Applications to UC Hit a Record High

A record number of California high school students applied for admission to the University of California for the coming fall semester, but “underrepresented minority” applicants declined for a second year in a row, according to statistics released Tuesday.

Overall, 46,682 California high school students applied to UC in hopes of enrolling in one of its campuses this fall--a 1.6% increase from the previous year, which was also a record high.

But the pile of California applications was buoyed largely by increasing numbers of white and Asian American applicants, masking an 8.2% decline in African American applicants, a 3.7% drop in Latinos and a 9% drop in Native Americans.

The number of out-of-state applicants grew among all groups, though the increases in white and Asian American applicants far outpaced those of blacks and Latinos.

The decline in applications from California minority students comes in sharp contrast to the previous two years, when the number of black and Latino applicants rose by several percentage points each year.

Although UC officials stressed that it is difficult to explain the shifts in application patterns, they suggested that some of the university’s competitors are having a field day recruiting California minority students while UC remains embroiled in a debate over affirmative action.

At the same time, UC recruiters are reporting that some minority candidates believe they are no longer welcome since the UC Board of Regents decided to phase out affirmative action, according to UC admissions director Carla Ferri.

“I don’t think that’s correct, but that is the perception,” Ferri said. “That is what we are hearing.”

UC officials will soon launch a study into the declining minority applications to determine the reason, Ferri said. She said she also wants the study to validate what she has heard from other institutions about “increased recruitment from eastern schools, particularly in Southern California.”

The study will be completed by the end of the year, she said.

As now planned, the University of California system will stop using race, gender and ethnicity as criteria in its undergraduate admissions process beginning with the students entering for the spring 1998 semester.

Although affirmative action criteria will be used in selecting next fall’s freshman class, the issue was muddied when voters adopted Proposition 209, an affirmative action ban.

That vote came Nov. 5, just weeks before UC’s Nov. 30 deadline for applications. To comply with the law, UC officials immediately announced that they were dropping the affirmative action criteria--but then reinstated them when the ballot measure was put on hold by court order.

The statewide vote to abolish affirmative action helped set a “negative tone” for some minority applicants, said Kimi Lee, executive director of the University of California Students Assn.

“There is this hostility and some think that their race will be used against them,” she said, pointing out that the number of applicants who decline to identify their race has jumped by nearly a third over the last two years.

Meanwhile, the number of white applicants from the California high school ranks rose 2.1% and Asian American applicants increased 5.1%.

“Either we are attracting more or they’ve felt there might be more spaces available,” said Rae Lee Siporan, director of undergraduate admissions at UCLA.

No matter what the motivation, Siporan said she expects thousands of disappointed applicants when she issues acceptance and rejection notices in late March. UCLA admissions officers are sorting through 29,000 applications for a maximum of 11,000 openings.

“We will turn down 17,000 or 18,000,” Siporan said. “That’s the most we have ever had to turn down.”

UC officials also released a breakdown of the freshman class that began its college career last fall. It showed that the students UC defines as “underrepresented minorities”--African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans--make up 19% of that freshman class, a decrease from 21% the previous year.

UC admissions director Ferri said she has heard that other universities also have seen a “softening” in the number of minority group students applying and enrolling, but has yet to see any statistics.

The planned study, she said, will also try to compare UC’s declining minority enrollment with those of comparable universities.

Ward Connerly, a UC regent who pushed to abolish affirmative action, said he believes that UC is not the only institution experiencing such shifts in enrollment.

“The conclusion that people are trying to reach is that since the regents took away the racial preference, blacks and Latino students no longer feel welcome,” Connerly said. “If that is the case, then you should not be able to find that pattern anywhere else. But the pattern is elsewhere.”

Connerly could not offer any immediate examples.

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UC Applicants

A record number of California high school seniors applied for admission to the nine-campus University of California system for fall 1997, but applications of underrepresented minorities--blacks, Latinos and Native Americans--dropped for the second straight year.

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Fall Fall Fall 2-Year Group 1995 1996 1997 Change African American 2,063 2,076 1,905 -7.7% Native American 430 388 353 -17.9% Asian American 12,838 13,523 14,225 +10.8% Latino 6,908 6,751 6,504 -5.8% White/Other* 19,400 20,975 21,409 +10.4% Not Stated 1,725 2,226 2,286 +32.5% Total 43,364 45,939 46,682 +7.7%

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* Includes applicants who declare themselves as belonging to white/caucasian, East Indian/Pakistani or other ethnicities.

Source: University of California