Banning racial preferences in college admissions, the Berkeley experience
During oral argument before the Supreme Court in the Harvard and UNC race-based preference cases, counsel for the students challenging these preferences pointed to the University of California at Berkeley as an institution that doesn’t grant preferences, yet remains diverse. This argument prompted the Washington Post to consider UC Berkeley’s admissions model.
The Post concedes that the UC Berkeley undergraduate student body is diverse. In fact, 19 percent of that body is Latino — only 1 percentage point less than white representation.
However, the Post complains that Latinos are underrepresented at Berkeley compared to population figures. It points out that Latinos account for 55 percent of California’s public school students.
The gap between that number and 19 percent is vast, but has nothing to do with whether Berkeley’s student body is diverse. Diversity and proportional representation are two different things.
The fact that the Post and other critics of UC Berkeley harp on the lack of racial balance — i.e., proportional representation — illustrates something I’ve been saying for decades. Racial preferences aren’t designed primarily to ensure diversity — that’s just a rationale that gets cited because Justice Powell took the law in that direction in the Bakke case.
No. Racial preferences are intended primarily to fill quotas, and the quotas are intended to promote a “social justice” agenda — as a kind of reparation, in effect.
The Post’s article also confirms that there’s no pleasing some people. It quotes a Latino Berkeley student who says, “I am here, but I wonder if I’m seen.”
If she means “seen” in the sense of “noticed,” she has it backwards. The fewer Latino students are present on campus, the more they are noticed.
If the student means “seen” in a deeper sense, her statement is no argument for racial preferences. Latino students at colleges that admit them due to their ethnicity are less likely to be seen for who they are, as opposed to what group they belong to, than are Latino students at colleges that don’t take ethnicity into account.
Finally, the Post’s article confirms how badly Latino and black students trail their white and Asian-American counterparts when it comes to credentials for admission to elite universities, even when those credentials are modified to accommodate the former groups. According to the Post:
The UC system recently decided to ignore SAT and ACT admission test scores, eliminating another perceived barrier for disadvantaged students. It offers significant financial aid to students in need and a special geographic-focused program to facilitate admission for the top 9 percent of students at California high schools. And it admits tens of thousands of transfers every year from community colleges — many from low-income families.
UC-Berkeley even added recruiters in Southern California to hunt for talent from an array of racial backgrounds. The admissions team here revamped how it reads applications in an effort to pay more attention to individual circumstances, including personal or financial hardships. It also launched a web page for Spanish-speaking communities called Berkeley en Español and opened a campus resource center for Latinx students to help them feel more at home.
These steps helped boost Latino representation several percentage points, if I’m reading the Post’s article correctly. But they haven’t enabled Berkeley to achieve anything like the proportional representation it apparently desires.
The lesson Berkeley draws from the Berkeley experience is that, in the words of its director of admissions, “there is no replacement for being able to consider race; it just does not exist.” The lesson I draw is that no replacement is necessary if the goal is diversity.
If the goal is something approaching proportional representation then, yes, there is no replacement for considering race (and in doing so, lowering the quality of the student body). However, it has long been clear that considering race for race’s sake — i.e., to achieve racial balance — is not permitted by the Fourteenth Amendment.