D-Day Comes as Minority Students Decide on College

They may have been phoned by the chancellor of UC Berkeley, but they were flown to Palo Alto (by Stanford), New Haven, Conn., (by Yale) and Chicago (by the University of).

They may have dined on dorm food at UCLA, but Harvard brought in an a cappella group to serenade them.

UCLA may have offered annual $5,000 Blue and Gold Scholarships, but any number of suitors were dangling much, much more.

It was one wild month for a group of students courted like few before them--California’s top black and Latino high school seniors.

And it all culminated Friday--D-day.

Decision day.

Alvaro Huerta, valedictorian of Garfield High in East Los Angeles, picked Yale over a slew of others, including UCLA. Kieu Smith of Inglewood turned down $20,000 from UCLA to accept an offer from Smith College, a highly selective women’s school in Massachusetts. But UC scored a win with John Weller from the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies. He’s bound for Berkeley.

The decisions of these teenagers carry importance beyond their families because of the nationwide attention to how the count of blacks and Latinos has dropped at UC’s most competitive schools.

Inevitably, there will be debate over whether California’s anti-affirmative action initiatives drove some off by making them feel unwanted.

But listen to these and other seniors as they make their decisions. Dozens say the same thing: Despite what many adults think, politics played virtually no role.

“I haven’t heard anybody say they were consciously not going to a UC school because of Proposition 209,” said Laura Humber, student body president of the Center for Enriched Studies. “They are going where it is best for them.”

For college administrators nationwide, teenagers like these are considered essential for achieving diversity--a goal ardently sought on campuses these days.

So these students have been wooed by the University of California and perhaps even more ardently by the elite private colleges--all of which are now eagerly waiting to see how their recruitment efforts paid off.

It will be weeks before the schools compile and release the final numbers, revealing how many students accepted their offers. Colleges generally require students to mail their decisions by May 1.

For now, though, the seniors have much to say about how they chose where to enroll next fall.

Huerta, 18, selected Yale over UCLA partly because his older brother already had forged a path to Westwood. “I’ve been in East L.A. all of my life,” he said, “and I want to experience something different.”

Smith, 17, wanted “to go to an Ivy,” she said. Smith College “is the women’s Ivy. That’s close enough for me.”

Weller, also 17, almost chose the University of Chicago, but Berkeley won out after the chancellor personally assured him that the school “has a marketable degree.”

Humber, a 17-year-old African American with a 4.3 grade-point average, felt overwhelmed by the pile of offers: UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown, Columbia, Duke and the winner--Harvard.

Why Harvard? The name, sure. The connections. But also, she said, it “gave me the best financial aid package.”

Unlike UC, private colleges can assemble their freshmen classes any way they want. They can give preferences for race, gender or, more commonly, to alumni’s children.

But UC campuses, for the first time in more than 20 years, have been forbidden from considering ethnicity or gender in admissions decisions.

As a result, the numbers of accepted African American, Latino and Native American students dropped sharply this year at the most competitive campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA.

And given that only 42% of Berkeley-accepted students usually agree to enroll in the fall, the school is doing everything it can to woo the 191 accepted blacks and 600 Latinos.

UCLA usually only captures about 38% of its accepted students. And, thus, it too has mounted a full-court press to get the 280 African Americans and 1,001 Latinos it has offered admission.

So it’s not surprising that 16-year-old Portia Jackson found herself on the phone last week with a former pro basketball player who was trying to entice her to enroll at UCLA, where he is an assistant coach.

“He used to play with Michael Jordan,” said Portia, who has had so many recruitment calls she couldn’t quite remember his name. “He was very nice. I talked to him for 15 minutes. Then he wanted to talk to my mom and then my dad, who is a basketball fan.”

But Portia said UCLA, like Berkeley, had become overshadowed in her mind by “the prestige” of eight private universities--all competing for this young African American with a 4.2 GPA and 1340 SAT score.

When Stanford flew her up for a weekend on campus, she was smitten by an a cappella group and the enthusiastic students welcoming her. “UCLA and Berkeley were working hard . . . but I got wrapped up in Stanford being the No. 5 school in the nation.”

UCLA officials decided to be more competitive this year in chasing top minority students by offering new Blue and Gold Scholarships to 200 of the best students from high schools in underprivileged neighborhoods.

The grants promised $5,000 a year--more than enough to cover UCLA’s $4,000 tuition--for each of the next four years.

UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale launched the program because he worries that dramatic declines in the numbers of admitted blacks and Latinos will trigger a “downward spiral” among the remaining few who might come to “feel they are not wanted nor welcome at UCLA.”

His fear, he said, was realized at UC Berkeley’s law school last year, when none of 14 accepted African Americans showed up for fall classes. One student who had deferred from the previous year became the only black member of the first-year class.

Herma Hill Kay, dean of Boalt Hall, as the law school is called, offered an explanation for that poor showing:

“The fact is that we have never been very successful in attracting the most sought-after students from underrepresented minorities for a . . . basic reason: We have not been able to provide scholarship support at a level comparable to other leading law schools,” Hill wrote last August.

UCLA’s new scholarships were aimed at fixing that problem.

The chancellor personally handed out many of them. In one such ceremony at Westchester High School, where the student body is 65% black and 15% Latino--he shook the hands of 16 students before the school’s jazz band played another snappy tune.

“I was blessed not only with admission to UCLA, but a $20,000 scholarship,” said Tasceaie Barner, waiving her certificate at an audience of several hundred cheering students.

In a quieter moment, she attributes her plans to attend UCLA to the influence of her father, an enthusiastic alum. The money was just a bonus.

Nine out of the 16 award-winners at Westchester High plan to attend UCLA in the fall. The others are bound for Stanford, Brigham Young University, Caltech and Berkeley.

The reasons behind these decisions are as complex and varied as the students themselves.

Although Pierre Basmaji turned down the scholarship (and chose Berkeley instead) because UCLA “is too close to home,” classmate Labina Ula accepted so she could be near her family. “I have a 3-year-old sister,” she said, “and I want to be part of her life.”

UCLA officials are realistic about the odds.

“If we get half of them to enroll, that would be fantastic given the offers and the money they get from other places,” said Thomas E. Lifka, assistant vice chancellor who oversees admissions and financial aid. “We usually get only 17%” of this uppermost tier of students, he said.

Weller, the 17-year-old from the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, has been actively courted by 10 schools. Initially, he was interested in going “the private university route,” either to Yale or the University of Chicago.

He ruled out Yale, though, because he could not afford a plane ticket to New Haven. The University of Chicago flew him out for an all-expense-paid weekend so he could give the campus a test drive and meet future school chums at a “Students of Color Reception.”

But what he learned over that weekend would probably make Chicago’s recruiters cringe: “Other universities don’t have many African Americans either,” he said.

“It was funny,” Weller said. “The students were so happy to see so many minority faces, and they really wanted us to come out there. To me, it seemed like they had a smaller number of African Americans than Berkeley has.”

Furthermore, some Chicago students dropped hints that they weren’t having all that much fun.

So when UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl dropped by to meet with accepted students from his magnet high school, Weller pulled him aside to ask if Berkeley’s degree has the same market value as the elite private schools on his list. He liked the answers.

“He said he would be very interested in having me come there,” Weller said. “After Mr. Berdahl came, Berkeley was my top choice.”