The numbers of Blacks and Asians also increased but their share of the total dropped. Banned from using race to decide on admissions, the University of California tried proxies, a list of 14 factors, such as census data, to identify poor neighborhoods and family income to identify underrepresented students, but, experts said, without enough success.
She led efforts to get Prop. The campuses vary in diversity and are autonomous, within the law, to carry out different approaches to recruitment and admissions. But, opponents argue, admission decisions should be based on merit. Some Asian Americans, for example, fear that increasing admissions to other groups will only result in decreases for them.
Getting voter approval for Prop. Gavin Newsom and other leading Democrats. In , the ban was approved by voters On faculty, White said Prop. But the man who led the fight against affirmative action in has resurfaced in California to challenge Prop. Known as the father of Prop.
If students are struggling, he said in an interview , they need to work harder. He was a Sacramento developer when the ban passed. Since , white students gained at CSU but their enrollment remains four percentage points below their share of high school graduates.
At UC, the gap is six percentage points between white students who took the required high school courses for admission and those enrolled. Asian students make up an increasingly larger share of the enrollment at UC. Prior to Prop. Some were awarded targeted scholarships and enlisted in programs that helped with tutoring and mentors.
There were also programs to help students qualify for admission by completing the required A-G sequence of high school courses. But all the programs that targeted support and gave academic help to students vanished. Many underrepresented students accepted to the public universities are poor and the first in their family to go to college.
They often need help adjusting to university life, he said, adding that programs designed for the summer between high school and college can be critical to their success. Jessica Ramos, a college-bound student at Skyline High School in Oakland says worthy students often need a boost. At CSU, White said that affirmative action would allow the system to create scholarships specifically for underrepresented students.
The programs leading to a UC degree enabled those students to boost their earning potential after graduation. Grace Pang, a senior at San Jose State, who is Chinese and Vietnamese, says affirmative action programs aimed at women and Asian students could have helped her with her living expenses as the first member of a low-income family to go to college.
For some students, CSU may have the advantage of lower costs and more locations around the state, 23 to nine undergraduate campuses for UC. The gap between enrolled freshmen and those meeting admission requirements is about half of that. That number, experts said, shows the reality that Black, Native American and Latino students who are historically underrepresented face. Latino students still need additional targeted help to overcome inequities that exist in high schools that pose a barrier to admission into top universities and to stay there once they get there, said Thomas A.
Because of U. S Supreme Court decisions since that have shaped affirmative action nationally, if Prop. In August, just after taking up his post UC President Michael Drake praised the use of affirmative action as a factor in admissions during his tenure as president of Ohio State University and said the practice could be used as a tool for admission to UC if Prop 16 were to pass. He declined an interview request.
This fall, UC touted its freshman class Latino enrollment as the highest in its history. Yet, officials say, the system needs to do better.
One of the biggest challenges that proponents of Prop. While she was recently able to hire a Native American historian, she was limited to recruiting without identifying that she wanted to hire a Native American. Make your donation today to our year end fundraising campaign by Dec. Click here to cancel reply. We welcome your comments. All comments are moderated for civility, relevance and other considerations.
Click here for EdSource's Comments Policy. One critical detail: Was that proposition seeking to allow only affirmative action in colleges? Or was it mysteriously tied to government institutions being allowed to use race for hiring decisions? At the same time, the number of Black high school graduates has increased from about 21, in to 25, in The number of Native Americans entering CSU campuses was tiny in and yet still fell drastically to 0.
They reached their peak in at 1. More Native Americans are enrolled at UC, where in they made up 0. No sector is more committed to diversity than higher education is, but it has proved to be one of the stickiest areas for affirmative action, both legally and practically. Urofsky, perhaps because he is an academic, is more patient with the trouble that universities have had in achieving diversity than he is with the problems of labor unions, to which, in general, he is uncharitable.
It is true that probably the main reason Nixon promoted affirmative-action programs was to pit African-Americans against labor, both traditionally Democratic voting bases. And, by many accounts, he succeeded, and created Archie Bunker—the Reagan Democrat, a man who resents special government help for minorities.
Still, the leadership of unions like the United Auto Workers, though sometimes fighting their own membership, were active in support of civil rights. Higher education and unions have a similar problem when it comes to changing the demographics: we are dealing with a cake that cannot be unbaked.
The undergraduate population turns over every four years, but the faculty turns over every forty years. When the new students arrive on campus, they often wonder where the professors of color are.
The answer is: wait twenty years, and they will show up. Even so, the lag in diversification between university faculties and their student bodies is striking.
As late as , less than five per cent of all professors had African or Asian ancestry, and around eighty per cent were men. Schools like Harvard and Stanford have had trouble even getting to gender balance.
In , women made up 1. Even at Berkeley, which had been admitting women since , women made up just 5. Today, less than thirty per cent of all university faculty at Stanford are women, and seven per cent are classified as underrepresented minorities.
