COLLEGES BLASTED FOR TALLYING RACE.

Byline: Sharline Chiang and Paul Hefner Daily News Staff Writers

Gov. Pete Wilson and Ward Connerly, the University of California regent who led the fight to end affirmative action, are blasting UCLA and other UC campuses for prying into student SATs to determine the ethnicity of thousands of potential members of the fall freshman class.

A UC admissions report released last week indicated that students of all ethnicities, except Asian-Americans, accepted for the fall semester declined by as much as 18 percent - 43 percent at University of California, Los Angeles. But skewing those statistics is the fact that record numbers of students declined to state their race - and thus were listed as ``unknown.'' That category increased by 190 percent.

Campus officials said they peeked at Scholastic Assessment Test data to learn who those students were, but only after making their admission decisions.

Connerly and Wilson's office called that an invasion of privacy.

``For our administrators to snoop around, I think it's a direct violation of these students' rights,'' Connerly said. ``It's a betrayal of the right of the individuals who didn't want to state'' their ethnicity.

Campus admissions directors at UCLA and University of California, San Diego, defended the move, saying they needed to get a full picture of the impact of the race-blind policies. UC system administrators say that the practice is legal.

``We're still required to collect this'' information by federal agencies, said Terry Colvin, UC system spokesman.

``We wanted to answer the obvious question of, Why are you collecting this if you can't use it for admissions?'' he said. ``And it's because we need it for statistical purposes.''

Rae Lee Siporin, UCLA director of undergraduate admissions, said her office may have crossed the line in looking up SAT information.

``It's really in some ways wrong to look at SATs to get a sense, but we were only trying to get rough percentages,'' she said.

But Wilson is furious that in the post-affirmative-action era, administrators are still trying to tally students by color, an aide said.

``This is an outrageous action. It's scary when people who don't want to be labeled have a government entity seeking out what their race or ethnicity is,'' said Wilson's spokesman, Sean Walsh. ``It's shades of darker times in Europe in the early part of this century.''

Students and observers outside the system were left with mixed feelings.

Elenna Turner, a college counselor at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, said many students make a deliberate decision to withhold information on their race and ethnicity.

``A lot of students feel it shouldn't be part of the admissions policy,'' Turner said. ``Last year I had a student who was Hispanic who declined to state. And I said, well they're going to know because of your name. And she said, `It's none of their business.'

``I think that is an invasion of privacy, but that's just me.''

All nine University of California campuses saw surges in the number of students who withheld race information. Systemwide, the number increased to 6,346, or a 190 percent increase, compared to last year.

Some reasons cited for the increase include the ban on affirmative action and the revision of the application form, which moved the ethnicity box from the front to the back.

At UCLA, 157 percent more students - or 1,463 - declined to mark their race and ethnicity on applications. By checking SAT data, Siporin said that administrators learned that 40 percent were white, 40 percent were Asian and the balance could not be discerned.

UCLA admissions staff looked at individual student data, including personal essays, to determine ethnicity.

At UC San Diego, 2,603 students skipped the question about race, a 69 percent increase from last year. By running a computer program to match ethnicities marked by about 1,490 students on their SAT identification statement, San Diego found that 90 percent were white or Asian.

``This was for research,'' said Richard Backer, assistant vice chancellor for enrollment services at the San Diego campus. ``It was an alarmingly large number as far as what we saw last year. It was a matter of curiosity. We said, What has occurred?''

Backer said the search was done on an aggregate basis, and individual student data were not researched.

In 1995, UC regents abolished a 17-year practice of using affirmative action goals in admissions. Then in November 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, which prohibits state agencies from making race-based decisions.

The 44,393 prospective freshman admitted to UC campuses this week are the first class since affirmative action was abolished to be selected without race as a factor.

Daily News Staff Writer Deborah Sullivan contributed to this report.