Black applicants are being systematically blocked from the University of California system in part because of its flawed admission scheme, according to a new University of California, Los Angeles report released Tuesday.
“The objectivity and fairness of schemes ‘based on the numbers’ is taken for granted by campus officials, despite studies suggesting that numerical indicators of ‘merit’ (particularly SAT scores and weighted GPAs) should be interpreted with caution,” the report says.
The report, “Admissions & Omissions: How ‘The Numbers’ Are Used to Exclude Deserving Students,” was produced by the College Access Project for African Americans (CAPAA), an ongoing study examining the crisis of Black under-representation in California’s higher education system. CAPAA, which was established in 2002 by a grant from the Ford Foundation, is housed at the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the UCLA.
“Those who are in a position to do something about the current crisis here at UCLA, for example, have been hiding behind the K-12 inequalities and they’ve been hiding behind Prop. 209 and saying, ‘Our hands are tied, there’s nothing we can do without breaking the law,’” says Darnell Hunt, director of the Bunche center.
“We are saying that’s patently false,” he says. “There is something they can do. There’s something wrong with the admission’s process.”
Black students made up a mere 3.4 percent of UC freshman accepted for Fall 2006. At the system’s three most selective universities – UC-Berkeley, UCLA and UC-San Diego — Black admits comprised 3.3 percent, 2 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively. Since California voters prohibited race-conscious admissions in colleges through 1996’s Proposition 209 legislation, Black admissions at UC-Berkeley and UCLA have plunged 46 percent and 57 percent, respectively.
Because of its faulty admission’s scheme, UCLA is experiencing a crisis, says Hunt. Of the 5,000 students expected to enroll in its upcoming freshman class, less than 100 are Black.
