SACRAMENTO, CA - On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a University of Michigan admission system that granted more points for race than key academic measures. But in another split decision, the court allowed a narrowly tailored use of race for admission to the University of Michigan law school.

Both supporters and opponents of racial preferences claimed victory, and the rulings guarantee that the high court will face similar cases in future. As it happens, Californians have already faced this issue and made a better decision.

The first time voters, as opposed to unelected judges and bureaucrats, had anything to say about racial preferences was in California in 1996. Voters approved Proposition 209 and made race and gender preferences illegal in state employment, education and contracting. Since then the state has been lax in enforcing Proposition 209, flouted by cities such as San Francisco.

In similar style, politically correct University of California bosses believe there are too many Asians at Berkeley and UCLA and are trying to avoid the law by nixing the SAT and continuing to use racial profiling through special non-academic qualifications. The UC seems to have forgotten that in California everybody is a minority.

In 2001, census data revealed California as the first state without an ethnic majority. This prompted Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante to say, “If there is no majority, maybe there are no minorities. The time has finally come for us to simply refer to ourselves as Californians.”

Bustamante, who once used a racial slur in a public speech, is right. The label of Californians would be preferable to imprecise tags designed to confer victim status. The absence of any true minorities makes an even stronger case for the state to reject racial profiling in university admissions and everything else, as the law already mandates. Nothing in the law bars universities from taking affirmative action, including consideration of economic status, to cast the widest possible net on admissions. But schools cannot discriminate on the basis of race and gender.

The real problem is not race-neutral admissions but an abysmal K-12 education system that fails to prepare students for college. Many of the best and brightest need remedial education in their freshman year. Legislators can help all students better prepare for college by letting parents, rather than a bureaucracy, choose the school their children will attend.

Californians intermarry at a rate that increasingly makes racial categories irrelevant. That is why another ballot initiative is in the works that would bar government racial profiling. That initiative deserves a serious hearing and debate.

More immediate, however, should be the dismantling of a prevailing orthodoxy that all institutions, particularly public universities, should reflect the ethnic breakdown of society. Though beloved of sociologists, that notion is not found in the Constitution of the United States or that of California. It would require enforcement of racial quotas and the denial of personal differences, effort, and choice.

Despite the Supreme Court’s Michigan decision, California should enforce existing laws against government discrimination in university admissions. It is the right thing to do.

Partisans of racial preferences, meanwhile, might examine their local post office, sports teams, and government agencies, and calculate how many people would have to be dismissed in order to make these place “look like America.”