Taking Action to Admit
UCLA tweaks its admissions process to stop the black student enrollment decline
Mark Long, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Washington who has focused on the effects of such policies, says that "affirmative action is in a long-term state of decline." President John F. Kennedy introduced affirmative action to the American lexicon in 1961 when he directed government contractors to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed ... without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin."
Since then, many universities have developed broad policies to improve diversity on their campuses and give minority students the chance to "make a contribution to society and within their communities," said Irvin Reid, president of Wayne State University in Detroit.
Today, black students overall are attending college in record numbers—total enrollment rose by nearly 43 percent between 1993 and 2003 to more than 1.9 million students, according to an October 2006 report from the American Council on Education.
But affirmative action policies have consistently generated controversy. Critics say the policies are tantamount to "reverse discrimination" and strain schools by propelling unprepared students into high-level institutions. These criticisms have been the basis of legal challenges to affirmative action in courtrooms and voting booths.
California businessman Ward Connerly, who wrote Proposition 209 and launched the current use of ballot referendums to halt affirmative action, argues that the policies have "become a system of categorizing the American people into five [racial] groups and treating three of them differently." Connerly, a conservative former member of the University of California Board of Regents who is of multiracial descent, says, "Race preference is the system we are trying to eliminate."
For UCLA, the ban hurt the school's ability to attract black students. UCLA "is very constrained in the types of outreach programs it can do within [Proposition] 209," Montero says. Before the proposition passed, UCLA had the highest number of black freshmen admitted in the massive, 10-campus University of California system. In the fall of 1995, for instance, the school admitted 693 African-Americans, 6.6 percent of the freshman class. Since 2003, the number of African-American students has slowly declined.
Michigan. For a university that prides itself on having graduated many of the nation's black leaders, such as former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and tennis great Arthur Ashe, the situation last fall was dire. "It was a vicious cycle," says Darnell Hunt, a sociologist who earned a doctoral degree from UCLA in 1994 and now directs the university's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African-American Studies. After the ban, fewer black students were being admitted, which made eligible black high school students question whether they wanted to attend UCLA, Hunt says.
Schools in Michigan are the latest to deal with the end of affirmative action: Their state's ban took effect in January. Last week, the University of Michigan reported that black student enrollment for next year's freshman class increased 2.3 percent over last year. Those numbers include students who applied in the fall before the ban.
At Wayne State, Reid and his staff are evaluating thousands of programs, such as scholarships donors set up to support women or minorities, to see which may have to be discontinued or changed under the new law. "We can't just stop awarding scholarships," he says. "Some people came in with a four-year scholarship. I can't renege on that."
advertisement
