In addition, UC campuses increased outreach to underserved communities. UCLA, for instance, works with 20 Los Angeles Unifiedhigh schools and several Black churches in the Inland Empire to scout promising students and keep them on track. The strategy, spearheaded by Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, UCLA vice-provost of enrollment management, has helped the campus increase the proportion of resident Black students admitted as freshmen from 3.7% in 2012 to 6.3% in 2019.
The measures have produced some progress. The share of admission offers to California freshmen who are Black increased from 4.3% in fall 2010 to 4.7% in 2019, while the Latino share grew from 22.9% to 34.3% during the same period. Asian Americans also increased from 33.9% to 35.72% while whites declined from 32.4% to 21.9%.
By way of comparison, the demographics of California high school graduates have changed during that time period. Black students decreased their share from 6.65% in 2010 to 5.3% in 2019, while Latinos increased from 42% to 51.8%, Asian Americans stayed roughly the same at about 14%, and whites declined from 34.4% to 24.7%.
But UC has not kept pace with the growing diversity of students in California K-12 schools or the overall state population, the memo said. In 2016, for instance, underrepresented students made up 37% of UC freshmen but 56% of high school graduates.
UC campuses also have not hired proportional numbers of female faculty in several fields, such as life sciences, physical sciences and mathematics, compared with the number of women with doctorates in those areas. The university has kept pace in engineering, computer science, education, arts and humanities, the board memo said.
Ahmad Mahmuod, a UC Berkeley incoming junior, said the constraints of Proposition 209 have hampered the ability to press for more Black students, faculty and services — such as earmarked scholarships — at his campus. He and a group of other Berkeley students took their concerns to Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), who has credited them for inspiring her to introduce ACA 5.
Crystal Lu, president of the Silicon Valley Chinese Association Foundation, said many of her members are immigrants who came to the United States “dirt poor” and succeeded through education and hard work. Allowing preferential treatment based on race, she said, will deny people the right to succeed through merit.
“Our skin color will become a scarlet letter,” she said.
The debate over ACA 5 revives a four-decade battle over affirmative action in the UC system. In 1974, a white student named Allan Bakke sued the UC system, saying a special admissions program for minorities led to his rejection by UC Davis medical school and violated his constitutional and civil rights. In a landmark 1978 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial quotas but upheld the use of race as one of several factors in college admissions policy.
Even if ACA 5 wins passage, the UC and California State University systems would still need to decide how affirmative action would be implemented in their admission and hiring processes.
