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A crisis in admission of African-American students

BY DARNELL M. HUNT

The recent news concerning UCLA admissions for Fall 2006 is deeply troubling. African-American and Latino students — already woefully underrepresented among continuing UCLA students — made minimal gains in admissions systemwide, but actually lost ground at UCLA.

This is consistent with a trend in which African-American and Latino students are being channeled away from UC’s most prestigious campuses to its less selective ones. UCLA holds the dubious distinction of admitting the lowest number of California African-American freshmen in the entire UC system — just 210 of the campus’ 10,487 admitted California freshmen for 2006 (2%). Given that the yield rate for African-American students admitted to the campus has been around 50% in recent years (but is declining), we are looking at a freshman class for 2006 that will contain only about 100 African Americans out of 4,500 students.

While K-12 inequities are clearly an important part of the problem, California Proposition 209 and the admissions practices shaped by it are also pivotal. The number of African-American students admitted to UCLA’s freshman class has dropped 57% since affirmative action in admissions ended a decade ago.

Proposition 209 prohibits both the use of racial preferences in admissions and discrimination against individuals on the basis of protected attributes like race or ethnicity. Research findings at the UCLA Bunche Center for African American Studies suggest that UCLA has designed its admissions process in ways that overcompensate for the former requirement without giving ample consideration to the latter. The result: Traditional patterns of disadvantage are hardwired into an admissions process that virtually guarantees African-American underrepresentation.

UCLA’s assembly-line approach to reviewing student applicants assigns different readers to review distinct components of a student’s application without access to information from the other components. This undermines the spirit of comprehensive review, further disadvantaging African-American students. Independent numerical adjustments based on the Academic Performance Index for a given applicant’s high school are hardly sufficient to account for this catastrophic flaw in the admissions process.

The same numbers fetish that drives UCLA to proclaim that its “admitted freshmen got stronger” in 2006 — an overall grade point average “increase” of .02 points — continues to motivate UCLA’s over-reliance on SAT scores, which have been shown time and again to correlate much more strongly with privilege than with college performance. We have clearly reached the point, it seems, where what constitutes “merit” at UCLA warrants serious reexamination.

By contrast, UC Berkeley — arguably more selective than UCLA — admitted 78 more California African Americans than did UCLA to its smaller 2006 freshman class. This is because UC Berkeley invests the resources necessary to give each and every student applicant a more holistic read. Rather than employ the UCLA model of relying upon the questionable validity of decontextualized numbers, UC Berkeley puts in the work to ferret out the special qualities that actually make some “strong” students stand out from the rest.

For African Americans seeking admission to UCLA, the campus’ approach to admissions is as irresponsible as it is misguided. Surely the 38 million Californians who “own” UCLA deserve better.

Hunt, a professor of sociology, directs the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.