As a senior honors student at Weston Ranch High School in Stockton, Calif., last spring, Lakea Youngblood gained admission to the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles, California’s two most sought-after public universities. While both schools offered the northern California native similar financial aid packages, UC Berkeley proved highly enticing to Youngblood given the school’s sterling academic reputation and its close proximity to her family home.
Nonetheless, UCLA readily won over Youngblood because of her interest in studying broadcast journalism in the media-saturated environment of Los Angeles and an effective outreach effort mounted by Black UCLA graduates, current students and others concerned about declining Black student enrollment. In addition to Youngblood’s financial aid package offered by UCLA, a foundation representing UCLA’s Black alumni and other supporters of the Black student outreach offered her a first-year $1,000 scholarship. The privately funded scholarship and the discussions she had with Black alumni sent a compelling message.
“I felt the UCLA outreach was tremendous. It really made me feel good about my decision to enroll there,” Youngblood says.
The outreach to Black students such as Youngblood became part of a larger story after Black freshman student enrollment at UCLA this fall saw a dramatic reversal after several years of decline. Blacks enrolling as freshmen this fall numbered 203 out of 4,564, or about 4.5 percent. In the fall of 2006, just 100 Blacks enrolled in a freshman class of 4,809, or roughly 2.1 percent.
UCLA alumni, students, community leaders and numerous individuals in Southern California believed that Black freshman enrollment in 2006 had reached a crisis point. Attributing the enrollment decline largely to the impact of Proposition 209, a voter-approved 1996 law that banned public institutions from considering race, ethnicity and gender in academic admissions, a wide range of groups and individuals banded together to address the admissions and enrollment of Black students at UCLA.
The force of their efforts, in coordination with those of UCLA and University of California system officials, resulted in the adoption of a new admissions process emphasizing holistic assessments of applicants. The efforts also launched a privately organized and funded affirmative action outreach campaign targeted towards Black students.
