Community leaders and Black alumni stepped up to help boost Black enrollment at the University of California, Los Angeles this year. The number of Black students who said they plan to enroll as freshmen in the fall doubled from 103 to 203, bringing the percentage of Black UCLA freshmen to 4.5 percent, up from 2.2 percent a year ago.
When the number of Black students reached a crisis point last year, UCLA students, alumni and other individuals in the Los Angeles community came together to find a solution. The steep dip in the numer of Black UCLA students has been widely attributed to the passage of Proposition 209, a voter-approved law prohibiting public institutions from considering race, ethnicity or gender in the admissions process.
“I’m very pleased that all of these students, who will be bringing with them the highest academic and leadership credentials, have chosen to come to UCLA,” says acting chancellor Norman Abrams.
Abrams also credits community leaders and UCLA alumni for creating legacy scholarships for incoming Black freshmen. The legacy scholarship fund is administered by the nonprofit California Community Foundation.
“These scholarships played a critical role in attracting to UCLA these future leaders in the tradition of Tom Bradley, Ralph J. Bunche and Jackie Robinson,” says Abrams.
Of the 11,924 students admitted to UCLA for fall 2007, 19.4 percent are either American Indian, Black or Hispanic, up almost 3 percent from a year ago. Asian Americans make up 41.2 percent of the freshman class, while Whites comprise 32.9 percent. Hispanics are the next largest segment of the freshman class, at 14.6 percent. American Indians, meanwhile, represent only 0.3 percent of the class. Five percent chose not to state their ethnicity or race, and 1.4 percent identified themselves as “other.”
