PERSPECTIVE ON THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA : Who Gets In? A Troubling Policy : Berkeley admissions based on socioeconomic class raise moral questions about the line between race and racism.

Freshman admission policies at UC Berkeley, already controversial for their broad preferences based on race, have added a new preference based on class, a favored track for applicants who are “socioeconomically disadvantaged.”

The first results of this change expose troubling trade-offs among race, class and academic criteria in deciding who gets into Berkeley. They also raise hard moral questions about the line between race and racism in making admissions policy.

In the background, Berkeley’s pre-existing admissions policies place a well-known squeeze on white applicants. Caught between racial preferences for “underrepresented” minority groups and the superior academic performance of Asian Americans, the portion of whites among Berkeley’s freshmen has fallen to 30%. Meanwhile Asian Americans have become the largest ethnic contingent at 35%. Yet whites still represent about 52% of California’s most recent high school graduates, and Asian Americans only about 14%.

If this “underrepresentation” of whites at Berkeley had come about through race-neutral policies, it would be wrong to question it. The idea that each racial group deserves “proportional representation” among UC students, though sometimes endorsed by the state Legislature and UC administrators, would lead to pervasive racial quotas, offending basic principles of equality and merit. But when the “disproportion” is partly due to racial preferences, as it is at Berkeley, it may be legitimate to ask whether those preferences are too large.

There are special grounds for concern because the decline in whites at Berkeley may be reinforced by “white flight.” In the past three years, applications by whites have plunged by 32%.

Amid these trends, in 1989, a Berkeley faculty committee proposed a new admissions plan, quickly approved by both the faculty senate and the campus administration, featuring a new preference based on “socioeconomic disadvantage.” The committee--led by (naturally) a sociology professor, Jerome B. Karabel--did not define this category but said it would issue guidelines. The guidelines are still under wraps, but they reportedly turn on the level of family income and parents’ education and occupation.

The new preference was justified by the plan’s authors not as a potential replacement for preferences based on race, but because “a genuinely diverse freshman class must be socioeconomically as well as racially and ethnically heterogeneous.”

Despite the vagueness and novelty of their concept, the authors were unwilling to start slowly. They declared that, right off, about 7.5% of Berkeley freshmen would be chosen for their “socioeconomic status,” or SES.

Admissions based on SES began last fall, and data just released allows a glimpse of who is being admitted this way and what policy questions the program presents. Last fall 252 Berkeley freshmen, or 7.7% of the class, were admitted through SES. The group’s racial composition is striking: 49% Asian American, 27% Chicano, 10% white, 6% Latino and 4% African American.

Since Asian Americans outnumber whites in the group by almost 5 to 1, SES distinctly aggravates Berkeley’s racial “disproportion.”

But is it racist to say so? If we have firmly decided, on race-neutral grounds, to have a low-income preference, it would be improper to object that “too many” of those who qualify prove to be Asian Americans. And this seems true even if the objection is not to Asian Americans as such, but to Asian Americans because they are already “overrepresented” at Berkeley, or because they seem the last group in need of affirmative action, or because they would be “having it both ways.”

However, the decision to have an SES program--and to make it so big--is not carved in stone. The idea does have appeal, but careful policy-makers would want to test it out before committing to it, and especially before committing such a hefty slice of the freshman class. (An early report on fall, 1992, freshmen has SES ballooning to 16% of the class.) In appraising now the desirability and the size of SES, it may not be improper to consider the program’s effect on Berkeley’s racial makeup.

Moreover, the SES proposal may not have been race-neutral. There’s reason to think that the idea’s proponents knew that the main beneficiaries would be Asian Americans--as had been true of a prior low-income preference--and that SES was part of a deal between Berkeley policy-makers and Asian-American leaders who had been complaining that Berkeley discriminated against Asian Americans.

Race aside, other attributes of the SES students may be relevant in considering the merit and size of the program. In particular, while Berkeley has no data on this, a high proportion of the applicants whose parents meet the SES guidelines are probably recent immigrants. It would be wrong to discriminate against immigrants, but should Berkeley be preferring them?

Another question is whether SES can find justification in the 27% of Chicanos and the small numbers from other “underrepresented” minority groups that it admits. Since almost all these applicants would be admitted anyway through racial preferences, one might think not.

Finally, there’s the question of whether this 7.7% of Berkeley’s freshmen places--and apparently a much larger slice next year--should be removed from competitive admissions based on academic criteria and subjected to sociopolitical preference.

All these questions are extremely sensitive. In today’s atmosphere of political correctness they are risky even to mention. They ought to be debated, though, before Berkeley--and other UC campuses--puts into concrete this substantial new layer of affirmative action.