Ethnic diversity
without race preferences? Ethnic diversity
without race preferences?
By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Wednesday, February 5, 2003
The Bush administration has thrown its weight behind two crucial constitutional challenges to the University of Michigan's use of race in admissions to achieve ethnic diversity in its student body. The cases, now in the U.S. Supreme Court, will probably be decided this spring. Michigan's race-based admissions formulas go well beyond what the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to allow in its Bakke decision of 1978 when Justice Lewis Powell spoke about the use of race as one "plus factor" in the admissions process. But the administration's invocation of California, Texas and Florida as models of how diversity can be maintained in selective state universities without the use of racial criteria is misleading. And therein lies a sobering portent for anyone who believes in narrow test-and-grade based admissions standards. '
All three state systems, which are barred from the use of race, admit the top graduates of every high school -- the top 4 percent in California; the top 10 percent in Texas; the top 20 percent in Florida. In its briefs, the Justice Department agrees that ethnic diversity is desirable but contends that the percentage of so-called under-represented minorities in those states' top universities -- blacks, Latinos and Indians -- is as great or greater than it was before affirmative action in those systems was banned and thus can be achieved without the use race.
So far, by almost any measure, it simply isn't so. Begin with California: The University of California has been publishing data showing that system-wide the percentage of blacks and Latinos admitted to UC is nearly back to what it was in 1997, the last year before the ban on race criteria went into effect. But since the regents' vote banning affirmative action (in July 1995) drove minority applications down before it went into effect, the real comparison has to be with the class entering in 1995, and UC's numbers are still 10 percent below what they were then. At Berkeley and UCLA, the state's high-prestige campuses, the gaps are far greater.
In 1995, 27 percent of freshmen admitted to Berkeley were black, Latino or Indian; last fall, it was 17.5 percent. UCLA's numbers are almost identical. The same general pattern is true also at the University of Texas. In 1994-95, 4.1 percent of UT's undergraduates were black, 14.5 percent Hispanic; in 2001-2, the latest year for which the university has published data, 3.5 percent were black, 13.6 percent Hispanic. If you further adjust the numbers for the significant increase in the percentage of Hispanic students in the high school graduating classes in both California and Texas, the picture becomes still gloomier. Even a return to the undergraduate minority college enrollment of 1995 or so would mean that a smaller percentage of Latino graduates are being admitted.
And, as a number of critics have pointed out, graduate and professional schools are not affected at all by programs such as Texas' Top 10 Percent plan. In 1994-5, 17.6 percent of UT's law students were black or Latino; in 2001-2, it was 12.4 percent. In 1995, 16.5 percent of entering UC law students were black or Latino; last fall, it was 12.5 percent. UC officials, though making a great outreach effort to increase black and Latino enrollment, privately acknowledge that they're not where they want to be, or where they were eight years ago. But they're reluctant to say so publicly for fear that political pressure in the Legislature will force UC to lower admissions standards and thus, ultimately, its academic standards as well, particularly at its most selective campuses.
And that's where the portent for academic conservatives lies. The Supreme Court could easily declare Michigan's race-based admissions formulas unconstitutional, close the huge hole that many universities have opened in the small gap that the Bakke court allowed in 1978 and still not overturn the Bakke precedent. That's what the administration's briefs in effect asked the court to do.
But nobody should imagine that in the few states with genuinely competitive public universities, diversity can be optimized through some other formula. Texas officials insist that students admitted under its 10 percent plan do better than those admitted on the basis of more conventional grade and test scores, which makes you wonder why it hadn't done so long ago and why it's not looking at a 20 percent plan, such as Florida's. The answer is simple: Academically, Florida's public universities are not Berkeley or UCLA, or probably any other UC campus.
So admitting the top 20 percent of the graduates of every high school is no big deal. Affirmative action was created to allow selective universities with admissions formulas based almost entirely on grades and test scores to still admit enough minority students to keep their campuses from becoming embarrassingly pale. UC has adopted some promising (and costly) strategies to broaden its admissions criteria and its ethnic diversity. But the political fights over minority admissions and the challenges to academic standards are far from over
About the Writer--Peter Schrag can be reached at Box 15779, Sacramento, CA 95852-0779 or at pschrag@sacbee.com.
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