IMPACT OF UC ENDING RACE PREFERENCES INCONCLUSIVE.

Byline: Peter Schrag

A lot of earnest head scratching has been going on about the recent announcement from the University of California that while applications to UC for next fall's freshman class are at an all-time high, there has been a decline in applications of ``underrepresented students,'' sometimes just known as URMs, for underrepresented minorities.

The latter, in UC's lexicon, are defined as African-Americans, American Indians, Chicanos and Latinos.

Is this decline the corrosive result of the regents' decision, in July 1995, to end race preferences in admission, effective next year? Although the decision does not apply to undergraduate admissions for fall 1997, are high school seniors, feeling the oncoming chill, already avoiding UC? The theory seems to be confirmed by reports from the California State University system of increases in its applications from blacks and Latinos.

But before anyone rushes to doomsday conclusions, take another look at the numbers.

UC made its comparisons with applications for the classes entering in 1995 and 1996. But if one makes the comparison instead with applications for the classes entering in 1991 or 1992, the change, with the exception of a dip in black applicants - 4.5 percent of the total number of applicants for 1991; 4.1 percent for 1997 - is almost imperceptible. Even with the dip, more blacks applied to UC for 1997 than applied in 1991 (1,905 vs. 1,820).

In 1991, the percentage of applicants who identified themselves as Chicano or Latino was 13.8; in 1997, it was 13.7. In the meantime, however, the percentage of those who identified themselves as Filipino-American - a total of 2,377 in 1997 - increased from 4.3 to 5.1 (Filipinos do not count as URMs). During the same period, the almost-negligible number who call themselves American Indians has gone from 373 in 1991 to 280 in 1993 to 430 in 1995 to 353 in 1997: No trend there whatsoever.

Among those who fall (inferentially) into the overrepresented categories, the percentage of whites, whom UC now lumps together with ``others'' (defined by UC as including East Indians, Pakistanis, etc.) has declined from 48.3 percent in 1991 to 46 percent in 1997, while the number defined as Asian-Americans has increased from 23.7 percent in 1991 to 25.3 percent.

Just as interesting, perhaps, there has been an encouraging increase in the number who refuse to identify themselves by ethnicity at all - from 4.6 percent in 1991 to 4.9 percent in 1997. In 1997, this group - listed by UC as ``unknown'' or ``missing'' - numbers 2,286 individuals, more than those who identify themselves as American Indians or Latinos or African-Americans.

All this should not assuage concern about the underrepresentation of blacks or Latinos on UC's campuses, particularly in light of the growing percentage of Latinos in the California population. But it does indicate the absurdity of an ethnic numbers game that lumps East Indians and Pakistanis in with whites but counts Latinos as a separate group even though, for all anyone knows, some of them are the totally white daughters of Argentine bankers and Panamanian shipping tycoons.

Further, even if one accepts the legitimacy of the concern about the low enrollment of URMs, there is as yet no certainty about where UC-eligible blacks and Latinos are going if they are not going to UC. Are they at CSU campuses, where there are larger numbers of students from similar ethnic and/or social backgrounds? Or are they at the private institutions that compete vigorously for qualified minorities and, in the case of blacks, particularly at all-black universities?

``We know anecdotally,'' said Assistant Vice President Dennis Galligani in UC's press release, ``that underrepresented students are being heavily recruited by other institutions . . . and that some institutions attribute their success in attracting these students to the debate over affirmative action.''

But since applications from blacks started to go down in the fall of 1994, before the regents had acted and before there was much of an affirmative action debate in California, that's hardly conceivable. There are also indications that most of those who are not applying to UC's competitive campuses are not the outstanding achievers but tend to be low-B students who are only marginally qualified for Berkeley or UCLA and may be more successful at CSU.

Two years ago, as the regents were considering UC's race preferences in admission, then-UC President Jack Peltason produced a report warning that if race preferences were ended, black enrollment at UC might decline as much as 50 percent and Latino enrollment by some 25 percent. How, the administration was asked, could that be, if nearly all those minority students were UC-eligible, as the university claimed?

UC's answer was that they were so much in demand that if they could not get into their first-choice campuses, meaning Berkeley and UCLA, the most competitive places in the UC system, they would accept better offers outside the UC system. That, too, was cause for concern for anyone who wanted UC's campuses to look roughly like the new California, but it was hardly tantamount to the claim that the end of race preferences would deny a lot of people a chance to go to a good college.

The new UC announcement about declining minority applications resonates with the warnings of the 1995 report. But so far the numbers prove almost nothing except perhaps the fact that the ethnic categories on which these reports are based get sillier and more indefensible by the year.