An Insider’s View of UC Admissions

A groan ripped through the audience of high school counselors. Bob Laird, the man who decides if their students make the cut for UC Berkeley, had just announced his plans to retire.

A few high school counselors stood and began to applaud. A dozen more rose to their feet. Soon the entire auditorium joined in a long, noisy tribute to Berkeley’s admissions director.

What was going on here? Hadn’t this guy crushed the dreams of thousands of their high school seniors who wanted to go to Berkeley?

The answers came when Laird was mobbed after his speech. “You don’t have a right to leave us,” one tearful middle-aged counselor said, smothering him in a hug.

Tributes poured from the mouths of the “college counselors,” those high school advisors who work tirelessly to find spots at the best colleges and universities for their most promising high school seniors.

They talked about Laird’s integrity, his compassion and fairness. They talked about experiences they shared with Laird over the last two decades as he sought to bring the very best students of all races to Berkeley and, in particular, integrate the campus with more African American, Latino and Native American students.

“Whether you agree with his views or not, you have to admire his passion,” said one college counselor.

Ivna Gusmao, a counselor at Chatsworth High, describes Laird this way: “He’s the conscience of the UC system.”

Laird, 60, said he will step down Nov. 15 because of the “wearing” pressures of his job. He plans to work on a novel, do some writing about admissions and spend more time with his wife, Karen Rice, and two sons, Sam, 14, and Casey, 10.

Laird has spent 22 years at Berkeley as a student recruiter and admissions officer. For the last six years, he has been director of admissions, overseeing the office during a particularly tumultuous time.

The UC Board of Regents in 1995 banned admissions officers from considering race, ethnicity and gender in selecting students--a decision reaffirmed by the voters a year later with Proposition 209’s ban on affirmative action.

When new policies were implemented in 1997, admissions of black students plunged by 66% and Latino students by 53%, although they have rebounded somewhat since then.

Earlier this year, Berkeley was slapped with a class-action lawsuit filed by every major civil rights groups in California on behalf of minority students who were denied admission. Their claim is that the new system is unfair to minorities.

Meanwhile, the competition for freshman slots at Berkeley has soared. In 1993, when Laird became director, 19,800 students applied to become freshmen. Applications rose to 31,100 for this fall’s class, although the number of seats available to freshmen has remained the same.

Question: What does it take to get into Berkeley these days?

Answer: With 31,000 applications and 8,450 admission slots, the competition is really severe. The mean GPA for this fall’s freshmen was 4.15 and the mean SAT was 1,307. But about a quarter of the students we admit have GPAs below 4.0. We read every application twice and find students who have done remarkable things, but not hit that 4.0 mark on GPA. We look for kids who have done the best with what’s available to them. Berkeley admitted 27% of its applicants for this fall, and that makes us the most selective public university in the United States. And in some ways that’s not a good thing.

Q: Most universities love to brag about how desirable they are, their rising caliber of students and how many students they turned away. Why don’t you do the same?

A: For a public university to turn down almost three-quarters of its applicants, it’s not a good thing. Almost all of our applicants are California residents and most of them have parents who have paid taxes that support the university. Denying that many students admission creates a whole series of problems in terms of public relations and maintaining broad-based university support.

Q: Why not just double the number of freshmen you take at Berkeley, and at UCLA, for that matter, the other campus where competition is going through the roof?

A: It’s certainly clear that Berkeley is not going to increase in size, because of a legally binding agreement with the city. I don’t see any easy resolution to this problem. In fact, I think the problem is likely to become worse. The tendency for large numbers of students and parents to focus on what they see as the top 10 or 12 universities across the country is huge.

Q: What schools are you talking about?

A: It’s mostly the upper Ivies and Berkeley and Stanford and possibly a small number of private liberal arts colleges that aren’t in the Ivy League, and possibly UCLA. With the increase of high school graduates in California and the state’s failure to plan over the last 15 years for a steady expansion of higher education, the pressures are going to increase on places like Berkeley and UCLA.

Q: We know all about the surging competition at Berkeley and UCLA. There must be some way . . .

A: The only probable long-range solution to this “funnel thinking” is to change people’s perceptions. Students in California have a remarkable set of opportunities in public higher education. All of the campuses in the UC and many of those at the [California State University] are also quite strong. But most of us in admissions and outreach have been saying this for 10 years or more with little apparent effect.

