<p>A Startling Statistic at UCLA</p>
<p>At the school whose alumni include Jackie Robinson and Tom Bradley, only 96
blacks are expected in this fall's freshman class.</p>
<p>By Rebecca Trounson
Times Staff Writer</p>
<p>June 3, 2006</p>
<p>This fall 4,852 freshmen are expected to enroll at UCLA, but only 96, or 2%,
are African American - the lowest figure in decades and a growing concern at
the Westwood campus.</p>
<p>For several years, students, professors and administrators at UCLA have
watched with discouragement as the numbers of black students declined. But
the new figures, released this week, have shocked many on campus and
prompted school leaders to declare the situation a crisis.</p>
<p>UCLA - which boasts such storied black alumni as Jackie Robinson, Tom
Bradley and Ralph Bunche, and is in a county that is 9.8% African American -
now has a lower percentage of black freshmen than either crosstown rival USC
or UC Berkeley, the school often considered its top competitor within the UC
system.</p>
<p>The 96 figure - down by 20 students from last year - is the lowest for
incoming African American freshmen since at least 1973. And of the black
freshmen who have indicated they will enroll in the fall, 20 are recruited
athletes, admissions officials said.</p>
<p>"Clearly, we're going to have to meet this crisis by redoubling our efforts,
which have not yielded the results we'd like to see," said Chancellor Albert
Carnesale, who met Friday with a delegation of undergraduates upset about
the situation.</p>
<p>In a telephone interview before the meeting, Carnesale described the
preliminary numbers for black freshmen as "a great disappointment" and said
that UCLA has been trying for years to boost those levels, within the limits
allowed by law.</p>
<p>He and other officials at UCLA and elsewhere said the problem of attracting,
admitting and enrolling qualified black students is found at competitive
universities across the country and that its causes are complex. In
California, the problem is rooted partly in the restrictions placed on the
state's public colleges and institutions by Proposition 209, the 1996 voter
initiative that banned consideration of race and gender in admissions and
hiring.</p>
<p>Other factors include the socioeconomic inequities that undermine elementary
and high school education in California and elsewhere, with minority
students disproportionately affected because they often attend schools with
fewer resources, including less-qualified teachers and fewer counselors.</p>
<p>Many students and professors also say the declining presence of blacks on
campus discourages some prospective students from attending, thus
exacerbating the problem. Some of those interviewed, including UCLA
sociologist Darnell Hunt, said the campus could be doing more than it is.</p>
<p>Hunt, who heads UCLA's Bunche Center for African American Studies, and
several colleagues have been studying the issue as part of a multiyear
research project on the challenges facing black students in California
universities.</p>
<p>In a draft of a report to be released this month, the researchers compared
the admissions criteria and processes at UC's three most competitive
campuses: UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego. (At the latter, the incoming
black freshman class stands at 52 students, or 1.1%, even lower than the
others.)</p>
<p>The report found that UC San Diego's admissions process relied most heavily
on numbers, while UC Berkeley's was most "holistic," allowing a single
reader to review all parts of an applicant's file, including academic and
personal achievements or challenges.</p>
<p>At UCLA, in what admissions officials have described as an attempt to
increase fairness and objectivity, applicants' files are divided by academic
and personal areas, and read by separate reviewers. The researchers asserted
that UC Berkeley's process may be the fairest, because it allows students'
achievements to be seen in the context of their personal challenges.</p>
<p>In an interview, Hunt acknowledged the difficulty for a campus like UCLA,
which received 47,000 applications this year. Yet he criticized the school
for rejecting many black students based on what he described as factors of
questionable validity, and that he said may be linked more to socioeconomic
privilege than academic merit.</p>
<p>"There's a common misperception that this is a horrible problem but that
black students just need to do better," he said. "But most of the black
students who don't get in go to other top-notch schools - Harvard, Duke,
Michigan. We're losing students who could be here."</p>
