When The Field Is Level

By Adam Cohen/Irvine

The African-American science majors eating lunch in a University of California Irvine dining hall are on the brink of brilliant careers. Aisha Kennedy, a chemistry major, has done ozone research with a Nobel-prizewinning professor. John Williams, a biology major, is off to Kenya this summer for a project on malaria transmission. And Brian McCurtis, a computer-science major with a summer job at Novell, is seeing years of hard work pay off. "I'd say my biggest problem is sifting through the job offers," he says. "There's been no job hunting for me."

It seems things have never been better for minorities on this picturesque campus 40 miles south of Los Angeles. Freshman enrollment in the past two years has jumped 45% for Hispanics, 47% for blacks, and Irvine is becoming known as a powerhouse for minority scientists-in-training. Many blacks and Hispanics say it's a far more supportive place than other U.C. campuses with bigger names and better reputations. "We're a hidden secret," says Genae Jefferson, an African-American physics major who chose Irvine over UCLA. "But a lot of people don't realize it until they get here."

If it all looks so good, why are some people saying that what is going on at U.C. Irvine is a disaster for minority education? The problem is, the rising minority enrollment at Irvine is largely a result of California's two-year-old ban on affirmative action at public colleges. As preferences were removed that had helped minorities qualify for the top U.C. campuses, notably Berkeley and UCLA, students who once would have gone there were redistributed down to such less selective campuses as Irvine. In California it is known as cascading, because minorities are sliding down from high-ranked schools to lower-ranked ones.

Supporters of Proposition 209, California's controversial 1996 ballot initiative ending racial preferences, say cascading is good: it means U.C. applicants are finally being judged on their abilities, not the color of their skin. Advocates go a step further, saying that it even benefits the minority students who end up being turned away by more prestigious campuses. Students are better off, the argument goes, when they attend colleges that match their academic level.

Those who disagree say cascading is just a nice way of saying minorities are being shut out of the best U.C. campuses. And it means that fewer minorities will graduate with the elite credentials that would help them become top doctors, lawyers and business leaders. "Some people don't believe African-American and Mexican-American students deserve to be at these institutions," says Ted Shaw, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. "That should be refuted."

For now, this post-affirmative action world of cascading exists mainly in California and Texas, where the University of Texas, responding to a federal court order, has also stopped considering race in admissions. But other suits challenging racial preferences are under way elsewhere in the U.S., notably at the University of Michigan. Other states are considering Prop. 209-style initiatives, among them Florida, where a drive is on to put an anti-affirmative action referendum on the 2000 ballot. If cascading goes national, what impact will it have on America's college students? The answer is unfolding in California, on campuses like Irvine.

The U.C. system can be divided, by general consensus, into three tiers of quality. At the top are Berkeley, UCLA and fast-rising U.C. San Diego. In the middle are Irvine, Davis and Santa Barbara. And then there are Santa Cruz and Riverside. The rollback of affirmative action has had only a small impact on admissions to U.C. as a whole--the eight U.C. campuses took 47,804 students this year, 7,439 of them black, Hispanic and Native American--only 27 fewer minority students than in 1997, the last year race was part of the process. But the new rules have caused a lot of cascading down the U.C. pecking order. At the most selective campus, Berkeley, freshman enrollment of Hispanics has fallen 34% in the past two years, and it's down 57% for blacks. The least exclusive campus, Riverside, has seen black admissions rise more than 54% and Hispanics 66%.

Could this ethnic rearrangement be a good thing? Yes, says Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a leading affirmative-action critic. Thernstrom argues that minorities suffer when affirmative action puts them on campuses that otherwise wouldn't have admitted them. The dropout rate of black U.C. undergraduate students back in the days of affirmative action was 42%--twice the rate of whites. That stands to reason, Thernstrom says, because blacks and Hispanics were forced to compete against whites and Asians who came to the same schools with higher test scores and grade-point averages. "As students are better matched to their institutions, as they cascade to places where they are prepared to the average level, the graduation rates should go up for minorities," she says.

Minorities will also do better, supporters of cascading say, because they will end up on campuses like Irvine that may be more socially welcoming than pressure cookers like Berkeley or UCLA. It's a view some minority students at Irvine share. "A lot of my friends said, 'Berkeley, Berkeley, Berkeley,'" Tiger Dunams, a junior at Irvine, recalls of her college-choosing days. "I went there and looked at it, and it didn't seem like it was the thing for me. My friend goes to Berkeley, and she doesn't really meet people. I'm interacting with professors and graduate students, and I've met the chancellor. You can tell the faculty is really reaching out to students." Melissa Marchand says she chose Irvine over UCLA in part because 34,000-student UCLA struck her as big and impersonal. "At UCLA, a biology class could be 500 people, while here 200 people is huge," she says. "My major is bio, and I didn't want not to be able to go up to a professor with a question."