Q: Why is that?

A: The perception is so deeply rooted--that if you don’t graduate from one of those top schools, it’s going to be hard to have a meaningful and worthwhile life. That’s not true, of course. But it’s a very difficult thing to get across to 17-year-olds, and even harder to get across to their parents. I think a lot of people are motivated by fear about the future, a fear that there will be only a limited number of opportunities in a Darwinian world.

Q: Speaking of limited opportunities, do you lament the loss of affirmative action as a way to admit more African American and Latino students?

A: I do. It was an unfortunate decision by a relatively small number of voters. There wasn’t nearly enough public conversation about what it means that the entire public K-12 system in California is 51% African American, Latino and Native American and the flagship public university has only 14% of these kinds of students. My own view is that, used responsibly, affirmative action is an appropriate and necessary tool.

Q: The public perception was that the use of affirmative action went too far.

A: In my view, affirmative action was used responsibly. We included middle-income students in affirmative action, but clearly the strongest preferences were to low-income students. It is important to the university that not all African American students at Berkeley be poor, that there be a range of African American experiences and points of view reflected in the classroom and the student body.

Q: The other perception was that a lot of white and Asian American students lost out to affirmative action.

A: The numbers of white and Asian American students who were denied admission to Berkeley because of affirmative action were really quite small. We were still going to turn down 18,000 or 19,000 students no matter what. There was a mistaken assumption that with Proposition 209 taking effect, a white or Asian American applicant would have a much better chance of getting into Berkeley. That’s turned out not to be true.

In my view, the state ended affirmative action before we ended the social and economic conditions that have created the need for it. We are trying to pretend that school reform and outreach somehow can solve this dilemma.

Q: Pretend?

A: I don’t think we are very honest in our public conversations about the causes of the low [college] participation rates of African American and Latino students and what’s really at the root of the problems in the K-12 schools. We are not honest about the incredible inequities in California society--26% of children in California live below the poverty level, which is an income of $16,500 a year for a family of four. And the gap is widening. So huge numbers of kids are behind by the time they get to kindergarten and fall further behind in the first few years of school--often not because of the problems in the schools. To think that this is K-12’s fault and that we can fix this, particularly by outreach to K-12, is naive and dishonest.

Q: But can’t outreach help?

A: It can help, and I think it’s important to do it. But it’s one small part. The long-term solution is to create a much more equitable and a much fairer society.

Q: That’s a pretty tall order for higher education. What can colleges and universities really do?

A: Higher education can insist on a more honest conversation instead of responding to political pressures in the most expedient way possible, which includes a kind of happy talk about the future. We’re not acknowledging how complex and deep-rooted the problems are.

Q: The ACLU recently sued the Inglewood school district, claiming that black and Latino students are denied equal access to places like Berkeley because they don’t have access to Advanced Placement courses. What do you make of the suit?

A: It raises the important question of how to define equal educational opportunity, with the extraordinary differences we have in public high schools. One question is whether the lawsuit focused too narrowly on Advanced Placement courses when, in fact, it should have focused on honors courses in general. AP courses are only one type of honors courses, at least for UC’s policy to award 5 grade points for an A. But honors courses carry the same extra grade point as AP courses. They can also earn that same grade point by taking transferable community college courses. Also, I’m not sure that it’s fair to blame the schools in Inglewood.

Q: So who is to blame?

A: It’s important to reexamine the notion that K-12 has failed. A lot of it started with Proposition 13. We de-funded a lot of K-12 and created a situation where affluent areas could take care of their public school needs, but there wasn’t the support needed in disadvantaged areas. If you look at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School and go a few miles east and look at Locke High School, you would think you are in two different countries, instead of six or seven miles apart.

Q: So this lawsuit misses the mark?

A: One of the issues that seems to be missing is the effects of tracking within an individual high school. We know that minority students get tracked away from honors courses. In some ways, it may be more important who is allowed into those courses within the school, rather than how many courses a school offers.

Q: Civil rights groups are also suing Berkeley, claiming your admission practices are unfair to minorities. What about that?

A: I’m worried that it will discourage some African American and Latino students from choosing Berkeley. It is also personally difficult to be sued by groups that have the same values I have. It’s also ironic for Berkeley to be sued by these groups because most people across the country would point out that Berkeley has been one of the moral leaders in the struggle to integrate elite public and private institutions of higher education.