classes and becoming president of his third-year class. After the first year, another black student transferred in.

Still, the pressure never really went away.

Brooks remembers sitting on the law school steps looking at a sheet of Boalt bar passage rates broken down by race.

“I remember thinking, 'Well, that's going to be fun when I take the bar,'” he said. “It's either going to be 100 or zero.”

In 2000, he did pass the bar (“I studied doubly hard.”) and began working as a lawyer. Partly because of his experiences, he became active in diversity issues, serving on the state bar's ethnic minority relations committee for some years.

Brooks says affirmative action may change, but he doesn't think it's time to banish the concept. “I think that it's useful in that it remedies past discrimination,” he said.

But Connerly thinks “most Americans are with me. They realize that this thing has probably outlived its usefulness and it's just a question of how it's going to end and when it's going to end, not whether it's going to end.”


I have to ask your opinion on affirmative action. I certainly oppose it.

__________________
Those who can't change become extinct.

Ray

We call it 'reservations' in our country.

Reservations are for the following classes:

Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes
Other Backward Caste
Moslems

It is a huge issue, but then the reserved seats in govt and colleges are all taken by the children of those who benefited by these reservations and did well and got their children better educated.

Those who have not as yet been able to take advantage of these reservations continue to be deprived and are making no headway since the reservations are being 'usurped' by those families who have already taken advantage of this and have benefited.

This type of reservations (for political reasons) have also been extended to what is called the OBC (Other Backward Castes [who actually are not backward at all]).

To ensure that the OBCs who have benefited no longer get the benefit and instead other deprived people amongst the OBC get it, these benefited OBC are called the "creamy layer" and are kept out of the reservation quota.

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

wkllaw

Actually if affirmative action was to assist people with economic disadvantages then I would agree, but this isn't how it works at all. Espiecially in America, I seen plenty of chinese students who have been immigrants to the U.S with little money and worked hard to get into good colleges and schools. They received no help at all.

In America it is like for the SATs:
Blacks: +230
Hispanics: +185
Asians: −50
White: nothing

In other countries there are quotas.

Confed999

AA is government enforced racism...

__________________
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I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

Tiger

Could one give more details about how Affirmative Action is implemented in the USA?

wkllaw

In the U.S affirmative action is used by giving certain races more points on college entrance exams and many colleges have to make sure every race is represented in certain amounts. This is done by declining entry from more competent students that are overrepresented to a less competent person who is of a less represented race.

gunnut

This is not the original intention of affirmative action.

The original intent was to give "colored people", at the time mostly black, an opportunity to work just like white people. Basically to not let the color of the skin affect his chance of landing a job.

This concept has been warped by the liberals over the years.

It is now more like a quota system or preferencial treatment of non-whites and non-Asians.

The liberals with a victim mentality argues that "institutionized racism" is so pervasive that it's nearly impossible for colored people to compete with whites. Therefore we must "level the playing field" by artificially boost more blacks into jobs that they may not qualify for.

The kink in the theory is the Asian immigrants. Most of them arrive with very little money and spoke very little English. Many of them achieve middle class status within a generation and their kids assimilate very well into the mainstream society. They rarely receive special help from the current intepretation of affirmative action.

__________________
"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

wkllaw

In Elite N.Y. Schools, a Dip in Blacks and Hispanics - New York Times

More than a decade after the city created a special institute to prepare black and Hispanic students for the mind-bendingly difficult test that determines who gets into New York’s three most elite specialized high schools, the percentage of such students has not only failed to rise, it has declined.

The drop at Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School mirrors a trend recently reported at three of the City University of New York’s five most prestigious colleges, where the proportion of black students has dropped significantly in the six years since rigorous admissions policies were adopted.

The changes indicate that even as New York City has started to bridge the racial achievement gap in the earlier grades, it has not been able to make similar headway at top public high schools and colleges. Asian enrollment at all three high schools has soared over the decade, while white enrollment has declined at two of the three schools.

City education officials said they were at a loss to explain the changes at the three high schools despite years of efforts to broaden the applicant pools.

Andres Alonso, the city’s deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, described the figures as “extraordinarily surprising,” even though they are the Department of Education’s numbers. Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott called the schools “true gems of our system,” saying, “We have to make sure they’re open to all of our students.”

Robert Jackson, the chairman of the City Council education committee, who is from Washington Heights, was more pointed in his criticism.