Irvine students say that although the education is rigorous, the atmosphere is supportive. "A lot of universities, including Berkeley, have a cutthroat attitude--I'm going to do well and I don't care about you," says Karen Fleming, a black sophomore who went to Irvine after turning down Berkeley. "This campus has more of a family feeling." Irvine students say minorities on campus pull for one another, both informally and formally, through the Irvine chapter of the California Alliance for Minority Participation, a program, funded by the National Science Foundation, for minorities in the sciences. "At Berkeley and Los Angeles, there's so much competition, even between black bio majors," says Marchand. "That's not how it's supposed to be--we're supposed to be helping one another out."

But don't students take themselves off the fast track by going to Irvine rather than Berkeley or UCLA? Many Irvine faculty and students say it isn't so. They point out that Irvine grads are admitted to the nation's top graduate schools and get jobs at top corporations alongside graduates of the more selective U.C. campuses. "I know it's not what the public thinks, but it's not true that you have to go to only a few schools to make it," says James Fallon, a professor at Irvine's medical school and chairman of the U.C. Irvine academic senate. "It used to be that way, but it's not today."

Then why are critics of cascading so strongly against it? The hard truth, they say, is that the status of a college still matters. And students from the more selective U.C. campuses will, on average, get into better graduate schools, get better jobs and have more influence in society. "Education has become more and more a credentialing process," says the NAACP's Shaw. "What is at stake is access to the corridors of power and influence."

That was the argument of a recent book co-authored by former Harvard University president Derek Bok. In The Shape of the River, Bok wrote that minorities who attend choicer colleges are likely to do better for themselves and for society than ones who go to less exclusive schools. "If there weren't some positive differences with selective colleges, they wouldn't be so hard to get into," he says. It's the prestige of the name, the access to informal job networks and the higher expectations for success, as much as the education, that make the difference, says Bok. "Students' aspirations are very much shaped by the aspirations of their peers," he says. "When you go to a very selective school like Berkeley, you probably set your sights higher."

Critics of cascading also say it hurts the whole U.C. system by stripping it of ethnic diversity at the upper levels. The entering class at Berkeley this fall will be only 9% Hispanic and 3% black (in a state that's 29% Hispanic and 7% black). That deprives students of a chance to learn in the kind of diverse environment they'll have to navigate when they graduate. It also means California's premier public university isn't serving the whole state. Says Juan Lara, assistant vice chancellor at U.C. Irvine: "If the diversity of the state is reflected in the U.C. system, but only in what you would call the third-tier campuses, then this university would have failed in its mission."

Still, cascading is a new fact of life, and it is not likely to end any time soon. Perhaps the clearest sign that California is entering a post-affirmative action era is how civil rights groups have responded to cascading. Their flagship lawsuit, Rios v. Regents of the University of California, doesn't bother trying to restore affirmative action. Instead it argues that if the U.C. system is going to use race-blind admissions criteria, it really has to be race blind. In calculating GPAs, Berkeley gives extra weight to grades in advanced-placement classes. The problem is, more than half of California schools--many in poor and minority areas--don't even offer these classes. A student who aces every class offered in his high school in the barrio and ends up with 4.0 could lose out to a student from Beverly Hills who gets A's in advanced-placement classes and graduates above 4.0. It's not a bad argument. But the fact is, even if U.C. cleaned up its criteria, as long as race is not considered, the number of blacks and Hispanics at the top campuses is not likely to go up much.

Then what is the solution? Surprisingly, there is one point of agreement for both sides in the debate over cascading. The low number of minorities at top-tier campuses should be a wake-up call about the need to improve K-12 education for all children (see the accompanying story). The racial gap in academic achievement starts in the earliest grades and grows worse. Among California 10th-graders, 88% of Asians and 76% of whites go on to graduate, but only 61% of blacks and 58% of Hispanics do. Thernstrom and civil rights groups both say the early grades are where the most work needs to be done.

One other sign that California is entering a new era on race is the attitude many young people seem to have about affirmative action. A lot of black and Hispanic students strongly opposed Prop. 209, and many still insist affirmative action is needed as much as ever. But the black science students gathered around the U.C. Irvine dining-hall table were confident that whatever the rules are, they can succeed under them. So is Elizabeth Lomeli. A Hispanic graduate of Santa Ana High School, she will attend Irvine in the fall after being rejected by UCLA. There's no way she'll ever know if she'd have got into UCLA under affirmative action, but she isn't upset about how things have worked out. "I just cared about the U.C. part--I didn't care about the Los Angeles or the Irvine," she says. "I think it's going to help me do what I want to do." Lomeli will be the first person in her family to enter college.