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

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

"With each passing year (since Proposition 209's passage), the numbers of underrepresented minorities started to dwindle to the point where last year's freshman class had the lowest enrollment of African-Americans since at least 1973," says Dr. Darnell Hunt, the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA.

Hunt recalls that in the spring of 2006 he shared with Alliance leaders the center's published reports that had documented the impact of Proposition 209. With the support of the Ford Foundation going back to 2002, the Bunche Center had studied Proposition 209, and it found fault with the UCLA admissions office for not having moved to a holistic assessment system as had UC Berkeley. The center contended that a holistic assessment, which evaluates student applicants within the context of educational circumstances, opportunities and challenges, would produce a more equitable admissions process for all students.

"We had been doing research on this for the last several years. And we had been releasing reports, but they didn't get a lot of traction because people didn't see it as a crisis situation ... When Black freshman enrollment hit less than 100, and it's on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, suddenly there was a crisis. I think that mobilized people and it led directly to the creation of the Alliance," Hunt explains.

Rev. Brenda Lamothe, a staff minister at the First A.M.E. Church in Los Angeles, says her church was among the several community groups that joined the Alliance and remained in the coalition. The church has a reputation for community activism and leadership, Lamothe notes.

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"We're one of the first places people come to where there is an issue that needs to be addressed--because of our reputation and our history," she says, adding that her own daughter is a UCLA undergraduate.

"For me, it was personal as my daughter had applied to UCLA and she was able to get into UCLA ... It was close to my heart because I had learned more about what was going on at UCLA from my daughter," Lamothe explains.

In addition to the First A.M.E. Church, other Alliance groups include the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP, the Brotherhood Crusade, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Urban League and the UCLA Black Alumni Association. The Alliance moved quickly, and its members met with university, city and state officials, including the University of California Board of Regents, to lobby for change in the admissions process.

"I think the Alliance from the very beginning had one primary goal, and their goal was to change the admissions process at was to change the admissions process at UCLA into something they thought was fairer and that would give African-American applicants a better read when they apply to the school," Hunt says.

Making Strides

By the fall of 2006, the UCLA administration announced it would adopt a holistic review in its admissions process for the fall 2007 entering freshman class.