“The statistics clearly show that black New Yorkers are being shut out,” he said. “If we’re looking to be inclusive in the greatest city in the world, I would think that the chancellor and every educator has to ask themselves why is this, and what do we need to do to reverse that. Is it institutional racism or is it something else?”

Debate over the racial composition of the city’s specialized schools, and the schools’ reliance not on interviews or grades but rather on a test alone to determine admissions, has captivated New York for decades.

Supporters of the specialized exam, which tests verbal and math skills, say it ensures that admissions are based on merit, while critics argue that elite colleges would never judge applicants on test results alone.

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has not challenged the testing system, but he has expanded the preparatory program, known as the Specialized High School Institute, and created dozens of new small high schools to broaden opportunity. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has also promised to create more elite high schools.

Still, during 2005-6, blacks made up 4.8 percent of the Bronx Science student body, according to city figures, down from 11.8 percent in 1994-95, when the institute was created. At Brooklyn Technical High School, the proportion of black students has declined to 14.9 percent from 37.3 percent 11 years ago, and at Stuyvesant, blacks now make up 2.2 percent of the student body, down from 4.4 percent.

Hispanic enrollment has also declined at the three schools, as has white enrollment at two of the three although it has risen at Brooklyn Tech. At the same time, the Asian population has reached as high as 60.6 percent at Bronx Science, up from 40.8 percent 11 years ago. Dr. Alonso said he could not explain the numbers without more information about how many black and Hispanic eighth graders take the specialized high school exam, and how many may favor other top city schools that are smaller or closer to home. He said he would insist that the department start collecting such information.

“My immediate question is, this is a far greater variance than the data shows in terms of our test scores, so what is going on here?” he said.

Over all, Hispanic students are the largest group in the city’s schools at 36.7 percent, and black students are next at 34.7 percent. The 1.1 million-student system is 14.3 percent Asian and 14.2 percent white.

In the 1960’s, civil rights groups and some education officials charged that admissions tests were racially biased and that they screened out black and Puerto Rican children. The tests had strong defenders, though, and in 1971, the State Legislature passed a law requiring that entrance to the specialized schools be determined by competitive examination alone.

Now parents, educators and academics explain the racial makeup of the schools by pointing to a variety of factors, including increasing competition from an influx of immigrants, paltry guidance counseling at many middle schools with predominantly low-income students, the hiring of private tutors by the middle class and continued use of the admissions test alone.
Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, called the schools’ racial compositions “absurd,” saying, “I don’t think someone would want to hire somebody just on the basis of a test score, and we don’t admit them to a great college on the basis of a test score, and we shouldn’t admit them to a great high school on that basis.”

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Graphic: Enrollment at Specialized Schools Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, however, said the enrollment figures showed “that we’re not yet managing to close the achievement gap and that this remains a serious problem for our schools, for our families and for our culture.”

“But we shouldn’t be blaming the messenger,” she said. “It’s not the specialized schools’ fault for maintaining legitimately high standards.”

Angela M. Howard, who graduated from Stuyvesant in 1982 and founded the Stuyvesant High School Black Alumni Association two years ago, after noticing fewer and fewer black faces at Stuyvesant events, said she opposed changing the admissions system but was trying to start a mentoring program.

“Let’s face it — the playing field isn’t level,” she said. “People are paying tons of money to get their kids tutored to go to Stuyvesant.”

For years, exclusive public schools throughout the country have been places where advocates of strict, color-blind standards have clashed with proponents of racial diversity.

Courts imposed a race-based admissions system on the Boston Latin School, but a federal appeals court struck the system down. In the 1990’s, Chinese-American families whose children were rejected from San Francisco’s selective Lowell High School sued; the resulting settlement reversed a citywide admissions system that took race into account.

New York’s Specialized High School Institute was designed to enlarge the pool of black and Hispanic candidates eligible for admission to the selective schools by giving them extra lessons and test-taking tips, without resorting to the kinds of preferences that had drawn lawsuits elsewhere.

Chancellor Klein has expanded the institute, which started with one location and 419 students. It has grown to 17 locations and 3,781 students, who spend 16 months preparing for the test, starting in the summer after sixth grade.

The chancellor is also trying to increase the proportion of black and Hispanic students participating in the institute, which officials said dwindled in the earlier years of the program as large numbers of white and Asian students signed on.

“The intended goal going back to 1995 was not realized,” said Jean-Claude Brizard, the Department of Education’s executive director of secondary schools. “If a kid is a nonminority, they’re supposed to be excluded, but there are a couple of places where we’ve seen quite a bit of pushback.”

