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Stardate 20011114.1540 (On Screen): Good old University of California... The voters of the state of California adopted ballot measure making it illegal for the University of California to take race into consideration when deciding which students to accept or reject. After this happened, there was a temporary tumble in the number of black and Hispanic students which, interestingly, then rebounded. But now the regents of UC (responsible for such famous institutions as UCLA, UCSD and Berkeley) have decided that a strict merit-based admissions policy just isn't good enough, even though that is clearly what the voters indicated that they wanted their state funds to support. But race is out -- so now they're instituting a policy where they can take into account such issues as "overcame adversity" or "was poor" or "attended a crummy school".

They said they do not expect the ethnic composition of freshmen classes at any of the campuses to change substantially.

I don't believe a word of it. They deny that this is a backdoor way of reinstituting racial preferences for minorities, and as proof of that they state that all indications of the race of applicants will be removed from the applications before this evaluation. Of course, if the application says that the student grew up in Watts, or attended a crummy school smacko in the middle of Oakland which is known to have a %95+ minority attendance, then it won't be too difficult to figure out anyway, one would think.

One of the biggest difficulty of this whole business is just how one quantizes things like "overcame adversity". We are, after all, ultimately going to have to line all applicants up in a line and take the first hundred thousand each year; and that means that ultimately every candidate must be assigned an overall numerical score so his place in that line can be determined. Doing that with academic scores is relatively straightforward: a 560 SAT verbal is higher than a 540. But how does one assign a reliable score to "overcame adversity" based solely on evaluation of a written application? What is the definition of "adversity", anyway? Despite their disclaimers, how much you want to bet that it turns out to be a code word for "not being white"?

Proponents said the switch, already approved by the UC faculty, sends a message to California high school students that they can get into UC if they make the most of their opportunities.

There is, to me, a certain irony in the fact that the regents are trying to send a message and didn't receive the message that the voters sent to them by passing a law: knock off the fuzzy-headed policies and use merit exclusively. What the law said was "no racial quotas"; I suspect that now there's a good chance there will be a new law passed which is much more explicit: "all studemts will be selected based solely on academic merit; no other criteria will be permitted". (discuss)