For the past five years, the Bunche Center’s College Access Project for African Americans (CAPAA) has studied the barriers confronting black students who aspire to college.  Project researchers focused not only on the challenges that often make African American youth less competitive in the college admissions game, but they also focused on the game itself  -- on how dubious definitions of “merit” routinely work to exclude deserving black students from prestigious colleges and universities.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Ford Foundation, we were able to look closely at the case of the University of California, the nation’s largest and most prestigious public system of higher education.  Admission and enrollment of African American students to the most selective campuses in the system (i.e., UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego) declined significantly in the aftermath of California Proposition 209, which had eliminated affirmative action in the state’s public institutions.  In fact, by spring 2006, UCLA’s numbers had sunk so low that only 96 black students were expected to enroll in the campus’s fall freshman class of nearly 5,000 students – the smallest enrollment of African American students on the growing campus since at least 1973.

To date, the Center has released four Bunche Research Reports on CAPAA’s findings (click here).  The Alliance for Equal Opportunity in Education -- a community-based coalition of groups like the local NAACP, Urban League, SCLC, student leaders, black alumni and elected officials – employed the findings of these reports to successfully advocate for an overhaul of UCLA’s flawed admissions process.  UCLA’s new admissions process is much fairer.  It holistically considers not only what each applicant brings to the campus learning environment, but also his or her likely contributions to society long after s/he has graduated.  These are the defining elements of “merit” that resonate with the mission of a public, land grant institution like UCLA.  The result:  the number of African American students admitted to this fall’s freshman class increased nearly 60 percent over last year’s number, and the number of students expected to enroll has doubled.

In an America where colorblind ideology works to mask the ongoing effects of racial inequality, this was no small victory.  Indeed, colleagues from Michigan and other places where affirmative action has been eliminated or is under attack have contacted us about the lessons learned from UCLA’s recent admissions experiment.  It is imperative that we continue to strategize with others about how to build on this victory, particularly given the challenges that undoubtedly lie ahead.  The Bunche Center is set to release a final CAPAA report later this year.  We invite you to review the report and to join us in continuing the dialogue.

Darnell M. Hunt
Director

Darnell Hunt, Bunche Center Director and Professor of Sociology
Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA
160 Haines Hall, Box 951545, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1545
(310) 825-7403