UC Quota Shell Game

In 2008 the University of California will increase the number of officially recognized Asian categories from eight to 23, nearly a three-fold increase. UC administrators and various student groups hail the move as a milestone of diversity and aid to outreach. That remains dubious but the plan confirms that the UC system is more ethnically obsessed than it was in 1996, when Californians voters passed Proposition 209.

That law bars the use of racial quotas in state education, employment and contracting. Some UC bosses are openly contemptuous of Prop 209 and look for ways to avoid it by downplaying the SAT, giving points for special life experience, and so on. Strictly speaking, the new UC plan is not admission by racial quota but the emphasis on ethnicity violates the spirit of that statute. The new categories seem a rather odd tactic since, in the politically correct ethos that prevails on UC campuses, Asians are not exactly an accredited victim group.

According to the most recent census, Asians constitute approximately 12.3 percent of the California population. The incoming UC freshman class, however, is 35.3 percent Asian, according to news reports, more than one third of all new students. This does not sit well with administrators who believe that every institution must reflect the ethnic breakdown of society, a view that ignores personal differences, effort, and choice. By this nonsensical but politically correct standard Asians are "overrepresented" – too many of them, in other words – at the UC. It carries no weight with UC brass that statistical disparities are the rule, not the exception, in California society. In any case, the new category scheme is rigidly one-sided.

K. Lloyd Billingsly is the editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute. This article is excerpted from his Capital Ideas column that he wrote for PRI. You can read the entire column here.