San Francisco, CA — The drop in minority enrollment at the University of California has administrators exploring new ways of maintaining diversity while admitting students without regard to their race or ethnicity. A current proposal, to be voted on in July, would grant automatic admission to the top four percent of the graduates of each California high school. While this sounds fair and efficient, it is neither and will likely make the problem worse.

The premise is that, while the University of California accepts the top 12.5 percent of California’s graduating seniors, only 11 percent are currently eligible under present standards. By guaranteeing the top four percent of each school admission, the UC system could accept 1.5 percent more students. Among these new students will likely be more minorities, thereby increasing the system’s diversity. But the plan’s logic flounders on the facts.

According to a February 1998 report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office, a full 19 percent of California’s graduates are eligible for the University of California based on their coursework and SAT scores. The 11 percent figure, from the California Post Secondary Education Commission, is misleading.

Unlike many other universities, the UC requires students to take the SAT II in addition to the SAT to be fully eligible, with the SAT II determining campus placement. Since most other schools don’t require the SAT II, many students who aren’t UC bound don’t bother to take the test and therefore aren’t officially UC eligible, even though they have the grades and test scores to earn admission. In other words, any student in the eight-percent gap only has to show up at a test site and turn in a signed test to become fully UC eligible.

More important, this scheme simply won’t work. A simulation conducted by the UC president’s office showed that under the four-percent guarantee, the eligibility pool will go from containing two percent black and nine percent Latino to two percent black and 10 percent Latino.

Similarly, when the University of Texas guaranteed admission to the top 10 percent of graduates from each high school, the percentage of whites and blacks admitted did not change. But Asians declined by eight percent and Hispanics increased by five percent.

Not only will the top-four-percent solution fail to achieve the results at which it aims, but, by breaking from a system of admissions based on individual comparisons, it will introduce perverse incentives for both students and institutions. Under such a plan, students will benefit from going to low performing schools. At the same time, low performing schools will have their failure masked by the guarantee that four percent of their students will be UC bound if they so chose. This is especially true where students are bused to achieve racial integration.

In San Diego 6,600 white students are bused into urban schools to attend magnet programs while 10,700 minority children head out to suburban schools each day. A top-four-percent rule could devastate such programs, which are often voluntary. Why, after all, would anyone choose to attend a highly competitive inner- city magnet school where their class standing would suffer when they could be guaranteed UC admission by attending a poorer quality school? And consider the incentives from a school’s perspective.

If a school is of such poor quality that its top four percent aren’t even strong enough academically to be UC eligible — when the system takes the top 12.5 percent — it avoids the fundamental problem to grant these students admission. Such dismal performance ought to trigger a top-to-bottom examination of the school, its staff, and curricula.

The failure of the plan to achieve more black and Latino admissions and the perverse, and unfair, incentives the plan would produce can’t be reconciled. In order to significantly increase the proportion of blacks and Latinos in the eligibility pool, the top 12 percent of each school would need to be guaranteed admission. But even liberals such as State Senator Tom Hayden recognize the injustice of this solution. It would severely punish students who attended competitive schools. At San Francisco’s Lowell High where 38 percent of the 1995 class was UC eligible, 166 students would have been turned away.

The only admission system that is fair is one that compares individual students to each other, while retaining the flexibility to consider individual circumstance. Under such a system, everyone plays by the same rules and everyone has an incentive to achieve.

The UC is closer to such a system now than it has been for many years. That it is not yet producing the racial results that most Californians hope for is disappointing. But it is no grounds for a hasty move to a less just system that produces similar results.

The current system, based on UC policy and a voter-approved law, needs a chance to work. Critics of color-blind admissions may soon be surprised by the results.

—Sally Pipes, President, Pacific Research Institute