UPDATE Summer 2007

UCLA Enrollment Update
Preliminary Victory Declared. Much More Work To Be Done!

Responding to the dismal numbers of African Americans enrolling at UCLA for the freshman class for Fall 2006 – only 96 students, the lowest number since the 1970's - the Alliance for Equal Opportunity in Education (AEOE), a historic collaboration between community-based organizations, students, alumni, faculty, support staff, and city and state representatives, meet weekly for the past year in order to apply pressure to UCLA and the UC Regents. The sustained effort resulted in a change to a holistic admissions process, where application readers evaluated the complete student; eliminating the historically segmented reviews of grades, SATs and life circumstances. With the evolved process and the privately donated funds for scholarships raised by friends of UCLA, the number of accepted African American students and the number that plan to enroll doubled! To date, 210 African American students have indicated that they will become Bruins as freshman in Fall 2007. This victory is to be celebrated and considered a stepping stone to still more African Americans on campus as a result of better academic preparation programs, public education regarding UC eligibility requirements and continued pressure on the UC Regents to maintain fair admission practices across ethnic lines.  

UCLA African American Enrollment Plummets!
A message from Blair Taylor

First, You Have to Really Care.

The Los Angeles Times ran a front page article on June 3rd titled "A Startling Statistic at UCLA" which depicts the abysmal state of African American admissions at the University of California Los Angeles. As a graduate of UCLA's Anderson School of Management, a former member of the Anderson School's Alumni Board and Executive Committee, the former Executive Vice President of one of the nation's leading college access initiatives for low income students, and now as the President of the Los Angles Urban League, the issue of UCLA's declining African American enrollment is one that I have been personally involved with for many years.

Importantly, these atrocious trends are not only occurring at the undergraduate level, but also at the graduate level, where representation of African Americans has now fallen to below 3% in many of the major graduate programs. African American enrollment in many of UCLA's graduate school programs has now dwindled to single digits.

What is happening to our great university and to our state - both of which formerly were great beacons in their aggressive pursuit of diversity? Today, the passion for uplifting communities through education has seemingly been replaced by a complacency and acceptance of the status quo. And if these trends continue, they spell disaster both for our great city and our once progressive state.

Despite assertions by Ward Connerly and other Proposition 209 authors to the contrary, the fact is that Proposition 209 decimated the African American populations at the University. By enabling the University to look more closely at purely academic and numbers-driven admissions criteria (notice I say "enabling" and not "forcing"), Proposition 209 gave the University an excuse not to facilitate the matriculation of highly qualified, well-rounded candidates of color.

Unfortunately, a numerically-driven system, which regularly seeks and accepts students with GPAs in excess of 4.0 and SAT scores approaching 1400, systematically excludes many African Americans and other students of color, who often lack access to the very honors courses that enable GPAs over 4.0 to even be achieved, and who also often lack the means to enroll in Princeton Review and other SAT Prep courses which profoundly impact test scores of more affluent students.

One immediate answer is most certainly a full embracement of holistic reviews, which the Los Angeles Times appropriately mentioned in the article. This process takes into account all elements of a student's life and does not simply rely on their grades and test scores.

Today, many 3.5-4.0 GPA African American students are turned away from UCLA and other UC schools. Some of these students have extremely strong academic credentials and have often overcome significant family and personal challenges in inner city America to arrive at their GPA. Moreover, they are often extremely well-rounded, with a litany of extracurricular activities and significant work experience. In decades past those myriad activities were once correctly taken into account as accurate predictors of future success and therefore were key elements of the admissions process; yet today those outside activities mean very little in the numbers-based admissions at UCLA.

Beyond the adoption of holistic review, another important element to assist in reversing the disturbing trend is simply recognizing that the system is broken at the access or transition point from high school to college. And while UCLA certainly cannot be held responsible for fixing the issues that plague our secondary schools, they can, should and must take responsibility for addressing the issues surrounding the transition from high school to college.

A report by the College Board indicated that low income students with "A" grade averages are going to college at approximately the same rates as high income students with "D" averages ("The Intersection of Socioeconomic Status and College Participation," Access Denied, The College Board). In other words, something that enables high income students to matriculate simply isn't present in low income communities - even for those students who are far more qualified academically than their counterparts.

According to a Congressional study, nationally this problem translates into a staggering 200,000 low income students each year who could succeed in college, but never attend. Sadly, high academic achievement does not guaranty college enrollment for low income students. This is partly because many low income students are first-generation college prospects who, unlike their high income counterparts, have no one in their home to help them conquer the complex admissions processes. The problem is then compounded further in their urban high schools, where ratios of college advisors to students often approach 1100:1.

