UC Chief Seeks to Expand Programs to Aid Minorities

Seeking to bring more poor and minority students into the University of California, UC President Richard Atkinson on Thursday appointed the former head of UC Santa Cruz to coordinate expanded outreach programs designed to improve the performance of such students--and make them eligible for admission to the elite nine-campus system.

Outlining his plan to the UC Board of Regents meeting in San Francisco, Atkinson also increased UC’s budget for these programs by $2 million and pledged to seek more money from the Clinton administration and the state Legislature. He said he wants to double the $60 million now spent by the university to enrich the education of black and Latino high school students and inspire more of them to go to college.

UC officials have intensified such efforts in an attempt to limit the expected decrease of minority student enrollment in the wake of the abolition of affirmative action.

Atkinson’s newest moves were immediately endorsed by the regents, who voted in 1995 to end giving preferences to race, ethnicity and gender. The regents’ action helped inspire Proposition 209, the ballot initiative that abolished such public affirmative action programs in California.

Board Chairwoman Meredith J. Khachigian and other regents vowed to participate personally in the efforts to reach out to disadvantaged students in public schools.

The regents in July approved a plan to target 50 underachieving or educationally disadvantaged high schools, as well as about 100 middle schools and 300 elementary schools. The five-year strategy includes programs to increase the number of college prep courses, improve the skills of high school teachers and provide scholarships for disadvantaged students.

The goal is to more than double the number of black and Latino high school graduates--now just 4,200--who attain grades and standardized test scores high enough to be eligible for UC. A recent study found that 2.8% of black California high school graduates and 3.8% of Latinos are eligible for UC, compared with 12.7% of whites and 30% of Asian Americans.

UC campuses have long had programs that reach into public schools. A 1996 survey discovered 800 such programs, most totally independent of each other.

UC’s new czar of outreach, former UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Karl S. Pister, said he hopes to pull together the disparate efforts so they are run as “more of a team sport, instead of the sum of individual activities.”

Pister said he recently toured the UC campuses to see what they were doing to help high schools in their areas.

“Our critics think we are sitting around whining about losing affirmative action,” he said. “In my campus visits, I never heard people complain. We have some tremendously tough problems to work on. We are going to charge ahead.”

UCLA officials Thursday told the regents that they are already moving ahead with two outreach efforts: One seeking to improve student achievement at a cluster of 30 schools in the Venice-Westchester area and another that has trained 100 UCLA undergraduates to be dispatched as mentors to disadvantaged students in 11 other Los Angeles schools.

“There is no simple, quick or cheap solution to the problem of educational inequity in California schools,” UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale told the regents.

Atkinson, in turn, called for the state and federal governments to share the costs of the outreach programs.