Don’t Lower the Bar--Elevate the Students : Education: UC needs to help minority youth prepare for regular admission.

University of California Regent Ward Connerly is right to call for an overhaul of the university’s affirmative-action policies. He’s right, not because UC’s current policies are inequitable, but because the university’s current efforts to support Latino and African American students are woefully inadequate.

According to the state Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is supposed to serve a cross-section of the top 12.5% of state high school graduates. Yet the California Postsecondary Education Commission’s latest data reveal that only 3.9% of Latino and 5% of African American graduates are academically eligible to attend a UC campus.

Recognizing that the great majority of the state’s Latino and African American high school graduates have historically been ill-prepared to enter the UC system, university admissions offices have long followed a policy of relaxing their academic requirements to offer more minority students the opportunity to attend. This lowering of admission standards, coupled with inadequate support of minority students on campus, has resulted in a discouraging progress rate for minority students admitted by exception to the usual requirements: from 1983-87, only 7.2% graduated in four years; less than 50% managed to graduate in six years. In the same period, for minority students admitted under regular requirements, 17.6% graduated in four years, while 67.5% graduated in six years. The graduation rate for regularly admitted “white or other” students in that time was 34.1% in four years, 77.6% in six years.

In addition, lowered standards for minorities have led to the denial of admission for many qualified non-minority applicants, the concomitant increase of racial tensions on campus and a false public perception that the Board of Regents is doing all it can to promote equality of opportunity across ethnic groups.

The truth is that the regents are avoiding their responsibility.

If they were really serious about preparing minority students for UC entrance, they would shift their affirmative-action efforts from a reactive to a proactive mode--phasing out their policy of relaxing admission requirements for minority students and phasing in a serious effort to prepare Latinos and African Americans to meet regular UC admissions requirements.

One part of such an effort could be to encourage UC campuses to join in partnerships with school districts in predominantly minority communities. Such partnerships could leverage the university’s vast human resources by offering incentives to professors, graduate students and undergraduates to engage in school-based research, training and service.

Another affirmative-action effort could be to revamp UC’s existing Early Academic Outreach Program to reach more students in more comprehensive ways. Currently, the program provides information on UC entrance requirements but no other practical assistance. By extending its services to support community-based after-school programs, mentor programs and the like, we could go a long way toward abolishing the need for reactive affirmative-action programs in the future.