<p>Ward Connerly, the conservative former UC regent who was an architect of
Proposition 209, countered that the issue was not the law he helped create.</p>
<p>"The problem - and this is an old song, I know - starts with the small
number of black students who are academically competitive," he said,
pointing out that many also choose to attend historically black colleges or
private schools. "But I don't think we solve this problem by tinkering with
the admissions criteria to make it easier to get in."</p>
<p>No matter the cause, the effect is apparent on campus.</p>
<p>Karume James, 20, a graduating senior who led a recent student protest on
campus over the issue, said he remembered the excitement he felt when he
arrived at UCLA for student orientation in the summer of 2003.</p>
<p>Then just 17, James was preparing to transfer to the big-city campus from a
community college in Riverside, his hometown. And he recalled what he felt
when he looked around.</p>
<p>"That was a real shock. I spent about 14 hours at the campus, and I counted
only about 12 black people. I guess I'd had this feeling that UCLA was going
to be this truly diverse place, and it just wasn't," said James, who is now
the chairman of UCLA's Afrikan Student Union. "Not for black students."</p>
<p>James, who was among half a dozen students who met Friday with Carnesale,
called the session productive and said the UCLA chancellor was receptive to
the group's views. Carnesale, who is preparing to step down as chancellor
this month, promised to release a statement expressing concern about the
issue and work with alumni, students and others to raise the numbers.</p>
<p>The new figures were part of an annual report showing that a record-setting
37,000 freshmen plan to enroll at UC campuses in the fall. Overall, across
all nine undergraduate campuses, the new class shows a continued trend of
slight increases in black, Latino and Native American students. These
groups, which are still considered underrepresented at UC, will make up just
under 20% of the 2006 freshman class, compared with just below 19% for the
current class.</p>
<p>But the picture in the latest release varied by campus and by group, with
the underrepresented minority numbers at the system's most competitive
campuses - UCLA and UC Berkeley - drawing the most attention, as always.</p>
<p>At UC Berkeley, black, Latino and Native American students are expected to
make up 15.9% of the freshman class, up from 14.4% this year. And 140 black
students, 10 more than this year, have said they will enroll in the fall,
making up 3.3% of the overall class of about 4,200. The number of Latino
students also rose, from 449 to 509.</p>
<p>At UCLA, however, the numbers fell for both groups, and for the overall
percentage of underrepresented students, despite an increase of more than
300 in the size of the total freshman class.</p>
<p>Of the freshmen who say they will enroll at UCLA this fall, 15.9% are from
underrepresented groups, compared with 18.1% of the current freshman class.
The figure for Latinos dropped from 683 to 659.</p>
<p>"The critical mass of our African American students is eroding, and we know
the quality of our education experience is absolutely affected, as well as
our obligation to the citizens of this state," said Janina Montero, UCLA's
vice chancellor for student affairs.</p>
<p>Jenny Wood, UCLA student body president, belongs to a student committee
drafting recommendations to revamp the admissions process.</p>
<p>"I think it's been really detrimental to see this decline in African
American students and, overall, in the number of students of color on our
campus," she said.</p>
<p>In Los Angeles County, blacks accounted for 11%, or 9,152, of the 84,677
public high school graduates. Statewide, blacks made up 7%, or 25,267, of
the 343,481 students who graduated from California's public high schools in
2004, the most recent year statistics are available.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>(INFOBOX BELOW)</p>
<p>Shortage of black freshmen</p>
<p>Ethnic and racial breakdown of UCLA freshmen*</p>
<p>1985 (peak year for black enrollment)</p>
<p>White: 49.7%</p>
<p>Asian/Filipino: 22.2%</p>
<p>Chicano/Latino: 14.8%</p>
<p>Black: 9.6%</p>
<p>Other**: 3.7%</p>
<p>2005</p>
<p>White: 33.3%</p>
<p>Asian/Filipino: 41.0%</p>
<p>Chicano/Latino: 14.8%</p>
<p>Black: 2.9%</p>
<p>Other**: 7.9%</p>
<p>Pie charts may not add up to 100% due to rounding.</p>
<p><em>Excludes foreign students. *</em>Includes Native Americans, other groups and
those who declined to state.</p>
<p>Source: UCLA</p>