Fewer Minorities Apply to UC, but More Are Accepting Offers

The racial and ethnic makeup of the incoming freshman class at the University of California will remain about the same as last year’s, despite a decrease in applications from “underrepresented minorities”--blacks, Latinos and Native Americans--according to admissions statistics released Friday.

Officials said that was because the acceptance rate among minority students--the percentage of those offered admission who ultimately decided to enroll--was higher than last year. Despite controversy over the planned end of affirmative action in the nine-campus system, 64% of the black students who were admitted agreed to enroll, up from 57% a year ago.

The percentage of Latino students agreeing to enroll rose slightly.

Overall, nearly 25,200 California high school graduates are planning to enroll at the University of California as freshmen in the fall, 5% more than last year, officials announced.

At the same time, UC will have more students from all ethnic groups except Native Americans, with the largest increases registered by white and Asian American students.

Clearly encouraging to UC officials was the fact that 62% of the students offered freshman admission said they plan to attend, up 2% from last year. Actual enrollment figures will not be available until after classes begin.

Since the UC Board of Regents voted to ban the consideration of race and gender in admissions--a ban that does not take effect for undergraduates until next year--these annual statistics have been closely watched as a measure of whether the affirmative action rollback has scared students away. Officials said Friday’s statistics suggest that did not happen.

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“That’s the good news,” said Dennis Galligani, UC’s assistant vice president for student academic affairs. “However, the university still has much work to do to ensure that student diversity continues.”

Galligani said he was particularly concerned about UC’s most selective campuses--UCLA and UC Berkeley. While computer modeling done by UC Irvine indicates that the campus may be able to maintain a diverse class after the affirmative action ban goes into effect, Galligani said, at UCLA and UC Berkeley “everything suggests that we will see declines” in enrollment of underrepresented minorities.

The systemwide undergraduate admissions statistics released Friday showed marked declines in the number of blacks and Latinos planning to enroll at UCLA. Although 240 black students said last year that they would enroll in a freshman class of about 3,700, only 205 blacks said yes this year--a nearly 15% drop. Latinos dropped from 728 to 604, or about 17%. Native Americans increased 14%, from 36 last year to 41 this year.

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Rae Lee Siporin, UCLA’s director of undergraduate admissions, attributed part of the decrease to the regents’ action and to Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action measure passed by voters last November.

“Students said they didn’t think they were welcome,” Siporin said.

Yet although applications from black students were down at UCLA, those who did get in seemed more eager to attend than those in the previous year. More than 42% who were admitted said they will enroll, up from less than 40% last year.

The percentage of Latinos agreeing to attend did go down, however, from 42.4% in 96 to 40.7% this year.

Siporin said one encouraging fact was a leap in the overall academic quality of UCLA’s applicants, producing a typical freshman with a 4.05 high school grade-point average and a 1,250 SAT score.

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“We saw a 10% increase in the very top tier of applicants that get admitted on academic criteria only,” she said. But although that group included many more whites and Asian Americans, she said, “it did not grow dramatically for the underrepresented students.”

UC officials had been concerned about a possible decline in diversity among undergraduates after it was disclosed last fall that, despite a record number of California high school students applying for admission, applications from blacks, Latinos and Native Americans had declined for the second year in a row.

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The burgeoning applications--up 1.6% this year over last--was buoyed largely by increasing numbers of whites and Asian Americans, masking an 8.2% decline in black applicants, a 3.7% drop in Latinos and a 9% drop in Native Americans.

This year’s undergraduate numbers were scrutinized especially closely because of what happened at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. That school, like all UC graduate schools, has already implemented the affirmative action ban in admissions.

So last month, when officials announced that not one of the 14 black students admitted to Boalt this year has decided to enroll, supporters of affirmative action said it confirmed their worst fears about the ripple effect of the ban. Boalt’s 270-member first-year class is now expected to include only one black student, who was admitted last year but deferred enrollment.

Last year, 20 black students enrolled in Boalt’s first-year class.

Officials said that of the 48 Latinos offered admission to Boalt this fall, 18 have indicated they will attend. Both Native Americans who were accepted have opted not to attend.

Last year, by contrast, 28 Latinos and four Native Americans enrolled in the first-year class.

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UC Enrollment

Here are fall 1997 University of California admissions figures according to the system’s ethnic categories:

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Number of Number Committed % Ethnicity Applications Admitted to Attend Change 1997 1996 1997 1996 1997 1996 African Amer. 2,112 2,305 1,531 1,628 984 934 +5.4% Native Amer. 357 414 308 360 205 247 -17.0% Asian Amer. 12,489 11,895 10,593 10,081 7,345 6,937 +5.9% Chicano 5,045 5,235 4,225 4,194 2,542 2,474 +2.7% E. Indian/Pak. 1,215 1,165 1,045 1,004 718 638 +12.5% Filipino Amer. 2,444 2,425 1,936 1,870 1,274 1,198 +6.3% Latino 1,861 1,956 1,490 1,550 869 906 -4.1% White 20,611 19,785 16,859 16,465 9,784 9,147 +7.0% Other 1,077 1,131 862 893 521 547 -4.8% Unknown 1,914 2,274 1,624 1,962 940 1,067 -11.9%

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Source: University of California