Radio Rahim

Response to Daily Bruin Editorial on SB 185 (UC Admissions Reform)

I am posting this here in light of the Daily Bruin’s refusal to print:
Last week, the Daily Bruin Editorial Board argued against SB 185 (a proposed bill that would allow the UC to consider race, gender, ethnicity and national origin in admission decisions), by claiming that additional students of color and under-represented minorities will under-perform academically, that the school lacks sufficient resources to help them catch up, and that K-12 schools should do a better job of educating these students, which will naturally reduce the need to reform university admissions policies. Each part of this argument is seriously flawed, and though Governor Jerry Brown recently vetoed this bill, it is worth setting the record straight on its content and purpose. 
First, by assuming that underrepresented minority students will need additional tutoring to catch up to the rest of their class, the Daily Bruin Editorial Board ignored the fact that this bill only applied to students who qualify under the University’s general admissions requirements. This fact means that there is no reason to expect that additional academically qualified minority students would perform worse than their white counterparts. Though some might claim that competition justifies racially disparate admissions decisions, the purpose of this University is to serve Californians, not compete against Ivy Leagues (1). Qualified students have a right to a state education regardless of how they perform relative to others.
Second, the Daily Bruin assumed that our school’s main problem is that it lacks resources. Budgets are indeed tight, but the reality is that our administration has repeatedly mis-allocated resources that should be spent on students. A decade of hiring superfluous administrators has resulted in more senior managers than faculty (2) and increasingly bloated executive compensation exemplified by UC President Mark Yudof’s half million dollar salary (3). Redirecting those and other misspent funds towards students would reduce the financial strain that the Daily Bruin uses to justify its opposition to SB 185. 
Third, the Daily Bruin blamed K-12 schools for not properly educating students from underrepresented minority backgrounds, once again ignoring the fact that SB 185 only mandated changes to policies regarding students who already meet the academic standards for admission. While our K-12 system is certainly flawed, it has done its job properly when it comes to under-represented minorities who meet our admissions requirements. Ultimately, it is our university system that is responsible for these students’ unequal access. For example, among the pool of students who qualified for admission to UCLA in 2010, the admissions rate for African-Americans was 13.7%, while for whites it was 22.7% (4). This disparity cannot be attributed to K-12 schools who produced both pools of qualified students. Instead, it results from admissions policies that, perhaps unintentionally, favor or disadvantage Californians in ways that produce this racial inequality. SB 185 aimed to stop this trend, and it is unfortunate that the Daily Bruin Editorial Board so severely mis-understood it. I hope that the next time our university’s unequal admissions practices are challenged, our paper will support equal access for qualified students of all backgrounds. 
1. See the UC Mission Statement: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/aboutuc/missionstatement.html
2. See: http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/?s=ratio and http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/uwnews/stat/
3. See: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/27/BA8SVRJTH.DTL or the recent UC Regents meeting where increased executive compensation was again placed on the agenda.
4. Applicant counts by race: http://www.ucop.edu/news/factsheets/2010/10apptable5.pdf and admissions counts by race: http://www.ucop.edu/news/factsheets/2010/fall_2010_admissions_table_3.pdf To get my percentages, I simply divided admissions by applications at UCLA, first for African Americans (372/2705) and second for whites (2929/12853).