New UC admissions policy would hurt African Americans, Asians

By Henry Der, New America Media, News Analysis

The new freshman admission policy will take UC admissions in the wrong direction, and it will seriously affect minority applicants.

Earlier this year on the recommendation of President Mark Yudof and the Academic Senate, the University of California Board of Regents adopted a new freshman admission policy. It greatly expands the eligible applicant pool but also reduces the historic guarantee of admission from the top 12 ½ percent to 10 percent of the California high school graduating class. The new policy retains the eligibility requirement for applicants to complete 15 college prep courses, maintain a GPA of 3.0 or better in these courses, and take the SAT Reasoning Test (previously known as the SAT I), but eliminates the requirement for applicants to take the SAT Subject Tests that assess the mastery of specific academic subjects.

Analysis by Yudof’s office indicated that if the new policy had been applied to the fall 2007 entering freshman class, the percentage of Asian-American admittees would have dropped significantly, and that of African Americans and Latinos would not have changed. In contrast, the percentage of white admittees would have increased. Faculty members had initially intended the new policy to increase student diversity at UC.

Unfortunately, when UC drops guaranteed admission for those ranked between the 10 percentile and 12.5 percentile, African Americans, Latinos and low-income Asian Americans who are clustered in this band lose out on admission.

As the former California Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction and a parent of three UC graduates, I was shocked by UC’s own analysis. I was not included in the discussion during the developmental phase of the policy, but I joined other Asian Americans in appealing to the Regents to delay their vote on the new policy so that its impact on racial minority applicants could be better understood. Long supportive of a diverse UC, we suspected that the analysis by UC did not fully explore the effect of using scores from only the SAT Reasoning test on racial minority admissions. The Regents denied our appeal for a delay and voted for the new policy to take effect for the fall 2012 entering freshman class.

Yudof argued that the new policy is about “fairness.” He said that under the current policy many students who meet the high school coursework and GPA requirements and take the SAT Reasoning test, but fail to take the SAT Subject Tests, have been barred from having their application reviewed and considered for UC admission. Including these students, Yudof said, would create a more diverse pool of applicants entitled to have their application reviewed.

The new policy may expand and diversify the pool of applicants, but unlike the current policy, it does not guarantee admission to all applicants who meet UC eligibility requirements. UC will review more applications but will also reject many more applicants, including eligible racial minority students.

Retired UC Berkeley Professor Ling Chi Wang, Chinese for Affirmative Action Executive Director Vin Pan and I met with UC officials this past summer and requested a simulation study of the impact of the new policy for each of the nine UC undergraduate campuses. UC officials agreed to do this simulation study, based on California Postsecondary Education Commission data, that would look at two scenarios at each campus: a small applicant pool increase and a large one.

Read entire article on New American Media.

Henry Der is a former executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, is a veteran civil rights activist.