Diversity drama at the University of California

Exact freshman enrollment levels for 2002 won't be known until the fall, but preliminary student responses suggest that 15 percent of those enrolling at Berkeley and 19.7 percent of those at UCLA will be underrepresented minorities. UC-Davis and UC-San Diego each expect to enroll classes with fewer than 13 percent minorities -- apparently because some of the students they admitted opted to attend other schools.

Riverside, on the other hand, is projecting an entering class that is nearly one-third black, Latino, or Native American.

"We certainly are not where we should be in terms of diversity," said Mae Brown, UC-San Diego's acting assistant vice chancellor for enrollment management. "We are not where we need to be or should be in terms of underrepresented students. We were not there in 1997 or in 1995."

"These aren't processes that are amenable to overnight quick fixes," concedes Richard Black, Berkeley's assistant vice chancellor of admissions and enrollment. "It takes a sustained effort over time, and that's what we're doing and that's what we're going to continue to do."

To that end, the university has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the last few years on outreach programs aimed at improving public schools and steering students onto the college track. But even the most enthusiastic proponents admit these efforts will take years to yield results.

To Wang, the university should reflect the society around it: "In an ideal world, I would love to see a proportional representation in our student body. I'm hoping that as we turn into a more diverse population, the university will reflect the diversity that is so richly represented in California, but I'm kind of discouraged."

It's true that U.C.'s 19.1 percent underrepresented minorities admitted for this fall's freshman class is far from the 40 percent of public high school graduates who come from those groups. And it irks some public education advocates to see private universities do a better job of reaching those groups, since the state's ban on affirmative action doesn't apply to them. Of Stanford University's 2001-02 freshman students, 22.2 percent were underrepresented minorities, compared with the U.C.-wide figure that year of 17.7 percent. If the Supreme Court rules against the University of Michigan, however, and strikes down the Bakke decision, Stanford will have to operate by the same rules as U.C.

But when it comes to another kind of diversity -- socioeconomic diversity -- the U.C. system clearly has the edge over private colleges. For years some advocates have said universities should focus on disadvantage, not race, in selecting students. In the heyday of affirmative action, some questioned why the daughter of a black surgeon who'd gone to the state's best schools, for instance, would get preference over the son of a white welfare mother, and the lack of attention to the socioeconomic disadvantage suffered by kids of whatever race rankled some social justice advocates. Even before it was forced to drop race-based affirmative action, U.C. had been paying attention to its applicants' socioeconomic backgrounds, and its diligence has paid off.

When the James Irvine Foundation looked at Pell Grant recipients, it found that as of the year 2000, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, and UC-San Diego were each enrolling more poor and working-class students than any other top-ranked university in the country -- public or private. (The other five undergraduate campuses weren't evaluated, because they're not in the nation's top 40 schools, but they have similar enrollment patterns of low-income students.)

More than a third of the students at UCLA, and around 30 percent of those at Berkeley and San Diego, were receiving Pell Grants. The only other institution that came close was the University of Southern California, at 27 percent -- and the next best performer among public schools was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with 12.5 percent. Stanford, with 10.8 percent, ranked 24th out of 40, and Harvard, at 6.8 percent, was second to last.

"For any campus, it's important to look at the extent to which they are serving the population, whether it's their state or country or community. It's important to look at that in a number of dimensions. Ethnicity is one. Class is another," said Robert Shireman, Irvine's higher education program director.

"The fact that the U.C.'s are doing such a good job of enrolling an economically diverse group tells me that it would be difficult for them to address their low enrollment of African-American and Latino students by focusing solely on economic issues," he added. "They're already doing that pretty well."

The new policies -- comprehensive review, the 4 percent program, and admissions criteria that consider whether an applicant's parents attended college -- have honed the university's ability to define and focus on promising students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Many believe a "dual admissions" program -- which would offer automatic admission to certain community college students who choose to transfer to U.C. -- would also help boost underrepresented minority enrollment, but that measure has yet to receive state funding.

California's complicated racial landscape means there is no proxy for race in this state -- many policies designed to assist low-income students, for example, would assist many Asian-Americans, who are not underrepresented. But there are other advantages in new policies that look more comprehensively at applicants.

"There is no magic bullet," said Douglass. "And one doesn't make policy only with respect to diversity and ethnicity and race. If there's any good that's coming out of this politically contentious period, it is a comprehensive look at why the university admits students and what are our responsibilities. It's been a much more vigorous and critical look at policies that might better fit our social contract with the state of California. The system had become too myopic."

"The university has been led to concentrate much more on real, fundamental disadvantages, ones over which no one has any dispute," agrees UC-Davis chancellor Larry Vanderhoef, who suspects that many of the innovations could not have been adopted if affirmative action were still in place. Of the nine chancellors who opposed the regents' 1995 decision, Vanderhoef is the only one still in his post, giving him a unique vantage point for making his assessment.

"I wouldn't say I'm satisfied with the state we're in, but I'm satisfied with the trend and the intentions," he said. "What I know for sure is that it's not the end of the world. It's not the end of underrepresented minorities being able to go to the university."

• View blog reactions