The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that UCLA was enrolling twenty fewer African-American students in this fall’s freshman class than it did last year. This represents 2.9% of all incoming students, which the Times points out is well below the 9.6 percent African-American presence in the 1985 freshman class. The article includes the obligatory quote from Proposition 209 author Ward Connerly (who points out that preparing African-American students for college is a preferable alternative to "tinkering with the admissions criteria to make it easier to get in.") But otherwise, the story largely steers clear of the affirmative action debate in order to instead focus on how to address the situation.
Left unsaid is that admissions to a campus as competitive as UCLA is a zero-sum game, and that increasing the number of qualified African-American students means that fewer students from other racial and ethnic groups will be admitted. As an opponent of race-based affirmative action, I don’t see that as a problem. A larger number of academically successful African-American high school seniors is a good thing all around. But the fact remains that improving these numbers means that other qualified students won’t get in.
So which students are getting into UCLA instead of African-Americans? Many of those who read the story will assume that the culprits are unqualified white students, and that admitting more African-Americans means that whites will no longer be over-represented.
Except that they’re not. The incoming freshman class will be 33.3 percent white, down from 49.7 percent in 1985. The article makes a point to contrast the 2.9 percent of African-American students in the incoming class with the fact that African-Americans make up 9.8 percent of the population of Los Angeles County, but it does not draw a similar contrast with whites, who make up 48.7 percent of county residents. So if the UCLA freshman class were to truly reflect the community’s ethnic and racial makeup, more African-American and white students would be admitted.
(By the way, whites represent 59.5 percent of the state population according to the last census, a more relevant statistic for a school that’s part of a statewide university system. African-Americans are 6.7 percent of California’s population.)
Of course, my point isn’t to argue for an admissions policy based precisely on race. But if UCLA were to succeed in achieving that balance, those who would suffer would overwhelmingly be students of Asian-American descent. Asian-American students will comprise 41 percent of the incoming freshman class, up from 22.2 percent twenty years ago, and far outweighing the 11.9 percent (Los Angeles County) and 10.9 percent (California statewide) that those of Asian or Filipino descent make up of the overall population. Personally, I think those numbers are a good thing. They demonstrate that a high school student who works hard and dedicates him/herself to academic achievement will be rewarded. But if you wanted to make sure that whites, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and Native Americans are all enrolled in roughly the same percentage as each group is represented in the county or state population, roughly three-quarters of those Asian-American students planning to enroll would have been denied admission. That’s unacceptable for all sorts of reasons.
There’s no need to re-open the affirmative action debate at this moment. The UCLA administration seems genuinely committed to increasing diversity while still maintaining high educational standards. And there’s nothing wrong with a discussion about how to make sure that all qualified students can best take advantage of the educational opportunities that exist for them, although I’d personally prefer that conversation center around socio-economic status rather than simply racial and ethnic background.
But it’s worth pointing out that the Times is telling only half the story here, and that the paper is unlikely to run an article anytime soon that talks about the problems inherent of having too many Asian-Americans on the UCLA campus.
(The Times story is here.)
June 5th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Also left unsaid by the article is the fact that many top-notch private institutions are actively recruiting blacks, offering lots of money to African Americans and other minorities to “diversify” their schools, which is their right because they are private institutions. That is the real talent drain for the top minority students in the state, not affordability or diversity.