By Kenneth R. Weiss / Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES -- The number of blacks planning to enroll at University of California campuses has dropped by 24 percent and the number of Latinos by 5 percent in the first year after the state's premier public universities abolished racial preferences in admissions.
The declines, as expected, were particularly pronounced at the most competitive campuses, such as UC Berkeley, where only 98 blacks will join 3,562 other students who have agreed to register as freshmen in the fall.
That's a 62-percent drop from the number of blacks who enrolled at Berkeley last September. Latinos there dropped 46 percent.
UCLA also showed significant declines in black and Latino students who will join its freshmen class: Of the 4,267 entering freshmen, only 131 are black -- a 40-percent drop compared to last year -- and 458 are Latino, a 24-percent drop.
But three of the eight undergraduate campuses -- UC Irvine, UC Riverside and UC Santa Cruz -- showed double-digit increases in the number of blacks and Latinos, indicating a redistribution of students who in earlier years might have landed a seat at Berkeley or UCLA.
UC President Richard C. Atkinson said he wants to see these kinds of results at all campuses.
"I'm uneasy that UCLA and Berkeley have had drops of this sort," he said. "We clearly have to rethink some things."
Still, UC officials were relieved that the overall numbers had not plunged further, given the tantalizing offers many minority students have from private colleges and universities.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl suggested that the decline would have been much greater had UC officials not mounted an aggressive campaign to encourage minority students to enroll.
"These students are in such demand, we were afraid that many of them would choose not to come to Berkeley," Berdahl said. "Given that there was a lot of negative publicity (about the ending of affirmative action on UC campuses) we beat the odds."
The figures released recently were the last stage in the admissions process that began last November when a record number of high school seniors -- including all-time highs for blacks and Latinos -- applied to the University of California.
Louis Proyect
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