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UC eligibility change raises minority protest
by Tanya Schevitz, San Francisco Chronicle, September 20, 2004

Minority advocates say they will turn out in force at this week's meeting of the University of California Board of Regents in an attempt to kill a proposal they fear will make it harder for black and Latino students to gain admission.

At issue is a faculty recommendation to raise the minimum grade point average from a B- to a B in order to shrink the pool of California high school students eligible to attend one of UC's nine undergraduate campuses.

"The regents must end their sordid practice of shutting their doors to the students of California, especially black and Latino students," said Yvette Felarca, a UC Berkeley graduate student and a national organizer for the pro-affirmative action group, By Any Means Necessary. "If anything, the regents ought to be reversing this kind of trend. If they are going to be making adjustments, they ought to be making adjustments to increase the number of black, Latino and Native Americans who have access to UC."

Felarca said the student group will be rallying Wednesday and Thursday at the regents' meeting at UCSF's Laurel Heights campus and will speak against the proposal.

The state's 1960 Master Plan for Education, which guides higher education in the state, calls for UC to set its grade and testing criteria so that the top 12.5 percent of high school graduates are eligible to attend UC. But in May, a study by the California Postsecondary Education Commission found that 14.4 percent of last year's public high school graduates were eligible for UC.

In response, the regents are being asked to increase the minimum grade point average needed for eligibility from the current 2.8 to 3.1 on a 4.0 scale for entering freshmen in the fall of 2007.

The proposal originally went to the board in July but was delayed in part because of concerns that it would slightly lower the percentage of African American and Latino students within UC's eligibility pool.

Those concerns remain, and many minority advocates plan to be at the meeting to protest the proposal's impact: The percentage of African American students within the eligibility pool would fall from 3.1 percent to 2.7 percent, and the percentage of Latino students within the pool would drop from 15.3 percent to 14.8 percent.

"We plan to be at the meeting. The concern is that it is going to make even less Latino and African American students -- who are already grossly underrepresented at UC -- eligible," said Francisco Estrada, director of public policy for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund in Sacramento. "It seems to be questionable at the moment about whether that is the way to go."

The action is also being criticized as being undertaken too hastily and based on flawed data.

Maria Blanco, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, said her group would be asking the regents to delay the decision again and to do another eligibility study. She said the eligibility study done by the California Postsecondary Education Commission had a large margin of error and was based on only 45 schools, a tiny fraction of the more than 1,000 high schools in the state.

In addition, she said, schools and educators have worked hard to help more students reach the current eligibility requirements and had succeeded in raising the rates.

"There is concern about the message this sends to everybody who worked hard to raise this," Blanco said.

The board has already approved other more technical changes, such as what courses it includes in calculating the grade point average. That reduced the pool of high school seniors eligible for admission from 14.4 percent to 13 percent. By also tweaking the grade point average, UC will bring it down to the 12.5 percent target.

"Why are we in such a hurry to limit the number of students eligible to enter our world-class university system?" wrote Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante in a letter to his fellow regents. "We have always told students who dream of attending the UC system that if they work hard enough, they will be admitted. The increase from 14.4 percent should be heralded and praised, not considered a problem."

UC officials say the changes would affect the minority students less than other plans that were considered. And something must be done, they say, because the extra 1.9 percent of eligible students translates into about 5,400 students. That poses a challenge for the university at a time when its budget is shrinking, said Regent George Blumenthal, chair of the faculty Academic Senate.

Blumenthal said changing the grade point average would affect only about 600 students a year.

But some regents agree with critics that the proposed change is too extreme. Regent Judith Hopkinson said work was under way to change it.

"I suspect there would be something different that would be brought to the regents committee," Hopkinson said. "It is too high ... we may be underreaching our 12.5 percent."

Eligibility for the UC system is determined by completion of a set of college preparatory courses and a complex sliding formula of grades and test scores. As grades go higher, the required combination of SAT I and SAT II test scores goes down, and vice versa. Individual campuses make admission decisions, but eligible students are guaranteed a spot in the system, which will have 10 undergraduate campuses when the Merced facilities open next year.

Hopkinson said students will not know what is required of them until 2006, even though the new requirements would go into effect for those students entering in fall 2007.

"I don't think we can make switches at the last minute," she said.

E-mail Tanya Schevitz at tschevitz@sfchronicle.com.

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