The Black Alumni Association announced last week a new program that will guarantee a scholarship of at least $1,000 to every black student accepted to UCLA, in hopes of encouraging them to enroll here instead of at another college or university.
Unfortunately, giving handouts to students who have already overcome disadvantages to gain entrance to UCLA does nothing to address those barriers at the root of the problem.
These private scholarships, which will be administered by a local nonprofit, the California Community Foundation, will be given from $1.75 million raised by the Black Alumni Association and business leaders beginning last summer, after the media noted that only 100 black freshmen were enrolling at UCLA for the 2006-2007 academic year.
Scholarships can be raised to as much as $9,000 per year based on merit and financial need.
Interim Chancellor Norman Abrams told the Los Angeles Times that this effort was specifically “done to increase the numbers of African American students.”
Black students accepted to UCLA choose to attend at rates similar to other races. According to figures from the Undergraduate Admissions Office, in the entering class for 2006, 40 percent of black students admitted enrolled at UCLA, compared to 39 percent of all admitted students.
The recipients of these scholarships are students who were already accepted to UCLA ““ meaning they’ve got high SAT scores, a good GPA, a wealth of extracurricular experiences, and the rest of the elite college admissions package.
The minimum scholarship of $1,000 in the days of $100 science textbooks and $700 rent is only a drop in the bucket ““ even as UCLA, despite its recent stream of fee increases, remains relatively affordable compared to private institutions.
While the Black Alumni Association’s scholarship funding may help solve UCLA’s current public-image crisis in respect to minority admissions by upping the number of black students in the next incoming class, it will only be wooing these students away from other elite colleges and universities.
These grants will do nothing to increase the number of black students pursuing higher education ““ instead UCLA will just be stealing candidates from UC Berkeley and the Ivies. Nor will these scholarships affect the percentage of black high school graduates in California who are UC-eligible, a significant factor in black admission at UCLA and across the UC system.
And while we do agree that something has to be done to repair the enrollment issues at UCLA, handing out money to a specific racial group at a specific university is too shortsighted.
Though the idea of using privately funded resources for racially targeted outreach, which UCLA cannot do (due to the affirmative action ban embodied in Proposition 209), is a promising step in the right direction, perhaps the nearly $2 million in funds raised by the Black Alumni Association could be better spent.
Writing checks to students who are already successful can only artificially inflate UCLA’s admissions numbers (and get the public off its back), not have any real impact on the reasons why UCLA’s black admissions figures are too low.