UC Berkeley Sued Over Admissions Policies

Eight black, Latino and Filipino-American students sued UC Berkeley on Tuesday, accusing the University of California’s flagship campus of discriminatory admissions policies that prevented them from being admitted last year.

The students, represented by a phalanx of civil rights attorneys, did not directly challenge the ban on affirmative action that resulted in steep drops in the number of racial minority students admitted last fall.

Instead, the class action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco alleges that Berkeley’s admissions officers violate civil rights laws with “unjustified reliance upon standardized test scores” and grading policies that favor the privileged.

UC Berkeley officials vigorously defended their admissions practices, saying that the central allegation in the lawsuit is false.

“The plaintiffs claim that Berkeley does not want African American, Latino and Filipino American students. That is not true--we do,” Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl said in a statement. “We seek minority students vigorously and welcome them eagerly.”

The lawsuit challenges admission policies used by Berkeley last year, the first time the eight UC undergraduate campuses picked their freshmen classes without preferences for race, ethnicity or gender.

Lawyers from a variety of civil rights groups said they targeted Berkeley because it is the most competitive of the UC campuses and turned away the greatest number of well-qualified minority students last year.

Indeed, six of the eight plaintiffs denied admission to Berkeley are now freshmen at another UC campus, including three at UC Davis and one each at UC San Diego, UC Irvine and UCLA. A seventh has been accepted to begin classes at UCLA next spring.

“UC Berkeley is operating as an exclusive club,” said Joseph E. Jaramillo, a civil rights lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “The campus selected over half of its students from only 5% of the high schools in the state.”

Although the lawsuit singles out Berkeley, all the UC campuses use similar policies as required by the UC regents.

The suit contends that Berkeley’s admissions officers assign “unjustifiable weight” to the SAT and SAT II achievement tests and rely too much on “educationally insignificant differences” in these scores.

The suit also challenges the practice of awarding an extra grade point to students who earn an A in an Advanced Placement course, resulting in grade point averages that exceed 4.0.

Although such AP courses are widely available in high schools with predominantly white and wealthy students, they are scarce in inner-city schools, putting poor and minority students at a disadvantage, the suit states.

UC officials have been wrestling with these issues for years. At a regents meeting later this month, a faculty committee will propose cutting in half the extra point students can earn in AP classes.

The half-point proposal is a compromise between competing interests: Although UC officials know AP courses are not equally available, they want to encourage students to challenge themselves with rigorous AP classes rather than sliding by with routine classes to earn an easy A.