California Proposition 16, the Repeal Proposition 209 Affirmative Action Amendment, is on the ballot in California as a legislatively referred constitutional amendment on November 3, 2020.
A “yes” vote supports this constitutional amendment to repeal Proposition 209 (1996), which says that the state cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.
A “no” vote opposes this constitutional amendment, thereby keeping Proposition 209 (1996), which says that the state cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.
With the recent social unrests (protests, BLM, defund police, etc.) many CA Democratic politicians believe that the climate has swung to favor obtaining the needed votes to repeal Prop 209.
The current polarized cultural climate will make it difficult for reasoned discussion of opposing views to take place, especially when it comes to higher education. Without being a racist, a person can be opposed to affirmative action simply because it is a poor and inadequate solution that carries its own unacceptable costs. It will always be an unsettling solution because it uses discrimination to remedy discrimination, and, arguably, it leads to more racial tension. After all of these decades, can the great thinkers of higher ed, not come up with some better solutions?
My 90% asian Silicon Valley school had only half the number of acceptances compared to last year, and only for UC Berkeley.
The UC system was really a paradise for my school, because we knew that its merit-based application reviews meant that we would not be subject to external forces and factors that are typically seen in other top schools, especially those of privates.
The UCs were not only the most economical choice for the California resident, but its top schools, UC Berkeley and UCLA were starting to catch up with some of the top private schools. Now that there is an ever-increasing wave to support ACA-5 in the upcoming election ballot, this UC dreamland is over for asian applicants.
The large majority of my classmates’ parents came to Silicon Valley because of the high tech jobs. But they also came knowing that the UC system would largely benefit their child’s education.
If UC Berkeley cut back on half of the typical acceptances for one of the best public high schools in California, then when ACA-5 passes and all the UCs would officially consider race and economic background in their application review, I believe that the number would become even less than half of what it used to be for schools such as mine.
If there are asian parents looking into living in Silicon Valley just with its great educational resources and its high number of students going to UCs being a major factor, that may not be the most rational choice anymore.
I don’t think this is “unsettling” at all. It really comes down to how you look at it. If I, as a white male in society, have had advantages over other races since the time I was born (i.e. an uneven playing field) I don’t see it as “discrimination” if another ethnic group gets some preferences over me because I have been the benefit of these advantages throughout my life.
In a perfect, equal world where everyone has the same chance for success, then yes giving a preference to URM would be discriminatory however the real world is not set-up this way.
By the way, most colleges seem to have a perfect 50/50 mix of male to female undergraduates. You think this happens by accident? There is a lot of balancing out of applicants in their acceptance pool to get this perfect ratio, year in and year out. Would you call this “discriminatory” to males? You don’t think MIT could easily fill an academically strong freshman class that is 90% male without losing the quality of the student body?
For those asian people like me who complain about affirmative action, I always hear this: “if you want fairness, go back to your home country!” Which is true, because almost all asian countries have college applications where you simply take a single exam and the highest scorers gets into the best schools, because they don’t have to worry about racial tensions due to its homogenous racial makeup.
But for those who want the diverse culture of this country, be ready to not only appreciate everything good about it but also be in mind that sacrifices have to be made in order to maintain it. If you’re a ORM asian and can’t accept this, then the earlier quote may apply to you…
I’m not sure that the 90% of males accepted to MIT in your scenario would want to attend with no women there, but that’s a different issue altogether.
The upside I see to this is that UCSD , UCSB, and Irvine saw an overflow of fantastically talented and vivacious students who, in previous years, would have been accepted to Berkeley. The quality of the student body at those schools will lead to their inevitable rise in the near future. UCLA did not carry as much prestige as Berkeley until relatively recently. With the astronomical cost of private school tuition, UCSD, UCSB, and Irvine will become increasingly sought after and selective and will attract these amazing California students who Berkeley is now excluding. Also, the reality is that Berkeley, while prestigious, does not have the best reputation for student experience as compared to the other UCs.
Interesting! At least now we can make sense of this years UCB admission decisions.
My D’s tiny hs, which often has a high UCB acceptance rate, dropped considerably this past year:
2019 - 8/42 got accepted/ 19% of the graduating class. (I don’t know the number of how many applied but probably 1/3).
2020 - 1/27 accepted - 3% (even though the class of 2020 was arguably stronger than the previous year - 5 were UC ELC’s, none of the 5 were accepted to UCB).
UCLA remained consistent both years @ approx. 14% acceptance for D’s hs:
2019 - 6/42
2020 - 4/27 (1 was a URM)
On the other hand, this situation could also make transferring in to Berkeley and UCLA a lot more competitive in the next couple of years because a lot of the very competitive Silicon Valley students who didn’t get in to Berkeley this year will flock to DeAnza and Foothill community colleges and try to transfer in to Berkeley and UCLA.
transfer acceptance rates from DA and foothill are so high at the moment so Silicon Valley students wouldn’t settle for lower UCs like UCR UCD and such.
I saw that it only went down 2% from last year’s 44%. However, I am also curious about whether they favored low income and first generation asians this year.
This year, my school had half the acceptances we typically get each year, and @leghornchicken also mentions that their school had significant reductions in their acceptances as well.
There seems to be overall a decreased number of acceptances from areas such as Silicon Valley with high income and good educational opportunities, if you are ORM asian or white.
I am not white but I grew up in a predominantly white and relatively poor town. To say that these people have “advantages” and therefore others should get preference over them causes resentment, and rightly so.
A better approach would be to use a neutral method like giving an admissions bump to low SES students. I mean, does it really matter if the family of a bright UC-Berkeley capable student is poor due to historical housing discrimination, or poor because they live in an economically depressed rural area? In both cases, they still ended up poor.
Note that this neutral method would still disproportionately help Hispanic, African-American, and Native American students due to those groups having lower SES on average.
Another method that can get widespread support is to have a policy whereby colleges say that they will accept X% of the top students in the state and Y% of the top students in each sub-region of interest, where X and Y are adjusted as appropriate to fill out the class.
That way you still allow many of the extraordinary students that consistently come out places like Palo Alto High School but still allow rural Californians entry as well for being among the top students in their area.
Instead, the current approach means that most of those strong students go elsewhere, which diminishes the strength of the UC system. If they stay this course, it will simply be a matter of time before Michigan becomes the best public university for undergraduate education. They have both competent management and an endowment most private universities would love to have.
I don’t see what Berkeley did this admissions cycle as being illegal. They are not legally allowed to consider race when determining their admissions decisions. That doesn’t mean that they can’t consider low income or first gen status. Or that they can’t try to drum up more applications from low SES high schools with a larger minority population.
My S20 did not get accepted into any CA public schools he applied to but received acceptances from every single private school he applied to so he probably falls into the category of kids most affected (i.e. the very good but not excellent student that the UCs used to be able to accommodate). But the reality is that there just are not enough spots for all the qualified kids and I agree with what was stated very well upthread by socal2002.
Maybe its an overly simplistic idea, but since all of the classes are online, I start to wonder why Berkeley had to reject all the students that they would have accepted if there hadn’t been the sudden (un-debated, un-announced, not publicly deliberated) move to affirmative action? Why not just add more Latino students without excluding the other students? It would’ve been clearly within the law and there would’ve been no controversy about it.
Even with Prop. 209 enforced, the UC admissions reader can sometime distinguish from the essays whether an applicant is an URM or not. For example, going up poor, having adversities, being involved in certain types of clubs/organizations, etc.