Note in this piece that UC’s Asian students are highly organized (based on their race) while Euro derived students are not. — Ed.
A newUniversity of California admissions policy, adopted to increase campusdiversity, could actually increase the number of white students oncampuses while driving down the Asian population.
Now angryAsian-American community leaders and educators are attacking the policyas ill-conceived, poorly publicized and discriminatory.
“It’saffirmative action for whites,” said UC-Berkeley professor Ling-chiWang. “I’m really outraged “… and profoundly disappointed with theinstitution.”
At an Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Educationconference Friday in San Francisco, Asian activists also noted thepolicy will result in negligible increases in African-American studentsand only a modest climb in the number of Latinos. But it’s the drop inthe already significant Asian count that has many in that community soupset.
[…]
Those critical of theproposed plan vow to get it reversed by appealing to those who holdUC’s purse strings: state legislators. On Tuesday, two panels of theCalifornia Legislature will jointly hold a hearing to review the policy.
Meanwhile,supporters of the change, which results from a faculty study and isbacked by president Mark G. Yudof, see it as a way to ease the wideningachievement gap on their campuses. The impact of the new policy,according to
UC’spreliminary analysis, would be to simplify the application process andcast a wider net among promising low-income students.
It’s aconsequential shift for the UC system, reflecting its effort to make UCmore accessible. The new policy applies to students entering college infall 2012; they are now high school freshmen.
More than a decadeafter California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racialpreferences, university administrators have struggled to create abetter balance on campus. The use of a strict meritocracy has beenblamed on the rise of “the Asian campus.” Some say it has come at theexpense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics — as wellas whites.
“The president would not have supported the policy hadhe not felt it was fair and created opportunity,” said Nina Robinson,UC’s director of policy and external affairs for student affairs.
Manystudents — especially low-income and/or minority students — becomeineligible to apply because they do not take the subject matter tests,she said.
Flawed report
Butan analysis of the change predicts that the number of Asians admittedto UC could decrease because Asians tend to excel on the “subjecttests,” which are no longer part of the application.