The Impact Of Race-Neutral Admission Policies On Minority College Students.

The Tomás Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI) finds even after the repeal of SP-1 – the resolution adopted by the UC Regents that rescinded race-conscious admissions at the University of California (UC) – little-to-no improvement has been made for underrepresented minority acceptance rates at each of the University’s eight campuses. The six-year longitudinal study, The Reality of Race-Neutral Admissions at the University of California: Turning the Tide or Turning Them Away, assesses the impact of SP-1 as well as its repeal. The study, using University of California Office of the President (UCOP) data, examines Black and Latino applications, admittances and acceptance rates at the UC’s eight campuses from 1997-2002 in three distinct admission policy eras – during affirmative action (1997), during SP-1 (1998-2001), and the first year of SP-1’s repeal (2002).

Study Finds Reported Minority Gains Are Overstated
Underrepresented minority gains are often reported by the UCOP in terms of raw numbers, however this can be misleading. TRPI stresses applications and their corresponding acceptance rates are also needed to acquire a complete understanding of gains for underrepresented students and not just raw numbers. In spite of the UC’s attempt to enroll a student body that represents the state’s diversity, the TRPI study finds Black and Latino acceptance rates are not growing commensurate with the number of applications being submitted by these students:

Five campuses – Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Riverside, and Santa Cruz – had lower acceptance rates for Latino and African American applicants in 2002, after the repeal of SP-1 than in 2001, the last year of the SP-1 resolution era.
Despite an 11% and 20% increase in Latino and African American freshman applications, respectively, fewer of these students were admitted to UC Irvine in 2002 than in 2001.

120 more African American students applied for admittance at UC Berkeley in 2002 than in 2001, yet the number admitted to the freshman class dropped from 293 to 290 in that same time period.

Even with an increase of almost 300 additional Latino applications in 2002, only one additional Latino student was admitted to UC Berkeley, thus resulting in a decline in acceptance rate from 27% in 2001 to 25% in 2002.

“Rhetoric and reality don’t match,” said Dr. Harry Pachon, President of TRPI. “In examining freshman applications and admissions, what emerges is the fact that there has been a significant decline in acceptance rates for Blacks and Latinos since 1998.”

The study examines the five years since affirmative action was in effect at the University of California and has found acceptance rates have fallen sharply for Latinos from 64% in 1997 to 47% in 2002 and by more than 20 percentage points for African Americans – from 57% to 36% in that same time period.

The impact of SP-1 is most profound when examining admissions at the flagship campuses of the UC system, Berkeley and UCLA:

Black admittances at Berkeley dropped from 545 to 290 between 1997 and 2002; Latino admittances dropped from 1,246 to 946.

The same picture emerges for UCLA (located in the metropolitan area with the largest concentration of Latinos in the nation): Latino admittances dropped from 1,476 in 1997 to 1,322 in 2002, and for Blacks, an even more dramatic drop from 488 in 1997 to 316 in 2002.

Quantifying The Effects Of Race-Neutral Admissions: Over 29,000 Black and Latino Students Turned Away
In estimating the effects of a race-neutral admission policy by applying the 1997 acceptance rate of 64% for Latino students and 57% for African American students to UC freshman applications submitted by Latinos and African Americans from 1998-2002, TRPI approximates:

22,201 Latino and 7,035 Black freshman students have been rejected from UC schools following the implementation of SP-1 that might have otherwise been accepted.

Taken together, TRPI estimates 29,236 Latino and Black freshman students have been turned away from the University of California since the passage of SP-1.

As a point of comparison, in the fall of 2001, the entire enrolled undergraduate student body at UC Berkeley was 23,269 and 25,328 at UCLA.

For more information at http://www.trpi.org