At Harvard, twenty-seven per cent of tenured faculty are women, and eight per cent are underrepresented minorities. On the other hand, student bodies, where race- and gender-conscious admissions policies can have an effect more quickly, have diversified. In , eighty-three per cent of university students were white; in , fifty-seven per cent were white.
The percentage of black students in that period increased from ten to fourteen; the percentage of students that the government categorizes as Hispanic increased from less than four to more than eighteen. The percentage of black and Latinx graduates as opposed to enrollees also increased although graduation rates for both groups are lower than for whites. Did affirmative-action admissions help? Starting in the mid-nineties, opponents of affirmative action were able to get laws passed prohibiting the use of race in admissions at public universities in several states, including Michigan, Washington, and California.
The top public universities in those states tried to attract minority students by other means, but Urofsky says that the percentage of black and Hispanic students has dropped significantly. Do students admitted under affirmative-action criteria benefit from their educations? Historically, black students as a group have tended to underperform academically—to get lower grades than their SAT scores predict.
So do varsity athletes. As many writers have pointed out, when we are considering colleges and jobs, there is a pipeline problem. They went to the same high schools that their brothers did and most of them probably got better grades. The success of affirmative action in employment and university admissions has not eliminated the education and income gaps between whites and blacks.
Although the poverty rate for blacks and Hispanics has dropped some since , it is still more than double the rate for whites. Americans of color are starting from much farther behind. Millions never get on board a train that most whites were born on. The Supreme Court case that admissions offices rely on today is Regents of the University of California v.
It was decided in , and, despite several attempts to relitigate it, it is still the law of the land. Bakke is a good example of the jurisprudential confusion around affirmative action: the Court managed to produce six opinions in that case.
The plurality opinion, by Lewis Powell, struck down an admissions program at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine, from which Allan Bakke, a white man, had been twice rejected, but it upheld the right of schools to use race-conscious admissions programs. The problem at Davis was that the medical school basically ran two admissions processes, one for everybody and one that effectively considered only minority applicants, for whom sixteen places were set aside.
Bakke was able to show that his record was superior to the records of some of the students who had been admitted through the special program. The Davis program was obviously not narrowly tailored. One consideration that the university offered in the way of compelling state interest was its belief that minority M. Powell found no evidentiary basis for this, and it was arguably a racist assumption. The school could have investigated whether applicants had worked with underserved communities in the past.
They did not, and Powell suggested that such a standard might be a better proxy than race. Admissions programs determined by race are in violation of both the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which outlaws racial discrimination in institutions that receive federal funding.
Powell argued, however, that another right was in play: the First Amendment; specifically, the right of academic freedom. There is no constitutional right of academic freedom, but Powell cited a case, Sweezy v. New Hampshire, in which Felix Frankfurter, in a concurring opinion, quoted South African jurists to the effect that the principle of academic freedom allows a university to determine who will teach its classes and who will sit in its classrooms.
The Michigan case, Grutter v. Bollinger, in , was basically a relitigation of Bakke. As was Fisher v.
Texas, in , and the second round of that case, known as Fisher II, in The Fisher cases involved a white woman who was turned down for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, U. Each time, the Court upheld the constitutionality of using race as a factor in admissions, but they were close calls.
The vote in Fisher II was 4—3. Proponents of affirmative action claim it is necessary because it creates greater diversity and opportunities for the disadvantaged.
Detractors will claim that it is reverse discrimination, favoring applicants of minority groups over white and Asian people. To them, it is trying to fix a problem of past discrimination with more discrimination. As of today, there are some states who have banned affirmative action in admissions for public institutions California is one. Affirmative action in public college admissions is on its way to be banned in the nation, because of our current administration.
Affirmative action in college admissions is still necessary. It is no secret that mistreatment, lack of opportunity and educational resources have kept some people from reaching their full potential. It is only fair that we help the disadvantaged get more opportunities now. And many schools across the country are still mostly white dominated. America is a diverse country with people of all countries, with roots from all over the world.
Ethnically diverse student bodies will create an environment where students from different backgrounds interact, preparing them for the workplace of the future.
But race-based affirmative action, while giving more opportunities to people who have been discriminated against in the past, is not without its problems. By only providing an advantage in college admissions to people from certain minority groups, users of affirmative action are assuming that all people of a certain racial group are poor and therefore disadvantaged.
That is simply wrong. It is stereotypical to just assume that all black and Latino people are poor and disadvantaged, while all whites and Asians are wealthy and privileged. There are exceptions. Someone being from a certain minority group does not necessarily mean that they are disadvantaged, as that depends on their socioeconomic status.
Here, race-based affirmative action is actually reinforcing harmful stereotypes of minority groups. Something that was implemented to remedy past racism has created more stereotypes and racism toward racial groups. And although affirmative action does bring diversity to college campuses, it mainly brings in racial diversity. There are many types of diversity, including diversity of socioeconomic status, race, opinions and achievements. Using race-based affirmative action for greater diversity to college campuses gives an underlying assumption that only people of certain minority groups can bring certain ideas or perspectives to the table.
It assumes that all people of one race think the same way. This idea that only people of minority groups can bring diversity to college campuses is wrong.
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