Black student enrollment rebounds at UCLA: will "outsourced" affirmative action prove long lasting?

Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Dec 13, 2007 by Ronald Roach

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As a senior honors student at Weston Ranch High School in Stockton, Calif., last spring, Lakea Youngblood gained admission to the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles, California's two most sought-after public universities. While both schools offered the northern California native similar financial aid packages, UC Berkeley proved highly enticing to Youngblood given the school's sterling academic reputation and its close proximity to her family home.

Nonetheless, UCLA readily won over Youngblood because of her interest in studying broadcast journalism in the media-saturated environment of Los Angeles and an effective outreach effort mounted by Black UCLA graduates, current students and others concerned about declining Black student enrollment. In addition to Youngblood's financial aid package offered by UCLA, a foundation representing UCLA's Black alumni and other supporters of the Black student outreach offered her a first-year $1,000 scholarship. The privately funded scholarship and the discussions she had with Black alumni sent a compelling message.

"I felt the UCLA outreach was tremendous. It really made me feel good about my decision to enroll there," Youngblood says.

The outreach to Black students such as Youngblood became part of a larger story after Black freshman student enrollment at UCLA this fall saw a dramatic reversal after several years of decline. Blacks enrolling as freshmen this fall numbered 203 out of 4,564, or about 4.5 percent. In the fall of 2006, just 100 Blacks enrolled in a freshman class of 4,809, or roughly 2.1 percent.

UCLA alumni, students, community leaders and numerous individuals in Southern California believed that Black freshman enrollment in 2006 had reached a crisis point. Attributing the enrollment decline largely to the impact of Proposition 209, a voter-approved 1996 law that banned public institutions from considering race, ethnicity and gender in academic admissions, a wide range of groups and individuals banded together to address the admissions and enrollment of Black students at UCLA.

The force of their efforts, in coordination with those of UCLA and University of California system officials, resulted in the adoption of a new admissions process emphasizing holistic assessments of applicants. The efforts also launched a privately organized and funded affirmative action outreach campaign targeted towards Black students.

"I think (the response by the community) was extremely significant above and beyond the crisis of Black student enrollment. The number of organizations that came together may have been unprecedented," says Dr. Richard Yarborough, an associate professor of English and African-American studies at UCLA.

For higher education diversity advocates, the community response to the UCLA Black admissions crisis marks what many are seeing as an innovative step for affirmative action in places where public institutions are prohibited from considering race in admissions and having racially focused academic programs. Advocates are assessing whether private efforts by groups and individuals can make up for the targeted activities and scholarship funding public institutions were once allowed to provide for Blacks and other under-represented minorities.

In response, critics are questioning the legality of "outsourced" affirmative action occurring at institutions where race-conscious admissions have been banned. They also contend that even if privately sponsored, racially targeted scholarships and racially specific outreach activities do not run afoul of state affirmative action bans or federal civil rights laws, it's morally wrong to exclude members of any racial group from being considered for an academic program or benefit.

UCLA Tradition

Few flagship state universities have as long or as rich a tradition of educating Black students as has UCLA. When many state institutions, particularly those in the South, barred Black students, UCLA's doors were open. Distinguished former students now deceased include Tom Bradley, the first and only Black mayor of Los Angeles; Jackie Robinson, the Black player who broke through Major League Baseball's color line in the 20th century; Dr. Ralph Bunche, the Nobel Peace prize-winning Black diplomat and political scientist who helped negotiate groundbreaking peace agreements in the Middle East in the 1940s; and tennis great Arthur Ashe, the first and only Black man to win the Wimbledon tournament. In addition to Bradley and Bunche, the late former U.S. Congressman Augustus F. Hawkins and Yvonne B. Burke, a Los Angeles County Supervisor and a former U.S. Congresswoman, are other politically influential Blacks who studied at UCLA.

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"The Black community has enjoyed a strong and long-lasting relationship with UCLA. There's been a notable presence of Blacks at UCLA going back to the 1920s," Yarborough says.

Given the deep association between influential Black Californians and UCLA, observers say that it proved logical that Black community groups and Black alumni would organize and enlist UCLA and state officials in an effort to address declining Black enrollment at the university. When the news media reported in the spring of 2006 that 96 Black students would be enrolling in the fall, a group of UCLA students staged a campus protest. That same spring, a coalition of community groups, known as the Alliance for Equal Opportunity in Education, also sprang into action.