In the hallowed, sunlit classrooms of Stuyvesant itself, students from Manhattan and the Bronx spent the summer sweating over scientific concepts, math formulas and new vocabulary words.

Melanie Tirado, 12, said the very act of striding through Stuyvesant’s gleaming hallways made her feel smart.

“You can be like, ‘I could be here, I could be in these desks in a year or two,’ ” she said during her lunch break one day.

For Yusrullah Abdul-MalikDunn, 12, who got an “overall excellence” medal at his sixth-grade graduation, the experience has been humbling.

Yusrullah’s teacher at Public School 108 had called him a “walking dictionary,” but in the first seven pages of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a book he read for the institute, he found 71 new vocabulary words.

“My science teacher told me we are all big fishes in our own pond, but now we’re inside a bigger pond,” he said.

Since 2002, students like Yusrullah can also pick from three new, small specialized schools: the Queens High School for the Sciences at York College; the High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College; and the High School of American Studies at Lehman College. These schools have larger proportions of black and Hispanic students, but even in their short lives, the schools’ black enrollment has declined. Hispanic enrollment has climbed at two of the three.

The Queens school opened with a student body that was 30.1 percent black and 13.6 percent Hispanic. In the most recent school year, those numbers were down to 19.7 percent and 10.1 percent, respectively.




Here's a article by the New York Times on top U.S High schools in New York and the disparity between races.

ChrisF202

It is time to end affirmative action. It is not fair to the nation as a whole:

1) If Person A with a 95 average total and is White applies to an Ivy League college and Person B who is Black and say with an 80 average total applies to the same college then Person B gets in to further the cause of diversity. That is not fair.

2) My local police department currently has 2,672 sworn officers with about 30% nearing 20 year retirement that means we need to start hiring. They have 250 openings and 29,000 people have applied. The test is $100 and Blacks, Hispanics and Females can take the test for free but Asians and White males must pay. Not fair. Yes, the department is close to 90% white male and has been mostly White males ever since the department was created in 1960.

gunnut

Socialists in California are always screaming about how the enrollment of minorities in UCs and CSUs have dropped since the end of quotas in determining college entrance.

What they don't tell you is Asians are not counted as minorities in this case.

Asian enrollment has only increased since the end of using race as a determining factor for college entrance.

Minorities are doing better than ever in our colleges. It's just not the "correct" minorities.

astralis

gunnut,

it's not as simple as you think. most asian immigrants whom come here come from middle-class/professional backgrounds. the families who do come are more risk-taking, hard-working, and go-getter to begin with (it's a pretty big jump to go over from asia to the US after all- and they've got to afford the plane ticket).

also, the racism asian-americans face is a different type of racism (and from working in capitol hill, yes it does exist). it is the racism of the paternalist, benevolent scorn, as exemplified in TIME magazine's late 1980s cover, "those asian-american whiz kids." a bit different than the racism blacks sometimes encounter- although i too am of the opinion that THAT particular card has been played too many times, and not to their benefit.

AA should have been designed thusly. back in the late 60s and 70s when it was instituted, the original idea was a decent one. there should have been benchmarks over the years, and after a decade, maybe two, it should have transformed into economic AA, which removes the idea of reverse racism and also does something about the equaling the playing field when it comes to education (important to a democracy, and also would have helped with our worsening GINI number, too).

and then after a decade of that, it should be phased out, as well. it's a short-term panacea which, if done for too long, becomes a bad addiction.

__________________
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

wkllaw

No, I've known plenty of asian immigrants who come to foreign countries and are low class with little money.

On a side note, I would prefer 1st generation asians over 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants. Those guys work hard and want to get up, but the ones who have been here a while get lazy.

ChrisF202

Oh I dont doubt that AA was necessary and a good thing back in the 1960s and early 1970s but I just feel that we as a country have gotten past that era and it is time to put everyone on equal footing when it comes to applying for higher education, seeking jobs, etc

The US of 2007 is alot more tolerant then the US of the 1960s.

Ray

Just like India's reservation.

Those who benefit now from advantages that initially had sound grounds, will never let it go.

Milk the milch cow to death!

execrable

I don't think it's a mere question of tolerance. Affirmative Action denigrates the efforts of those minorities it's supposed to help - how would you know you really got a place or position through your own efforts or because you were the "right" (to use gunnuts words) minority?

Certainly outlived its purpose. It should be outlawed.