Recognizing this issue and its integral connection to African American enrollment, UCLA and other universities must drastically increase their efforts to aggressively intervene on behalf of these students in the 11th and 12th grades, before they fall out of the system. For those universities who are truly interested in increasing campus diversity, these students represent the consummate "low hanging fruit" in the system.

Although Proposition 209 may have set the stage for a numerically driven system, the fact is that UCLA has done far too little to proactively push against the restrictions of this outrageous ballot proposition. The relative success of UC Berkeley has come as a direct result of their overt efforts to make diversity a high priority, notwithstanding the ostensible boundaries of Proposition 209. In other words, Berkeley has simply made diversity more of a priority. They garnered the willpower to push against the restrictions of 209, and today they are a better campus because of it.

In the final analysis, however, UCLA is not the only one at fault. All of us, particularly those who hold leadership positions, have a responsibility for this terrible problem. If nothing else, we have a collective responsibility to be outraged, and an obligation to prod and push the system of this great university back to a more reasonable position.

When too few of us convey such outrage, the pattern of deterioration continues unabated. Thus, it is past time for our great University and the people of Los Angeles to grit our teeth and conclude that the present situation is totally untenable and unacceptable. For in many ways this battle does not hinge upon the absurd restrictions of Proposition 209, but rather it will pivot upon our collective willpower and recognition that the current trend portends disastrous consequences for our city and our nation.

To any objective observer, the trends regarding college access for African American and Latinos are now extremely sobering. A college degree has always been the key to wealth creation and the mechanism for obviating intergenerational poverty. In the 21st Century, a college degree is the new high school diploma. Our failure to enable equitable access to higher education for our young people of color will eventually solidify a permanent underclass for the first time in our nation's history.

This is obviously deleterious for the affected ethnic groups. The current trends, if they continue unabated, will have absolutely dire consequences on African American and Latino communities over the next decade. It is undisputed that the loss of college educated talent is already being felt in a multitude of low income communities. What is apparently less understood, but no less certain, is that this trend is also an absolute disaster for our city and our nation in this century.

Over the next several decades, we desperately need students of color with college degrees to work within our inner city areas. In so doing, they would serve as a beacon for others coming behind them. This is critical because in the 21st Century, our urban population centers not only hold new and vital markets for goods and services in our economy, but they also harbor the labor pools that will be fundamentally crucial to our region's future economic success and viability. Today, we are simply not creating the "ambassadors" necessary to access and cultivate that economic opportunity and labor pool.

In the end, a lack of diversity (with regard to African American and Latino students) at UCLA does not help anyone. It fails the students who presently attend the university, by rendering their college experience far less than complete. For those students, it becomes a missed opportunity to expand interpersonal horizons as they find themselves surrounded with more of their own. This in turn does little to advance the betterment and tolerance of our society.

But the approach also fails our minority communities by leaving vast regions without leaders who are fully trained and highly credentialed. It therefore leaves a vacuum, with too few bringing back the skills and connections that are so desperately needed to advance our urban communities.

Finally, it fails our region overall, for the approach is antithetical to building the leaders we will need as a region to enable our success in the increasingly diverse global economy of the New Millennium. Once, the struggle of our urban population centers was not integral to our nation's economic well being. In the 21st Century however, where goes urban Los Angeles, there will go our city.

Diversity in this century is not a "nice to do." Nor is it a "giveaway" to minorities. Today, in the rapidly emerging global economy, diversity in our institutions of higher learning is an absolute necessity. We will need every bit of talent available to enable our city and nation to compete against rapidly emerging superpowers such as India and China, who have overtly committed themselves to a college educated workforce.

Moreover, history has proven time and again that diverse perspectives enable problems to be identified and resolved more effectively than more monolithic groups (who often fall victim to "group think"). We will need a variety of perspectives and backgrounds to deal with the issues that lie ahead.

Our region's diversity is our greatest strength and it represents our optimal means of competing in a world where valuing and understanding the perspectives of others is mandatory. Unfortunately, as we fall ever further behind, there's enough blame to go around. It is now far past time for our university and our citizens alike to stop holding ourselves hostage to the invalid premise of Proposition 209. By an act of our volition, it is time for us to show that we really do care about diversity and its implications for our future.

Blair H. Taylor is the President and CEO of the Los Angeles Urban League, one of the oldest and largest civil rights organizations in Los Angeles and the former Executive Vice President of College Summit, a leading college access initiative serving more than 6,000 low income students. He holds a BA from Amherst College and an MBA in Marketing and Entrepreneurial Studies from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA.