Because of the elimination of affirmative action in the UC’s (University of California system), the percentage of African American students there is pathetic now. Only 2-3% at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, and Santa Cruz, for example. Comparably selective LACs often do much better, getting closer to 5-6%, which is still pathetic. Less selective Earlham and Goucher Colleges both have 12%, which is right up there with Amherst!
Diversity is more than just racial characteristics – socio-economic diversity is important too. I agree with you that the UC’s could be doing much better to achieve racial parity, but 33% of Berkeley students receive Pell grants; at Santa Cruz the percent is above 45%.
What is considered racial “parity” at an elite university?
California is 60% white yet only 24% of the student population at UCB is white.
Is it true that the UCs are mostly Asian now?
According to the stats for fall enrollment in the University of California system:
4% African American
23% White
24% Latino
34% Asian
12% International (over 75% of these are students from Asian countries)
@dragonmom3: The percentage of CA high schoolers who are white is a bit less than 60%, though.
Whatever argument you may want to make, I don’t think that the argument that the UC’s should reflect the population composition of Californians who are 60 is a justifiable one.
And why should where international students come from matter? If Africa has burgeoning economies and 75% of internationals at UC’s were African, would that change anything?
And here are the figures:
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/ceffingertipfacts.asp
Non-Hispanic Whites are 24% of (public) school-aged kids in CA. Seems that white kids are proportionally represented at the UC’s to me.
And, to answer the above question (#204), yes, Asians are the largest ethnic group in the UC system.
Umm… California is not 60 percent white. It is 42.3 percent white.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California
And the UCs do not practice any affirmative action based on race at all. They are prohibited by the State Constitution from doing so.
The UCs have significant economic diversity because they emphasize grades and class rigor much more strongly than test scores. They want the overachievers from every school in the state to have a chance to get a UC education, including the poorest schools where the teaching is weak and the test scores are not as high.
One of the biggest reason that the UCs have a low percentage of whites is because you need to be in the 5 percent or so of your high school class to get admitted, and the top 5 percent of the students at rich suburban schools and elite private schools usually choose to go to an Ivy-type school rather than a UC. At my kids’ small prep school, no student has gone to Berkeley in years, because every student who can get into Berkeley goes to Stanford, Yale, UChicago or Pomona instead.
According to https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045216/06 :
White, 2010 57.6%
White, 2015 72.9%
White, not Latino/Hispanic, 2010 40.1%
White, not Latino/Hispanic, 2015 38.0%
Latino/Hispanic, 2010 37.6%
Latino/Hispanic, 2015 38.8%
Those numbers for the white population that does not exclude Latino/Hispanic look odd. The 2010 number added up with those of the other groups does not add up to 100%.
The white (not Latino/Hispanic) population is probably older than the Latino/Hispanic and Asian populations, however, which may affect the distribution within the typical college-attending age groups (both traditional and non-traditional students are likely to be younger than the overall population).
Largest at 34% of undergraduates, but not “most”.
Love the term “LAC Lobby”-- I embrace it.
It is possible to go to a LAC and get a degree in a STEM field and go on to a PHD program. Table 2 of this document (https://wayback.archive-it.org/5902/20160210152803/http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/) shows that measured on a per graduate based about 1/2 of the top 50 schools are LACs.
@jmnva06 , yes, somehow, some way, those poor kids are figuring out how to do STEM at those ill-equipped liberal arts colleges. yes, the LAC kids do “lab” as well as discuss Kant and Hegel at lunch time. 
Fun fact - the University of Arizona, through its Astronomy Dept.'s Steward Observatory, operates 5 or 6 of the coolest telescopes you’re going to find associated with a university anywhere.
My son, who is stumbling through Pomona College without access to “real” labs [sarcasm], will be looking through said telescopes this summer with a group of undergraduates from around the country who will be there with an astro-physicist from a pretty well-known tech university, who himself is a product of a LAC as a math and physics major.
My son’s sister has a very dear friend who is a great kid, but who, to date, has never taken an honors, AP or IB course, and doesn’t generally care that much about academics. She’s headed to UofA next fall. I’m quite sure she doesn’t know, and I’m guessing will never know, that her school manages those telescopes. I hope I’m wrong. I’m even more sure she’ll never access them; the users of that equipment must submit academic proposals to get on the schedule. You don’t just show up with your friends after a basketball game and say, “Hey, can we look at the stars?”
