UC Regents Panel OKs Minority Outreach Plan

A University of California Board of Regents committee unanimously approved a plan Thursday to double UC’s annual spending on outreach programs--which seek to increase minority enrollment without using affirmative action--to $120 million.

The plan, the result of 18 months of deliberations by a 35-member task force, is designed to increase the number of black and Latino high school graduates whose grades and standardized test scores make them eligible to enter UC from the current 4,200 per year to 8,500 over the next five years.

“The UC is one of the state’s main avenues for social and economic mobility,” said C. Judson King, UC’s provost. “We need to serve that role. In short, people should be limited only by their abilities and desire, and not by social, environmental, economic and educational factors.”

To make that ideal a reality, UC officials plan to target 50 underachieving or “educationally disadvantaged” high schools across California, as well as about 100 middle schools and 300 elementary schools.

The target schools would split an estimated $370,000 a year to improve teaching skills. Officials said Thursday that they hope to cobble together the additional $60 million that is needed from several sources: the federal and state governments, private foundations and the targeted schools.

Currently, about 5% of black high school graduates and 4% of Latino graduates meet UC admission requirements. Nearly 13% of whites and 32% of Asian Americans are eligible.

The new outreach strategy--which also includes plans for teacher recruitment and retention programs and scholarships for disadvantaged students--comes almost exactly two years after the regents voted to ban the consideration of race and gender in UC admissions, contracting and hiring. In the wake of that vote, concern about maintaining diversity among the university’s student body led to the formation of the outreach task force.

The panel’s report won praise Thursday from Regent Ward Connerly, among others.

Connerly, who led the affirmative action rollback, said he supports the new initiatives and hopes they will “make more black and Latino students competitively admissible to [the University of California] starting in about five years than was the case in the past 20.”

“I truly believe that history will say it was well worth the wait,” Connerly said.

Although the full board is expected to approve the committee’s vote today, other regents were more muted in their praise. Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, who is a member of the board by virtue of his office, said he supported the goals of the plan but was not satisfied that it would make the university sufficiently diverse.

“Let’s not kid ourselves. This is simply not enough,” he said in a letter to the board, which was read aloud Thursday. Davis proposed that the UC system also adopt a proposal guaranteeing admission of the top two students of every public high school in California.

Critics, including former Regent Rick Russell, who wrote a dissenting 15-page minority report to the task force’s recommendations, have said that even an infusion of millions of dollars will not solve the problems that racism has caused.

“The challenges that face us in light of the elimination of affirmative action cannot be addressed by UC outreach efforts alone,” Russell wrote, calling the new report a rehash of existing policies.

The $60-million cost projection for the program includes $27.2 million for school outreach efforts, $17.9 million for expanding academic programs that target black and Latino students but are open to all, and $7.9 million for contacting students, families and schools about UC admission requirements.