Casting about for a way to boost minority enrollment in the post-affirmative action era, the UC Board of Regents on Thursday began debating a proposal to guarantee seats to the top 4% of students from each public high school in California.
The idea was promoted as a way to increase the number of black and Latino students by 10% in the university system.
The proposal, however, would simply guarantee admission to one of the eight UC undergraduate campuses, but not necessarily the students' first choice. As a result, it probably would have little if any impact on one hotly contested issue--who gets admitted to UC Berkeley and UCLA, the most competitive campuses.
Nonetheless, the proposal, modeled after a step already taken in Texas, unleashed a torrent of criticism from regents, who questioned if the top 4% from poor high schools would displace more qualified students from better schools--and also lower standards at the prestigious nine-campus university.
"As regents and protectors of the university," said Regent Sue Johnson, "we're concerned about quality of our students."
Regent Ward Connerly summed up the chilly reception to the plan this way: "We are willing to stand in any gate to make sure that quality doesn't suffer."
The 4% plan has been endorsed by some faculty leaders and two Democratic candidates for governor. Keith Widaman, head of a faculty committee rethinking admissions criteria, defended it Thursday as a way to stop the decline in blacks and Latino students without any significant drop in quality.
He cited a UC analysis showing that the formula would accept about 3,500 to 4,000 students who would not otherwise be UC-eligible, including as many as 700 blacks and Latinos.
Coincidentally, he said, that's about the size of the decrease in the number of "underrepresented minorities" accepted this year, the first time in decades that UC picked its freshman class without racial preferences.
The analysis says that those students would not significantly dilute the overall grades and test scores of the pool of 46,000 students accepted by UC this year.
"If they have strived to be the very top of their school, they should do well at the university," said UC's undergraduate admissions director, Carla Ferri, who supports the plan.
The plan would make a difference at many schools--usually in poor, rural and minority neighborhoods--that now send only a few students, if any, to UC. Although many students at those schools have A averages, they often do less well on the standardized SAT tests.
