As the U.S. Supreme Court gets set to hear arguments in a case
challenging affirmative action policies at the University of
Michigan, the UCLA School of Law has been conducting a program that
promotes student diversity without directly addressing race.
Following the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996, the School of
Law began an aggressive outreach program to increase its diversity
by preparing students of underrepresented backgrounds for the
application process.
The principal outreach initiative, the Law Fellows Outreach
Program, began in the 1997-1998 academic year with 19 UCLA
undergraduate students. That number doubled to 38 the following
year.
The goal of the law fellows program is to
“demystify” the law school experience, said Leo
Trujillo-Cox, the executive director and instructor for outreach at
the School of Law.
“Once they are accepted, we provide (law fellows) with a
series of presentations from our admissions professionals,
counselors, and panels of attorneys,” Trujillo-Cox said.
“We have law school professors instruct the students in law
school level material.”
Law fellows are assigned a mentor to provide continued guidance,
and each fellow who completes the outreach program receives a full
scholarship for an LSAT preparation course.
“It was so helpful,” said Priscila Benitez, a fellow
who completed the program. “It provided this huge network of
students who were interested in law school and current law students
in UCLA as well as lawyers.”
Law fellows are accepted to the program, Trujillo-Cox said,
based on socioeconomic status and a 3.0 GPA. He said though the
program is self-described as a way to “maximize the
opportunity for achieving diversity” in both the university
and legal profession, it is not affirmative action.
“The criteria for the program are socioeconomically based
… it is true that (this includes) a large number of students
underrepresented racially and ethnically,” Trujillo-Cox
said.
The program is an effort by the law school to increase
diversity, as defined by socioeconomic factors, in its admission
pool and ultimately, in enrollment.
The School of Law takes pride in diversity, said Trujillo, and
in 1994, the entering class at the law school closely reflected the
demographic makeup of the state with 53 percent of its student from
minority backgrounds.
“It was a class with no racial majority,”
Trujillo-Cox said. “It may have been the first time that
happened in a top 20 law school … it’s also probably the
last time.”
In 1995, the University of California passed SP-1, a policy
prohibiting the consideration of race and gender as criteria for
admission.
Voters in California then approved Proposition 209 in 1996,
ending the use of race and gender preferences by state agencies for
hiring and contracting purposes. The proposition supercedes UC
policy, making the university’s repeal of SP-1 in 2001 purely
symbolic.
The School of Law saw a sharp decline in the admission of
minority students between 1996 and 1997, with the proportion of
black, Latino and American Indian students admitted dropping from
22 percent to 9.8 percent.
In response to the decline in the admission and enrollment of
minority students, the Law Fellows Outreach Program, which sought
to increase diversity at the law school, was launched.
“The law school traditionally valued the fact that its
population of law students looked very much like the population of
California,” Trujillo-Cox said. “With a change in
admissions policy statewide, the law school had to engage in
aggressive and imaginative outreach to mitigate the changes in
admissions policy.”
The Law Fellows Outreach Program ultimately sees a high number
of underrepresented minority students complete the program.
Additionally, initial criteria for the program include various
measures of economic and educational disadvantage.
Parental levels of education, parental net worth and
neighborhood conditions during an applicant’s high school
years all factor into the criteria. There is no mention of race,
and the program is in no way catered solely toward students of
color.
In the 1999-2000 academic year, the program had students of
black, Chicano, Caucasian, Chinese, Pilipino, Columbian,
Salvadorian and Persian descent.
The number of students in the law fellows program in the
2002-2003 academic year has increased to 92. The program has
students who have matriculated to UCLA, Harvard and Columbia.
Diego Cartagena, a law fellow who completed the program in 1999
and is now a third-year law student at UCLA, said though the
program could be perceived as being affirmative action, it falls
well within the boundaries set by court rulings to date.
Now a mentor for the outreach program, Cartagena said diversity
in the university environment is important on many levels and
although the law fellows program helps achieve diversity, it is in
no way a violation of any legislation.
Cartagena added that the state ban on affirmative action has, in
some ways, led to a loss in the progress made during the Civil
Rights era.
“It’s really sad when you’re learning about
monumental cases, like Brown v. Board of Education, and the
environment just isn’t the same as if you had a much more
diverse student body,” Cartagena said.