Taking Action to Admit
UCLA tweaks its admissions process to stop the black student enrollment decline
It was a self-described crisis. In the fall of 2006, only 103 black students said they planned to enroll as freshmen at the University of California-Los Angeles. That's the lowest black enrollment in 30 years—just 2 percent of the flagship public university's incoming class of about 4,800 first-year students. "We were devastated, and that was an understatement," says Janina Montero, vice chancellor for student affairs at UCLA.
With record numbers of students applying to colleges nationwide, admission is more competitive than ever, and the formula for who gets in is more complex. UCLA has one more variable to consider. Or not. In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, a referendum to end affirmative action in public education, hiring, and state contracting. (Similar initiatives already have passed in four other states and could be on the 2008 ballot in several more.)
Without access to the race-specific considerations of affirmative action, UCLA has had to rework its admissions and recruiting processes or face enrollment numbers for black students like those from last fall.
This year, Montero and other UCLA officials are breathing a bit easier. The number of black students who were admitted to the UCLA freshman class for this fall jumped from 249 in 2006 to 392, the school recently announced, and the number who plan to enroll roughly doubled to 203, or 4.5 percent.
Achieving that increase required an unprecedented effort. UCLA created an African American Student Enrollment Task Force that conducted phone-a-thons to reach prospective students in California. The school's Black Alumni Association gathered donations to fly in and host 50 black students, who had been admitted to UCLA but had not yet enrolled, for a whirlwind weekend of campus activities. Private organizations raised more than $1.75 million, enough to give every black student who enrolled for this fall at least a $1,000 grant.
Finally, the school implemented a new admissions process, called holistic review, in which each application is read in its entirety by one person, rather than having sections reviewed by different people. This change complemented the university's six-year-old comprehensive review policy that considers test scores and grade-point averages in light of students' life experiences and special circumstances.
State by state. "We pulled out all the stops this year," says D'Artagnan Scorza, a UCLA student and access coordinator for the school's African Student Union. "We, so to speak, stopped the bleeding." But Scorza and others say the job is far from over. "We have momentum and are moving forward," he says, "but it could very easily and very quickly be lost."
More universities could face the same factors that led to the low black student enrollment at UCLA. All colleges are struggling with how to handle the booming number of students applying. And after Prop. 209 passed, Texas, Florida, Washington, and—last November—Michigan also eliminated state-supported affirmative action. Activists are now working to add similar referendums to the November 2008 ballots in states such as Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Nebraska.
The impact of the bans has been mixed and has changed over time. While across the UC system the number of African-American and Latino students dropped immediately after Prop. 209, those figures are slowly rising. Texas saw a similar post-ban decline, but the numbers improved after the state guaranteed college access to students in the top 10 percent of all Texas high schools, creating a path for students from predominantly black high schools.
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."
University of Michigan administrators also have started using a demographic software program called Descriptor PLUS from the College Board, the SAT company. Using census and College Board data, the program helps schools find and target prospective students from disadvantaged or underrepresented neighborhoods and high schools. The Descriptor data include the percentage of "nonminority" students, family income, and parents' educational levels in those areas. Descriptor PLUS, which costs $15,000 a year and is currently in use by about 40 U.S. colleges, "helps us identify clusters of students without using race, ethnicity, or gender," says Lester Monts, senior vice provost for academic affairs at Michigan.
Education officials in states with bans are helping one another. In February, the University of Michigan convened a meeting of counselors and financial aid experts from the University of Texas, the University of Washington, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Georgia to swap ideas.
State schools are working to fund scholarships through private organizations. Peter Taylor, a former UC regent and former president of the UCLA Alumni Association who helped spearhead UCLA's massive fundraising campaign, says, "We went to some of UCLA's fervent and longtime supporters, but we also went to African-American alumni and said, 'If you are upset, it's time to put your money on the line.'"
Overall, at schools where affirmative action admissions have ended, a combination of enrollment strategies will most likely take their place. But experts say the emphasis should be on closing the "achievement gap"— differences in things such as SAT scores—between minority students and their white counterparts in the primary grades. "A hope was that the end of affirmative action would lead to increased attention and action at the K-12 level," said Anthony Lising Antonio of the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research. "But we haven't seen that."
This story appears in the June 4, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.