Minority admissions fall in California

BERKELEY, Calif. - The University of California's two premier campuses reported yesterday that their first undergraduate classes chosen without the use of affirmative action will have an extraordinarily low number of black and Hispanic students.

At the university's Berkeley campus, admissions offers to black students for next fall's incoming class have plunged by 64 percent and by 56 percent for Hispanic students. Those are the lowest totals for each racial group in at least 15 years. Of 8,000 students who were offered admission, 191 were black, down from 562 last year. A total of 434 Hispanic students were offered admission, down from 1,045 last year.

The admissions trends are similar but not quite as extreme at UCLA. In its incoming class the number of black students who are being offered admission has fallen by 43 percent, and by 33 percent for Hispanics.

The numbers are down even though both campuses got more minority applications, with stronger academic credentials, than in previous years. Officials at both campuses said they expect the number of minority students who actually accept the offers to be even lower, since the students who are chosen tend to get offers from many schools.

The declines match the predictions that many university leaders in the state made when the University of California's Board of Regents, and later California voters, approved the nation's first and most extensive ban against racial preferences in college admissions.

"These numbers are worse than what we had hoped for," said Berkeley's chancellor Robert Berdahl. "We still have to be a place of opportunity for all, but the law is constraining us very, very substantially."

College leaders nationwide have been anxiously awaiting the results from the University of California's first attempt in a generation to choose undergraduates without using race as a factor because many universities are also facing pressure to limit, or abolish, affirmative action. The giant University of California system, which has eight campuses and more than 166,000 students, is one of the most prestigious public universities in the country - and, until now, one of the most racially diverse.

Richard Atkinson, the president of the University of California system, said yesterday that the new admissions figures at Berkeley and UCLA are "a source of great concern for the university, as they should be for all of California."

Across the nation, nearly all public universities still abide by a 1978 Supreme Court decision that allows colleges to use race as one among many factors used to choose students.

So far only California and Texas have removed racial preferences from their admissions rules.

But opponents of affirmative action in higher education are trying to get another potentially precedent-setting case to the Supreme Court.

If they succeed, many higher education officials say the latest figures from Berkeley and UCLA could be a harbinger.

04-01-98