UC Law Schools’ New Rules Cost Minorities Spots

The first results of the University of California’s ban on affirmative action were released Wednesday, revealing a dramatic drop in the number of black and Latino students offered admission this fall to the university system’s prestigious law schools.

UCLA School of Law reported accepting only 21 African American applicants, down 80% from 104 last year, while the number of Latino students accepted decreased from 108 to 73.

At UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall Law School, the 792 students accepted included only 14 blacks, down from 75 a year ago. Boalt offered admission to 39 Latinos, half the number accepted in 1996.

Officials at the system’s third law school, at UC Davis, also reported accepting fewer black and Latino students--groups that were already just a tiny fraction of the student body.

At all three schools, UC’s new colorblind admissions policies resulted in the acceptance of slightly more white and Asian American students.

The exact breakdown of the law schools’ incoming classes will not be known for several months, when officials find out how many of the students who are accepted actually enroll.

“The situation is even worse than the numbers we are releasing,” said Michael Rappaport, UCLA Law School’s dean of admissions, venting his frustration that his incoming class will not be more racially mixed. “When we say 21 blacks were admitted, keep in mind that many of them have been admitted to Boalt, Harvard and Yale as well. We will be very, very fortunate to get half of them.”

UC officials expect a similar pattern in minority admissions to emerge this summer in the university system’s 600 other graduate programs--including its five medical schools--as they firm up their first post-affirmative action rosters. The university’s ban on considering race, ethnicity or gender in admissions will be extended to undergraduates next year.

While law school administrators lamented the drop in black and Latino students, UC Regent Ward Connerly welcomed it as the public unmasking of an “artificially engineered system of preferences that has been propping up diversity.”

“We are too politically correct to reach the conclusion: They are not as competitive to be lawyers and doctors,” Connerly said. “If we really want to help those black and Latino kids, we will give them some tough love and get them channeled into being able to compete.”

Concerned about a setback in race relations, UC law school administrators have dispatched students, faculty and alumni to persuade those blacks and Latinos with acceptance notices to commit to their school.

Most of those admitted hold multiple offers from various law schools. As a result, Boalt and UCLA triple-booked each seat, calculating from experience that only about a third of those admitted will accept their offers.

UCLA admitted 983 applicants in all, hoping for a class of 300 to 320 first-year students. Boalt Hall admitted 792 for a projected class of 270 students--but those may include 40 students admitted last year who chose to wait before starting.

Boalt Law Dean Herma Hill Kay said of the decline in black and Latino acceptances: “I had hoped it wouldn’t be this bad, but it is quite dramatic.”

She said she fears it will detract from the quality of education by short-circuiting vigorous classroom debates--a view shared by some of her students.

“As a white woman, I want to have classmates who have had different experiences, who have grappled with racism when we have important policy discussions,” said Elizabeth Landsberg, a second year student. “It gives me a better understanding of what the law can succeed in doing.”

Hastings School of Law in San Francisco is affiliated with the University of California, but it is independently governed and does not fall under the UC Board of Regent’s admissions policies. Hastings does not yet have a breakdown of the students admitted this year.

“We haven’t completed making offers yet,” said Angele Khachadour, Hasting’s general counsel. “But I don’t expect any major shift in the minority student enrollment.”

Khachadour said Hastings tries to ensure diversity by giving extra points not explicitly for race, but for an applicant’s disadvantaged background. She said admissions criteria should not be affected if the courts uphold Proposition 209, the statewide ballot measure approved by voters in November, which would bar racial and gender preferences. Proposition 209 remains under review by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The California schools are not alone in seeing an immediate impact from ending affirmative action in admissions. The University of Texas School of Law in Austin earlier reported a substantial decline in the number of black and Latino students accepted after a federal court outlawed its affirmative action program.

With law school admissions substantially finished, the Texas law school reported this week that it had admitted only 10 blacks--contrasted with 65 last year--and only 29 Latinos, down from 69 in 1996.

Those numbers may grow a bit, said assistant admissions dean Tonya Brown, as the law school extends a few dozen more offers--added to the 944 made--to reach its ideal class size of 475 students.

The law school was forced to redesign its admissions program after four white applicants sued, complaining that they were denied admission because less-qualified minority applicants were accepted ahead of them--an argument that won out before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Some educators expect the legal reasoning to spread across the nation amid a reassessment of affirmative action programs.

In a national study of law schools, University of North Carolina professor Linda Wightman determined that of the 3,435 black applicants accepted to at least one law school in 1990-1991, only 687--20%--would have been admitted had grade point averages and LSAT scores been the sole criteria.

Yet her study, published in the New York University Law Review, also noted that black students showed no significant differences from other students in graduating from law school or passing the bar. So abolishing affirmative action and basing law school admissions solely on test scores and grades would “deny a legal education to many minority applicants who were fully capable of the rigors of a legal education and of entering the legal profession,” she wrote.

The UC regents’ ban on affirmative action has prompted programs to maintain diversity without using race as a factor. UC administrators are focused mostly on outreach into the grammar and high schools to better prepare black and Latino students for college.

Admissions officials, including those at Boalt Hall and UCLA law school, also are giving weight to factors such as overcoming language barriers, low family income, low educational attainment of the parents--whatever the race of the applicant.

UCLA has begun giving a number value to such life achievements, factoring it into the admissions equation. A group of Boalt Hall students last week urged their administrators to do something similar by establishing a “character index” that would give weight to numerous criteria that demonstrate an applicant’s perseverance in overcoming difficulties in life.

Yet Rappaport, UCLA law school’s admissions dean, said the greatest beneficiaries of UCLA’s formula seemed to be recent immigrants, “because they had many disadvantages.”

“We have immigrants from Russian, Iran, Poland, the Ukraine, Korea, you name it,” Rappaport said. “Walk down the street in Los Angeles and you will see what our class is going to look like.”

Thomas Kane, an economist at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who has studied proposals to replace racial preferences with economic criteria, said the new method will not produce the same diversity, leaving blacks and Latinos badly underrepresented.

“It’s sloppy thinking that you can have both colorblind policies and racial diversity,” he said. “I don’t think it exists.”

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UC Law School Admissions

The University of California’s three law schools have offered admission to dramatically fewer African American and Latino students under the new UC policy that bans granting any preference for race, ethnicity or gender. The schools will not know for at least a month how many of the students admitted actually enroll.

UCLA LAW SCHOOL

Percentage change

African Americans: -80%

Asian/Pacific Islanders: +7%

Latinos: -32%

Native Americans: -60%

White/others: +14%

Total: -3%

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BOALT HALL LAW SCHOOL at UC Berkeley

Race/Ethnicity: Percentage change

African Americans: -81%

Asian/Pacific Islanders: +18%

Latinos: -50%

Native Americans: -78%

White/others: +12%

Total offered admissions: -3%

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UC DAVIS LAW SCHOOL

Race/Ethnicity: Percentage change

African Americans: -26%

Asian/Pacific Islanders: -21%

Latinos: -28%

Native Americans: +17%

White/others: +5%

Total offered admissions: -4%

Source: UCLA, Boalt Hall, UC Davis