RACIAL PREFERENCES NO LONGER IMPORTANT PASSING OF PROPOSITION 209 PROVED UC ADMISSIONS FORECASTS WRONG.

Byline: Chris Weinkopf

``Race-baiting, gender inequality, anti-Semitic, homophobic,'' is how Jesse Jackson, back in 1996, described Proposition 209, the ballot initiative that prohibited racial and gender preferences in California. Speaking to a frenzied crowd at the University of California, San Diego, campus, Jackson warned that the end of affirmative action would devastate underrepresented minorities in higher education. He urged students to vote against 209, ``because your roommate may not be your roommate'' if it passed.

Jackson was not alone in stoking the flames of racial hysteria, having been joined by liberal politicians, some editorial boards and the UC chancellors.

These racial bean counters all read from the same script: The repeal of preferences amounted to ``ethnic cleansing'' in the university system. They predicted that without preferences, whites and Asians would overrun California campuses, driving blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans into academic ghettoes.

These dire prophecies proved to be ineffective, as Proposition 209 passed by an overwhelming majority among California voters. They also proved to be false.

Three years after the ban on racial preferences took effect, it's clear that a far greater impediment to minority success in higher education is the patronizing prejudice of the liberal left.

The number of non-Asian minorities admitted at UC colleges since 1997 is on the rise. Next fall, the combined total of blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans enrolling at the schools will reach 7,336, up 100 from 1997, the last year of the affirmative-action regime.

Such good news for minorities must be disheartening for the bean counters, who have made a career out of underestimating them. The defense of quotas has long rested on the assumption that certain ethnic groups cannot compete without special consideration or diminished standards.

In 1995, the UC commissioned a study claiming that in a color-blind admissions process, black enrollment would drop by about 50 percent, and Hispanic admissions would also decline. In fact, while the number of blacks admitted to the UC system has dipped slightly (from 307 to 255), the number of Chicanos has risen steadily (from 4,061 to 4,373), accounting for the overall increase in the number of underrepresented minorities.

Who needs affirmative action?

The bean counters, of course, will not be satisfied. They will complain that because more whites and Asians have also been admitted, underrepresented minorities constitute a smaller portion of the 2000 freshman class (19.1 percent) than its 1997 counterpart (19.8 percent). That modest reduction, however, is the consequence of removing bias from the admissions process.

It's a small price to pay for fairness.

UC no longer rejects whites and Asians on the basis of their skin color, and black and Hispanic students are now relieved of the racist presumption that they owe their achievement to special treatment.

Bean counters will also point out that minority enrollment has increased only at UC's second-tier campuses - Irvine, Riverside and Santa Cruz - while decreasing at its most prestigious institutions, Berkeley and UCLA.

The beans they will surely forget to count are minority graduates, which are sure to proliferate starting with the class of 2002.

Although affirmative action produces racially diverse freshman classes, it tends to create homogenous commencement ceremonies. That's because preferences cause colleges to accept some underprepared students on the basis of their ethnicity and not their academic qualifications. The result is that underrepresented minorities tend to drop out or fail college at a disproportionately high rate.

A Center for Equal Opportunity study, for example, found that at UC San Diego only 41 percent of black freshmen entering in 1988 graduated within five years, compared with 71 percent for whites.

Race-blind admissions redirect some members of disadvantaged ethnic groups away from UC's elite schools, which must be disappointing, but less so than the embarrassment of flunking out a year or two later.

In the job market, a USC graduate will always have the advantage over a UCLA dropout.

Not that non-Asian minorities have given up on California's most competitive public universities. The number of applications from minorities at all UC campuses went up this past year. Berkeley, in particular, witnessed a 22 percent jump in Hispanic applicants and a 9 percent rise among blacks.

Jackson might not think that minorities can get into elite colleges without preferences, but minorities seem to disagree, as evidenced by their applications.

Three years after the death of affirmative action in California, the statistics show that the ``need'' for preferences was nothing more than the fabrication of the ``race-baiting, gender inequality, anti-Semitic, homophobic''-charging left, which has long been more interested in pitting cultural groups against one another than in their advancement.

The most heartening figure to come out of the University of California is 3,395 - the number of incoming freshmen who ``declined to state'' their racial identity. Preferring to be judged as individuals and not as members of racial groups, these students recognize that preferences are dead. Bean counting is next.