On a campus lined with groves of citrus trees left over from its
roots as an agricultural research station in the early 1900s, UC
Riverside now serves a large student body with a significantly
higher percentage of ethnically underrepresented students than most
other UC campuses.
With over 15,000 undergraduates enrolled in 2004, 28.4 percent
of students at UC Riverside identify themselves as either African
American, Native American, Chicano, or Latino, according to the UC
Riverside Office of Academic Planning and Budget. UC Riverside
enrolls more underrepresented students than any other UC except for
UC Merced.
Underrepresented minority students make up about 18 percent of
UCLA’s student body.
As the other UC campuses experienced a decrease in
underrepresented student enrollment after Proposition 209, which
effectively banned affirmative action in 1996, UC Riverside has
been able to keep a high rate of minority student enrollment.
Jeannie Biniek, the external vice president of the Undergraduate
Students Association Council at UCLA, said underrepresented
minority student enrollment rates are drastically higher at UC
Riverside than on other UC campuses because of the differences in
the comprehensive review process at each university.
“Our comprehensive review isn’t very comprehensive.
They don’t consider life experiences and what students can
contribute to UCLA beyond their previous academic performance
enough,” Biniek said.
Unlike UCLA, UC Riverside enrolls a high number of minority
students. The school has traditionally enrolled all UC eligible
students, including those that were not able to get into other UC
schools. Last year was the first year that UC Riverside had a
selective admissions process in which not all UC eligible students
were able to attend the school.
UC spokeswoman Ravi Poorsina said that while UC Riverside has
become a selective campus, it is still able to accommodate a larger
proportion of its applicants than the other campuses, with the
exception of UC Merced.
“Because UCR has the ability to admit a greater proportion
of its applicants, it also tends to capture a pretty diverse group
of students,” she said.
Currently, the small percentage of underrepresented minority
students at UCLA has some students worried. According to the UCLA
Office of Analysis and Information Management, less than 17 percent
of applicants identifying themselves as African American, Native
American, Chicano or Latino were admitted into UCLA in 2004.
“As one of the flagship institutions to the UC system, we
should be the one taking the lead in enrolling a student population
that’s reflective of the California population. Failing to do
so is a failure to serve the state of California, which is what the
institution is supposed to do,” Biniek said.
The tradition of an ethnically diverse student population
started when UC Riverside first opened its doors as a college in
1954. The school was able to draw from a largely Hispanic local
population and was also able to enroll many students who were not
accepted to other UCs.
“A lot of students from underrepresented minorities who
wanted to get their feet into a UC campus were more welcomed here
than at other campuses because we were still in a growth
mode,” said Ricardo Duran, a UC Riverside spokesman.
Jim Sandoval, the vice chancellor for student affairs at UC
Riverside, said that though UC Riverside has no unique outreach
problems, the school has been able to continue to enroll a high
percentage of underrepresented minority students because it has
been able to build from its traditionally diverse student
population.
“When students visit our campus they feel good about the
diversity that they see and it helps us recruit them to UC
Riverside,” Sandoval said.
Only the newly opened UC Merced campus, which enrolled 31
percent underrepresented minority students in its first incoming
class, has a larger percentage of minority students.
But UC Riverside officials believe that UC Riverside will
continue to cater to a large student body of underrepresented
students despite the opening of a new UC campus.
“Things may change in the future but being a smaller
campus and a campus that already has built a reputation of
diversity, I think we’re going to continue along the lines of
being more diverse than other UC simply because of our
reputation,” Duran said.
Third-year UC Riverside student Juan Cortes said though the
diversity at UC Riverside may have attracted some minority
students, he did not know that UC Riverside had the highest rate of
underrepresented minority enrollment when he decided to apply.
“I applied to UC Riverside and not to any other UC schools
because it is closer to home and I knew I didn’t have the
money to live on campus,” Cortes said.