Shut Out Of the System
As competition increases for slots at UC-Berkeley, admission offers to minority students continue to declineBy Pamela Burdman

BERKELEY, Calif.
As University of California officials announced admissions results for the fall, it appeared that increasing competition for seats at the university, rising tuition costs, and continued controversy over the role of race in admissions were conspiring to reduce the slots offered to African American students at UC-Berkeley.  At the same time, the state's budget crisis was posing additional barriers to low-income and disadvantaged students seeking an education at the top-ranked public university. Among the effects: fee increases of more than 50 percent over the last three years and elimination of all state funding for university outreach programs that help high school students prepare for college and, once they arrive, stay there. And for the first time in 44 years, UC and California State University both were reneging on their guarantees to admit all students who meet the minimum eligibility requirements.
Even as the fiscal woes threatened to push low-income and minority students further down the educational ladder, the number of African American students from California high schools admitted to UC fell 15 percent from last year. At the Berkeley campus, the drop was even more pronounced: Of the 7,753 students who were admitted for this fall, only 194 were Black, 30 percent fewer than the 281 Black students who received admissions offers in 2003. In 1997, the last year that the UC system practiced race-conscious admissions, Berkeley admitted 515 Black students. Berkeley Chancellor Dr. Robert M. Berdahl called this year's results "flat-out unacceptable." 
"I am profoundly saddened and disappointed that so many of these students, especially African American students, will not receive the exceptional education and experience that this public institution has to offer," the chancellor said in a statement. Berdahl, who steps down on July 1, vowed to devote the rest of his time at the university to search for strategies that would increase opportunities for underrepresented students at Berkeley.
Latino students were also admitted at Berkeley in lower numbers: 916 this year vs. 998 for last fall's class. Based on preliminary responses from students, Berkeley's incoming freshman class will be 2.6 percent African American, 9.8 percent Latino, 32.3 percent White and 45.5 percent Asian American. Those numbers are increasingly out of line with K-12 enrollment, where 8 percent of students are Black, 46 percent are Latino, 32 percent are White and 8 percent are Asian American. 
Officially, the campus position is that officials are still studying this year's admissions results as well as accusations leveled by Board of Regents Chairman John J. Moores that the campus had been offering seats to minority students with low SAT scores (see Black Issues, Jan. 1). A report is due in July, said education professor Dr. David Stern, who chairs a faculty admissions committee. "It's going to be as detached and scientific as we can make it. It has to hold up to scrutiny that's more strict than academic research."
Some insiders who were troubled by the figures blamed the "chilling effect" of a nasty public spat on UC's board of regents over whether the campus had been admitting underqualified minority students in violation of the state's race-blind policies. The climate may have dissuaded some minority students from applying and also driven admissions officers, even subconsciously, to be more cautious about accepting minority students with strong, but not stellar, records.
At the campus' Black Recruitment and Retention Center, student volunteers were questioning their hard work to attract talented African American students from local high schools to attend Berkeley.
"The situation is not conducive to Black students coming here," said Carl Williams, a junior majoring in electrical engineering. "It's difficult as students here to reach out to those students and tell them they'll be welcome with open arms. It's pretty obvious that they won't have as good a social experience."
Nile Taylor, a fourth-year student with a triple major in political science, legal studies and theatre, also felt discouraged. "It's hard to be one of the only Black students in a class of 700," she said. "It's an added weight to an already difficult situation. It's getting harder to look (high school students) in the eye and tell them that Cal's the best school to go to."
And, with the loss of outreach dollars, the campuses themselves will have fewer resources with which to develop programs in high schools that send few students to the university — typically schools with high proportions of minorities.