All this talk about sophisticated labs and equipment and what not is a fair point; but it is also just one of many points of a more complicated and, dare I say, subtle, discussion of the merits of one style of undergraduate education vs. another.
No doubt, if you want to leave undergraduate studies with professional credentials - engineering, accounting, pharmacy, etc. - then you need to attend a university with those departments.
@MiddleburyDad2 – On the professional credentials side. Lots of LACs have joint progams with other schools. My D’s LAC has a per-pharmacy program where (if I read it right) are admitted into a joint program with an auto-admin.
That way you can get your both your Kant and professional certification.
Cool on the Steward Observatory-- I have a friend from undergrad that spent a summer there. If only he could have passed differential equations, he would have been a great astronomer.
^ @jmnva06 , agreed, and maybe that is another version of “the best of both worlds” along with the large university honors college concept in its many forms.
While I think the dual-programs are a nice option, in my personal view, the LAC experience is really meant to be self-contained. That is, you show up with your class, major in something, and leave with your class. Leave professional school for afterwards.
I also understand that a lot of kids head off to LACs intending to take advantage of those programs and wind up bagging it because they don’t want to leave their school and their classmates. I have no statistics. It’s no more than what I often hear from others.
While there are leading representatives of the Mega University Lobby on this forum who indulge in exaggerating how cozy the LAC setting really is (“I don’t want to know every single person on campus”), it is true in my observation that the kids at those schools do identify with their class and want to go out with them.
With that said, I don’t think I know 1500 people in my entire life, much less at a single institution. Alas, CC is a haven for ridiculous rhetoric. Those who use it habitually as a substitute for cogent reasoning are almost a protected class in these parts. 
For Carleton 3+2 engineering, the transfer rate appears pretty low:
https://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/engineering/questions/
^ @ucbalumnus , wow. shockingly low. I guess what I hear is generally the case and, as bullet point three indicates, for the reasons I gave.
To be clear: nobody is transferring anywhere in those combination programs. They’re just admitted to two schools, and attending each at a different time for different coursework. FWIW, I’ve heard from people at Whitman that the kids who do pursue these programs tend to do very well when they get to the big school.
The main point here is that LAC kids go on to do all kinds of wonderful scientific and technical stuff with a solid undergraduate foundation from which to launch such ambitions.
But the other lobby doesn’t like to hear that because it undermines the facilities and famous professor line of crap.
^ I don’t really have a dog in this fight (having attended neither a LAC, which I do admire, nor a giant public), but I could say the following and it would be equally accurate:
"The main point here is that giant public uni kids go on to do all kinds of wonderful creative/artistic/world-changing stuff with a solid undergraduate foundation from which to launch such ambitions.
But the other lobby doesn’t like to hear that because it undermines the small class size and individualized attention line of crap."
Obviously, the key word is “some” in both cases.
Other key word is “individual”.
(I do get the sense that some people REALLY REALLY REALLY want to justify their expenditures, though.)
(Not that I blame them . . . . too much.)
Anyway, just for fun, I decided to see how well public honors students do vs. LACs students in garnering prestigious scholarships.
2014 Marshall: http://publicuniversityhonors.com/2013/12/10/marshall-scholars-2014-public-university-honors-students-win-8-awards/
Public honors (PH) trounces LACs 8-1 (Wheaton being the only small school keeping LACs from being shut out).
2015 Marshall: http://publicuniversityhonors.com/2014/12/06/marshall-scholars-2015-eleven-public-university-winners/
PH wins 6-4 (I’m not counting Olin as a LAC; not that it matters).
2015 Rhodes: http://publicuniversityhonors.com/2014/11/23/rhodes-scholars-2015-ivies-continue-to/
PH trounces again 6-2 (Wabash and Puget Sound representing; I’m not counting the military academies as LACs; again, not that it matters).
Sadly, those are the only instances I’ve found so far where the author of that blog has done the research to determine which public school winners are honors students, but maybe there’s more, and in any case, I wouldn’t expect other years to be all that different.