New UC rules worry some Asian Americans

Changes to UC admissions policies have met with resistance from the Asian American community, who fear their numbers will be reduced on campus.

The biggest changes, starting in 2012, include eliminating the SAT Subject Tests requirement and changing the number of top students in their graduating class who are guaranteed enrollment from 12.5 percent to 10 percent.

The changes have recently raised some controversy and have prompted action from Asian American legislators, including California Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, the chair of the Asian Pacific Islander legislative caucus.

Lieu held a hearing last month requesting documentation to ensure that Proposition 209, which banned the consideration of race, sex, or ethnicity in admissions, wasn’t being undermined.

“I support diversity. Many of us do. There are smart ways to do it and there are stupid and counterproductive ways to do it. Based on the projections we saw, this is not the right way to do it,” Lieu said.

But Ricardo Vasquez, a spokesman for the UC Office of the President, said that the university is sure that broadening the applicant pool is the right thing to do.

He insisted that it is not a hidden form of affirmative action, as critics have suggested, but an opportunity that will open the door for approximately 30,000 more students, including Asian Americans.

“There’s absolutely no consideration of race. … The fact is, more students will be eligible for comprehensive review,” Vasquez said, referring to a process admissions officers use to evaluate applicants in which all portions of the application are read by the same reviewer.

He added that the number of eligible students for admission would not increase as much for the Asian American Pacific Islander demographic because so many were already eligible.

Oiyan Poon, a doctoral candidate in education at UCLA and a former president of United States Student Association, said that though certain underrepresented Asian American groups, such as Pacific Islanders, may stand to benefit from the new policies, the Asian community has a right to be suspicious.

She cited a federal investigation into UC’s admissions policies in the 1980s that has many older members of the Asian American community still reeling.

“This is not just about Asians being upset that the new policy may reduce their proportions. Asian Americans have a long and bitter history with the UC that started in the ’80s trying to cap their enrollment,” Poon said.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a federal investigation of the UC system in the late 1980s found both UCLA and UC Berkeley guilty of discrimination against Asian American applicants, especially in the competitive law and mathematics departments.

In 1989, Poon said, the investigations resulted in a public apology from the chancellor of UC Berkeley for the rapid decline in Asian American enrollment.

An article in the Wall Street Journal stated federal investigators also found discrimination against Asian American graduate school applicants being practiced in UCLA’s mathematics department, and in 1992, a federal investigation prompted UC Berkeley to rescind a policy that compared Asian American applicants to each other, instead of the entire pool of applicants.

“So it’s easy to see, in a historical context, why so many in the Asian American community are concerned,” Poon said.

Poon added that though the new policy had some positive attributes, the 33 percent margin of error in the California Postsecondary Education Commission study UC numbers were based on also made it difficult to predict who would benefit.

But she also said that making it clear who could apply was a good place to start.

Under the new policy, eligibility for the Pacific Islander demographic would be expected to increase about 500 students, a tremendous gain for the demographic, she said.

“Personally, I would be the biggest cheerleader of this new policy if they eliminated testing altogether,” she said.

Mitchell Chang, a professor of education and organizational change at UCLA, agreed.

He said that though he believes the new policy is a good effort to broaden the applicant pool, he understands why older generations of Asian Americans are worried.

“This is a good-willed effort to address a real problem with access … but older members of the Asian American community don’t want to see history repeated,” he said.

He added that he thought the biggest problem was a lack of resources for qualified applicants.

“Right now, there’s a scarcity of world-class public institutions, and in this economy, that’s very important,” Chang said.

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