“I just don’t understand why certain people have gotten themselves all worked up about who gets to go to Berkeley and UCLA as if that’s the only path to a successful life in California, because it is not and the evidence is abundant that it is not,” he says.
Black and Hispanic enrollment is higher at California State University — there, Black students comprised about 8 percent of the freshman class last fall.
Still, CSU Chancellor Charles Reed says he’d like to see those numbers increase.
“I go out and visit public schools and talk to people and I figured out just walking around that students, parents and, frankly, a lot of teachers in the public schools really don’t know what it takes to go to college,” says Reed, whose staff has blanketed schools and libraries with a “How to Get to College” poster spelling out requirements.
Even though Blacks, Hispanics and American Indians are under-represented at Berkeley, the school is far from all-White. The expected freshman class will be about 47 percent Asian American (a huge category encompassing ethnicities from Samoa to India) and 31 percent White.
“We should all be extraordinarily proud of the achievement of Asian Americans,” says Birgeneau, “and we need to learn how to propagate that to other groups.”
— Associated Press
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
