Back to Square One

By Adam Cohen/Berkeley

This spring the admissions committee of the University of California, Berkeley evaluated a Latino applicant whose grades and college-board scores were good but not stellar. Following Berkeley's newly redesigned admissions policy, however, the committee looked well beyond the raw numbers. The members learned that although his parents spoke only Spanish, the applicant had single-handedly found his way to a magnet school devoted to science an hour from his home. They took note of the fact that as his English improved, so had his grades. And translating for his parents, as the boy frequently did, had given him an interest in language generally. That had led him to take and do well in advanced-placement Japanese. Send the kid a thick envelope.

The goal of Berkeley's new policy, which was first used to screen the freshman class that will enter this fall, is to give every applicant more attention so the best can be spotted. But Berkeley is going to that trouble for reasons beyond academic altruism. After one of the biggest affirmative-action fights anywhere in the nation, the University of California board of regents banned race as a factor in admitting this year's class. Fearing a sizable drop in minority enrollment, some supporters of the new plan hoped that the redesigned admissions criteria would sustain campus diversity, without taking account of race per se, after the ban went into effect.

There was much the same problem--and the same hope--in Texas, where in 1996 a federal court banned race-based affirmative action in admissions in the state university system. In response, last year an alliance of state legislators came up with the "10% Plan," which was first applied to this year's pool of applicants. Any Texas high school student who graduates in the top 10% of his or her class is guaranteed a slot at any of the state's public universities, including the highly selective University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M. At many of the state's public high schools, most of the students are black or Latino, so sponsors of the plan expected the new law to boost minority enrollments to new highs. Among educators around the country who thought affirmative action might be threatened on their own campuses, the fate of the 10% Plan became a focus of considerable interest.

In both California and Texas, the preliminary results of these experiments are in. And the hopes they inspired--that more minority students could be brought on board through approaches that don't address race head on--have deflated. At Berkeley minority admissions have plummeted. Of the 10,509 applicants who were offered a slot this year, only 2.4% are African American, down from 5.6% a year ago. Chicano students of Mexican descent, about 11% of the applicants accepted in 1997, made up just 6% this year. Taken together, African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos of all backgrounds, who constitute about 34% of the state's population, account for just a tenth of this year's admissions. Berkeley admissions director Bob Laird argues that "the outcomes might have been significantly worse had the new policy not been adopted." He may be right, but to a great many Californians, that's cold comfort.

As for Texas, the numbers were no more encouraging. The 296 African-American students admitted this year at UT Austin represent only 2.9% of all admissions, in contrast to 4.3% (416) the year before the law changed. At Texas A&M admissions of black students fell 3%, and those of Hispanic students went down 7%. "We expected a significant increase in minority numbers, and that did not happen," concedes Al Kauffman, a senior lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, who helped draft the law. A notable exception: at UT Austin the chief beneficiaries of the new law seem to be Asian students, whose admissions under the 10% Plan rose a whopping 16% in the past two years.

What happened? At Berkeley, which saw 29,961 high school grads competing for only 8,034 spots, a major problem was just how selective the admissions process had to be. Although the new policy decreased emphasis on grades and SAT scores, both remained important. That was a handicap to many African-American and Hispanic applicants. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that in 1992 nearly 21% of college-bound, non-Hispanic whites had GPAs of 3.5 and higher, compared to just 10% of Hispanics and 4% of blacks. And 25% of non-Hispanic whites had SATs above 1100, compared to 8% of Hispanics and 3% of blacks. California's redesigned admission scheme allows admissions officers to give more favorable consideration to applicants from poorer households. But for African-American and Latino applicants, that was not as helpful to them as considering race was under the old system. One reason is that among less affluent students who applied to Berkeley, Asian Americans were represented much more heavily than blacks or Hispanics.

The reasons for the failure of the Texas 10% Plan are murkier. Some of its supporters argue that the universities did not do a good enough job of publicizing the program. But the university at Austin sent personal letters to each of the 17,000 students across the state who were in the top 10% of their class. Another theory is that states like Oklahoma, where campus affirmative action is still permitted, lured away talented minority students with scholarships. Some educators speculate that the real problem may be that in many impoverished schools even the top graduates are unable to afford the relatively low tuition and board at the Texas campuses involved in the plan. Also, many eligible high school grads may opt not to apply out of fear the work might be too difficult.

Some conservatives argue that being turned away at the admissions stage is better for minority students than being welcomed onto campus only to discover that they have been poorly prepared for the academic work. "It's remarkable how little thought is given to what happens to students when they get there," says Harvard history professor Stephan Thernstrom, co-author of America in Black and White. "The blind assumption is that just breathing the air on an elite campus is remediation." But some diversity advocates are so frustrated that they are ready to give up on the whole idea of trying to select the best of the best. "It would be a moral mistake for Berkeley to continue to rely on the new system," says Ronald Takaki, a professor of ethnic studies at Berkeley. He has called for his school to admit its next class from a lottery among the top third of all applicants. With roughly the top one-third of applicants to Berkeley submitting 4.0 GPAs, he argues, any of them would be capable of doing the work. "In terms of excellence," Takaki says, "I don't think Berkeley has to worry about it."

--With reporting by S.C. Gwynne/Austin

With reporting by S.C. Gwynne/Austin