Even though state law bans preferences for minorities, black and Latino high school seniors who applied to University of California campuses last year were accepted for admission in numbers somewhat higher than appear warranted, UC officials reported Monday.
They said the pattern among blacks and Latinos was most noticeable at UC Berkeley and UCLA, the system's two most selective campuses, although the numbers were relatively small.
At UC Berkeley, for example, 267 black and Latino students were admitted beyond what officials estimated were warranted. In all, more than 9,300 candidates of all races were offered admission last year.
Officials of the UC system said they had spotted no obvious reason for the apparent admission disparity, but would continue to study what might be behind the pattern. Critics of UC's admission policy have suggested that the university is making an end-run around the state's ban on affirmative action by considering applicants' personal and economic hardships.
Officials discovered the disparities in research prepared for a UC study group investigating the system's admissions practices.
In a prepared statement, UC President Robert C. Dynes said the racial and ethnic disparities have been "reduced dramatically" since voters approved the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in 1996. Still, Dynes said, he remains "concerned" about "a few presently unexplained differences" in admissions rates of applicants of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
However, he and other UC officials noted that blacks and Latinos continue to be severely underrepresented on UC campuses compared with statewide populations of high school graduates. They said that is largely because Latinos and blacks qualify for admission at much lower rates than whites and Asian Americans.
UC researchers used statistical techniques to calculate how many applicants of each racial and ethnic group qualified for admission. They took into account quantifiable factors such as applicants' grade point averages, SAT I and SAT II scores, the quality of high school they attended, family income level and parents' educational background.
Then the researchers determined the numbers of blacks, Latinos, whites and Asian Americans that should have been admitted and compared those totals to the actual numbers who were offered spaces at the universities.
