UC Plans to Boost Aid to Minorities : Education: Regents approve $1 million to help blacks and Latinos qualify for admission.

The University of California regents endorsed a plan Wednesday to spend an extra $1 million over the next two years to bolster efforts to help Latinos and African Americans qualify for admission at the system’s nine campuses.

The regents’ Special Committee on Affirmative Action, which meets only once a year, endorsed an administrative initiative aimed at keeping admission standards high while accommodating what is expected to be a tidal wave of high school students in the next decade, many of them from ethnic groups with traditionally low rates of UC eligibility.

Without taking these steps, UC would be faced with “changing its admissions requirements--and consequently its academic programs--to enroll students with lesser preparation than is desirable” or running a “public institution where major sections of the population will have little access and be greatly underrepresented,” said a university report.

UC administrators will expand two programs designed to prepare minority high school students for college. The Early Academic Outreach Program currently provides tutoring, Saturday programs and more extensive on-campus summer institutes for 57,000 students between the eighth and 12th grades.

The California Alliance for Minority Participation, partly funded by the National Science Foundation, offers internships, research support and stipends for minority undergraduates studying science, engineering and mathematics.

The plan discussed Thursday also calls for a diversity conference in September to highlight successful multicultural efforts and a series of campus forums to be held throughout the 1994 academic year to “take into account new thinking on affirmative action and diversity,” the report says.

Currently, the mix of students graduating from high school in California is about 49% white, 29% Latino, 11.6% Asian American and Pacific Islander and 7.3% African American.

But projections say those numbers will change drastically by 2006 as the state’s public high schools graduate 43% more students. At that time, the breakdown of graduates is expected to be 37% Latino, 37% white, 13.5% Asian American and Pacific Islander and 7.3% African American.

Those numbers concern educators because Latinos and African American students traditionally have a low eligibility rate at UC, which admits the top 12.5% of high school graduates. Only 4% of Latino high school graduates and 5% of African Americans qualify for admission, compared to 12.7% of whites and 32.2% of Asian Americans.

As a result, UC officials say they must bolster their efforts to better prepare Latinos and blacks for college, offering them tutoring and encouragement while they are in high school to make sure more are eligible for admission and the university system better reflects population trends.

In related reports, UC said that the number of minority faculty members and graduate students has grown steadily over the last decade or more, although they continue to lag behind these groups in the general population.

UC figures show that the number of white men holding faculty positions has declined from 81% in 1979 to 68% last year. The ranks of white women have increased from 9.3% to 16.4%. Latino faculty has increased from 2.6% to 4.1%, African American from 1.8% to 2.5%, and Asian American and Pacific Islanders from 5% to 9%.

As for graduate students, minorities now account for 31.7%, up from 23.3% in 1987.