Friday, February 5, 1999
We need outreach to broaden campus diversity
PLAN: Community programs, overhaul of admissions process
necessary to attract minorities
By Dawn J. Fraser
In recent attempts to undo the declining number of ethnic
minorities at an institution whose diversity attracts students, the
Academic Senate’s Board of Admission and Relations with Schools
(BOARS) has proposed broadening its eligibility criteria for the
University of California (UC) system.
One of the proposed means of determining who should be UC
eligible is to admit the top 4 percent of students from each high
school in the state.
Under these guidelines, the board believes that it will not only
provide access to higher education for applicants from every
geographic area in California, but that it will also be able to
attract a more ethnically diverse incoming class.
But such minute changes in the definition of who is and who is
not academically eligible will do very little, if anything at all,
to improve the declining number of minorities in the university.
Allow me to elaborate.
Problem No. 1 – Ethnic minorities who become eligible under the
new proposal would not necessarily diversify the applicant pool
based on recent trends in increasing number of applicants to the
university.
About 30,000 individuals applied for fall admission to UCLA in
the 1998/1999 academic year. This year, the committee on admissions
will look at close to 35,000 applications, an increase of 5,000
people from last year.
If there was to be an increase in ethnic minorities that apply
to the university under this new proposal, it is possible that they
will simply "get lost in the crowd" of an applicant pool where
there are already large numbers of people from all different
backgrounds who apply for admission.
Problem No. 2 – Although this proposal may or may not increase
the number of ethnic minorities who apply to the university, it
can’t be ignored that there still exists an admissions process that
does not consider gender, ethnic or racial differences in its
applicants.
Although the committee can look at criteria such as
socioeconomic status, opportunity to learn and life-challenges, the
majority of the people who fall into these categories will not be
ethnic minorities.
Now, in no way, shape or form would I advocate for a policy that
states that only minorities from disadvantaged backgrounds should
have the opportunity to be admitted by using these criteria, nor
would I be so naive to argue that all socioeconomically
disadvantaged people are minorities.
Rather, I believe that individuals who come from all different
kinds of backgrounds enhance the overall quality of education in a
university where the potential for learning expands beyond the
physical boundaries of the classroom. But if the objective of a
proposal is to increase the number of minority students at the
university, why not specifically target the root of the problem –
the admissions process?
To remedy the effects of declining minority numbers at UCLA, we
need to do much more than reach out to the top 4 percent of
students from each high school.
Although such a strategy allows for individuals who live in
impoverished areas to become UC eligible, this is simply not
enough. Not only will this strategy do very little in terms of
actually increasing the number of minorities who are offered
admission to the university, but it does even less to effectively
address the source of the problem.
If the university is truly dedicated to halting the declining
rate of minorities, the admissions process should be reformed. No
amount of change in the UC eligibility index can remedy the effect
that affirmative action had in the admission process.
Instead, why doesn’t the university use its vast funding to
establish comprehensive outreach and educational enhancement
centers for underrepresented groups and use the participation in
these programs as a means to enhance admission possibilities?
Granted, some of these programs already exist and can be used as
a criteria in admissions, but a university such as UCLA should have
the ability and the power to strategically challenge the existing
barriers many of these outreach programs face.
Why is there such a lack of communication among the different
outreach centers, and why are student volunteer services so greatly
unappreciated?
If the university focused more effort on this issue, perhaps it
would be better equipped to deal with the problems associated with
the public education system and provide an effective means for
minority populations to gain admittance to the university.
Yet another means of addressing this problem would be to urge
the newly elected governor to appoint regents who are as dedicated
to ensuring diversity on campus as many students are.
At least these strategies directly aim to increase numbers of
minorities on campus and don’t assume that allowing the top 4
percent of each high school to be UC eligible will realistically do
much to change the deplorable state that exists in our
university.
Comments, feedback, problems?
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