DAVIS, Calif.-Richard Black, vice chancellor for admissions and enrollment at the University of California-Berkeley, has done more than just witness firsthand the far-reaching consequences the end of affirmative action has had on his school. It has been his job to deal with them.
"There was an immediate and obvious effect," Black said.
Enrollment of "underrepresented" students at Berkeley plummeted from 22 percent of the entering class to 11 percent in the year following the end of affirmative action, prompting admissions officers to scramble to maintain a diverse student body at the state's most prestigious public university. In California, underrepresented students are defined as African-Americans, Chicanos, Latinos and Native Americans.
To help lessen the fallout from the UC Board of Regents 1995 decision to eliminate race as a factor in admissions - an edict that went into effect in 1997, immediately after the passage of Proposition 209 - admissions officers at Berkeley and the other UC schools have completely revamped their admissions processes and have spent millions annually on recruitment and outreach programs.
Proposition 209 was a direct ballot initiative approved three years ago by California voters to eliminate racial preferences in higher education and state contracting. Although Proposition 209 made affirmative action illegal, officials throughout the UC system have said they remain committed to maintaining diverse student bodies.
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While diversity may be a top priority of Berkeley administrators, the makeup of current classes does not mirror California's diverse population.
According to a California Department of Finance study, of the 1997 California high school graduates, about 46 percent were white, 31 percent were Hispanic, 11 percent Asian and 8 percent black. According to Berkeley statistics, in 1997, the last year before 209 took effect, 7.3 percent of Berkeley's entering class were black, 11.6 percent were Chicano and 2.3 percent were Latino. In post-209 1998, the entering class was 2.75 percent black, 5.18 percent Chicano and 2.21 percent Latino.
"The numbers were dropping off a cliff," said Conor Moore, executive vice president of Berkeley's student government. "The campus has really changed since the end of affirmative action. You'll notice a huge difference in who is walking around."
During that same time, the percentage of white students increased from 28.8 percent to 30.34 percent and the percentage of Asian students jumped from 41.7 percent to 42.8 percent.
About 60 miles north of Berkeley at the University of California-Davis, the repercussions from 209 have not been as severe. From 1997-99, minority enrollment at Davis dropped by 5 percent; this despite a 13.2 percent increase in minority applications during the same period.
To combat this decline, like at Berkeley, Davis admissions and recruitment officers have spent the past three post-209 years overhauling Davis' admissions process and developing minority recruitment efforts targeting California's lower-income public high schools.
Yvonne Marsh, assistant vice chancellor for student affairs at Davis, said her school has been more shielded from 209's aftermath because of the "cascade effect."
In the UC system, students who do not gain admission to California's flagship institutions, Berkeley and UCLA, tend to spill over to Davis and the other UC schools, Marsh said.
"It's only in the selective institutions that affirmative action makes a difference," she said.
"We were lucky enough not to see this huge change in campus demographics," Davis Student Government President Phong La said.
Admissions processes revamped
Just as race was being eliminated as a legal factor in admissions, admissions officers at Berkeley and Davis threw out point systems and formula-driven admissions procedures.
"The admissions process has changed radically," Black said.
Instead of using racial preferences, the schools now take socio-economic factors into consideration when doling out admissions slots.
"We want to know what you have done with the opportunities given to you," Black said. "We like to think it's very similar to selective private schools like Harvard, MIT and Cal Tech."
At Davis a new three-tiered admissions process takes such factors into account as whether a student is the first in his family to attend college, if the applicant is from a low-income, single-parent or laid-off worker family and if the has persevered over family disruptions or adverse immigrant experiences.
"It's much more work," Marsh said, noting that admissions officers now must individually pore over each of Davis' 24,000 applications instead of simply plugging grade point averages and SAT scores into predetermined formulas.
The new procedures are catching some minority students who otherwise might not be offered admission, but Marsh said the practice has not worked as well at assembling a diverse class as affirmative action once did.
"It doesn't make up for not having the ability to use race, gender and ethnicity," she said. "I think the benefits would be greater to go back" to affirmative action.
Black said Berkeley's new admissions procedures have yielded some positive results.
"We wanted to treat people as individuals," he said. "It is a tool for leveling the playing field, which is a tool we wanted to use."
Outreach programs intensified
Since the passage of 209, Davis has been appropriated $3 million yearly for the implementation of outreach programs to help increase the number of minority high school students who take the requisite courses for UC admission and take the SAT.
The school's $3 million appropriation for these programs is a dramatic boost from the $600,000 annually provided to Davis pre-209. The money has translated into an increase of 15-20 staff members who work with seventh through 12th-graders throughout the Golden State, said Roberto Paez, Davis special assistant to the chancellor and provost on affirmative action and diversity.
According to a 1996 UC study, only 30 percent of California Asian high school seniors were eligible for UC admission - meaning they had taken the SAT and the requisite years of mathematics, foreign language and other requirements. Only 13 percent of white students were fully eligible, 5 percent of Latino students and a paltry 3 percent of black students were fully eligible for UC admission.
"The school system in California is in abysmal shape," Marsh said. The outreach programs are "helping to mitigate the negative impact."
According to the same UC study, only 16 percent of latino high school sophomores end up taking the SAT. This compares with 25 percent of blacks, 29 percent of whites and 65 percent of Asians. Fourteen percent of Asian sophomores will enroll at a UC school after graduation, while 4 percent of whites and 2 percent of blacks and Latinos will enroll after their high school graduation.
"Everyone has recognized the huge outreach issues," Paez said. After 209 "we were all saying, 'Oh my God, what are we going to do?'"
Because underrepresented students in California tend to go to lower-income high schools, the elimination of affirmative action damaged efforts to break the cycle of minority students not attending college, he said.
"It perpetuates and exacerbates the problem," he added. "We're struggling with a generational impact - we won't see the results [of the outreach programs] for years to come."
Marsh pointed to a 1995 California Department of Education study that examined student performance in the state's top and bottom quintile of public high schools, as determined by school-wide average SAT scores.
In the top 151 public schools, 5 percent of the students were on welfare, 7 percent had a limited proficiency in English, 90 percent had a father with a high school diploma or higher and the 56 percent of the seniors taking the SAT earned an average score of 1,007. In the bottom 151 public schools, however, 27 percent of students were on welfare, 31 percent had a limited proficiency in English, 36 percent had a father with a high school diploma or higher and the 33 percent of seniors taking the SAT earned an average score of 715.
But Marsh said the most telling statistic was the minority enrollment numbers. In the top 151 schools, 17 percent of the students were Latino, black or American Indian. In the bottom 151 schools, 79 percent of the students fell into one of those three ethnic groups.
At Berkeley, like at Davis, concentrated efforts are being made to reach out to underrepresented students to prepare them for a UC education.
Berkeley undertakes a "vigorous yield effort," he said, meaning students and professors will call and visit with admitted minority students to persuade them to enroll.
"We're doing everything we can to prepare people for the university [system] so they will be competitive" applicants, Black said.
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