<p>John Fund "On the Trail" opines on UC admissions:</p>
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... While ... black and Hispanic enrollment at UCLA and Berkeley went down after Prop 209, these students simply didn't just vanish. The vast majority were admitted on the basis of their academic record to somewhat less highly ranked campuses of the prestigious 10-campus UC system, which caters only to the top one-eighth of California's high school graduates. In the immediate wake of Proposition 209, the number of minority students at some of the nonflagship campuses went up, not down.</p>
<p>This "cascading" effect has had real benefits in matching students with the campus where they are most likely to do well. Despite what affirmative action supporters often imply, academic ability matters. Although some students will outperform their entering credentials and some students will underperform theirs, most students will succeed in the range that their high school grades and SAT scores predict. Leapfrogging minority candidates into elite colleges where they often become frustrated and fail hurts them even more than the institutions....</p>
<p>There were lots of black students capable of doing honors work at UCSD. But such students were probably admitted to Harvard, Yale or Berkeley, where often they were not receiving an honor GPA. The end to racial preferences changed that. In 1999, 20% of black freshmen at UCSD boasted a GPA of 3.5 or better after their first year, almost equaling the 22% rate for whites after their first year. Similarly, failure rates for black students declined dramatically at UCSD immediately after the implementation of Proposition 209. Isn't that better for everyone in the long run?</p>
<p>University admissions officers don't think so. Ever since race-based admissions ended in California, they have tried to do end-runs around the ban and reinstate de facto preferences. For example, UCLA's new "holistic" approach to admissions, which purports to take into account an applicants' "whole person," including nonacademic achievements and obstacles they have overcome, was adopted in response to Proposition 209. The results have been dramatic. The number of black students admitted for the 2007-08 academic year has surged by 57%, to 3.4% of the overall student body...</p>
<p>But the increased numbers come at a cost. As Peter Schmidt reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the number of students from Asian backgrounds fell to 43.1% from 45.6..."The overall number of minorities seems to have fallen using criteria that downplay academics and substitute factors designed to boost minority numbers," notes one UCLA professor. ...
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