Quick Hits

Today, the United States Supreme Court, in a divided opinion, upheld as CONSTITUTIONAL a provision of the Michigan Constitution that is very similar to Proposition 209.  (New York Times story on the decision)  Notably, Michigan's Proposal 2 was a reaction to the Supreme Court's decision in 2003 upholding the University of Michigan Law School's use of race as a factor in admissions. 

But we also have some other interesting developments in California. 

First, according to data released by the University of California, Latinos has passed whites as the second largest group of admitted students this year.  (OC Register story)  Here's the link to the UC's Summary Fact Sheet and here's the link to Table 3, which gives the campus-by-campus and universitywide diversity break-down.  Again, these are ADMISSIONS numbers for Fall 2014, not applications and not actual enrollment.  I prefer looking at the Universitywide numbers because they are not duplicated numbers (more than one campus can offer a particular student admission) and they reflect the overall systemwide effort to create a diversity across the entire system.

For Asian Americans, in 2012 the percentage was 36.3%, in 2013 it was 36.0% and in 2014 it is 36.2%.  No change.  There was also no change in all the other groups EXCEPT whites (from 28.2% in 2012 to 28.1% in 2013 to 26.8% in 2014) and Hispanic/Latino (from 27.3% in 2012 to 27.6% in 2013 to 28.8% in 2014). 

The other interesting news is that the percentage of non-resident students admitted (international and out-of-state), as a percentage of the admitted class, ROSE.  UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said, in a written statement, that non-resident students pay more in tuition and that additional revenue is necessary to maintain the programs at UC Berkeley.  Moreover, the plan, Chancellor Dirks explained, was to increase the total percentage of non-resident students from 20 percent to 23 percent in the next three years.  So, one could say, that the bigger threat to Asian American students comes not from SCA-5 (which is currently dead) but from the UC System's need to enroll non-resident students for economic reasons.  That is a greater threat to California's Master Plan to educate Californians. 

Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin: A Word from our Friends

Amicus curiae briefs - aka "friend of the court" briefs - are always an interesting read.  Here are two that are significant for the SCA-5 issue:

Here's the brief filed by the University of California.  And below are some excerpts that may be of interest:

Page 4:

California has adopted a number of different strategies in an attempt to reverse that decline in underrepresented minority students, including expanding its outreach program to secondary schools, incorporating a broader program and more comprehensive set of admissions criteria, adopting 'holistic' review of applicants, decreasing the weight given to standardized tests, and admitting a specified percentage of the top graduates from each high school under an 'Eligibility in the Local Context' program similar in certain respects to UT's 'Top Ten Percent' Program.  To date, however, those measures have enjoyed only limited success.  They have not enabled the University of California fully to reverse the precipitous decline in minority admissions and enrollment that followed the enactment of Proposition 209, nor to keep pace with the growing population of underrepresented minorities in the applicant pool of qualified high school graduates.  These effects have been most severe and most difficult to reverse at the University's most highly-ranked and competitive campuses. 

The University of California's experience establishes that in California, and likely elsewhere, at present the compelling government interest in student body diversity cannot be fully realized at selective institutions without taking race into account in undergraduate admissions decisions.

Pages 10 to 12 (discussing campus racial climate):

UC campuses, like UT, administer a biennial survey to undergraduates in which they are asked, among other things, whether they feel students of their race/ethnicity are respected on campus.  ... In many cases, students' responses to the question correlate directly with whether the representation of underrepresented minority students on campus approaches critical mass.  ...  In short, where critical mass is not achieved, the campus racial climate is likely to be significantly less hospitable to minorities.  ...  The concern about a welcoming climate for all racial and ethnic groups on campus is part of a broader commitment by UC and other public institutions to serve the full range of their citizenry, from all cultural, racial, ethnic, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

[And incidents like the UCI fraternity video depicting blackface!]

Page 15 to 16 (discussing UC admissions standards)

The Master Plan for Higher education of the State of California provides that the University of California should educate freshmen from the 'top one-eight' (12.5 per cent) of all graduates of California public high schools.  To identify these students, the University of California promulgates minimum eligibility requirements that both specify a floor of preparation needed to pursue study at UC and also function as an entitlement: any high school graduate who meets these requirements is guaranteed a place at UC - although not necessarily at the campus nor in the major of his or her choice.  At the same time, because demand for admission exceeds enrollment capacity at most UC campuses, the campuses over the years have developed selection criteria (such as consideration of high school grade point average, test scores, and other evidence of academic promise) to choose which UC-eligible applicants they will admit.  These criteria function as a second, and generally more demanding, set of requirements that applicants to most of the campuses must meet.

 Pages 20 to 22 (discussing the Outreach Task Force strategy as a response to Prop 209)

[Board of Regents] directed the formation of a task force on academic outreach, the goal of which was to develop proposals for new directions and increased funding to increase the eligibility rate of economically disadvantaged and other applicants.  ... Consistent with Proposition 209, UC's outreach programs operate in a race-neutral fashion.  To be eligible for these programs, applicants must be from low-income families or those with little or no previous experience with higher education, or attend a school that is educationally disadvantaged.

[Footnote 32]  As the minority enrollment figures discussed below make clear, policies that increased the enrollment of low-income students do not serve as an effective 'proxy' for race and ethnicity.

Pages 23 to 24 (discussing the ELC program which was a response to Prop 209)

... effective for students entering the University in 2001, the Board of Regents modified its existing eligibility policy to add a 'top 4 percent' program, under which the top 4 percent of the eligible students in each California public high school were designated as Eligible in the Local Context ('ELC').  Effective for students entering UC as freshmen for fall 2012, the Board of Regents expanded the ELC program to the top 9 percent of eligible California high school graduates.   ... The ELC program has been successful in increasing interest and applications from students at high schools that traditionally sent few students to the University.  However, because the State of California has few if any high schools with student bodies composed entirely of minorities, it has not substantially increased the diversity of the pool of students considered eligible for UC.

Pages 25 to 28 discuss the use of a "holistic review" in selecting students and pages 28 to 29 discuss the reduced emphasis on standardized test scores.

Page  29 sums up the results of these new tools:

While these and other measures have enjoyed some limited success, particularly at UC's less selective campuses, the unfortunate reality is that the University's experience continues to support the conclusion it reached a number of years ago: 'in a highly selective institution, implementing race-neutral policies leads to a substantial decline in the proportion of entering students who are African American, American Indian, and Latino.'

Page 32 (after running through the numbers for African-American and Latino students):

These figures are troubling, because they call into serious question whether it is currently feasible without the careful and limited application of race-conscious measures to achieve the level of diversity of underrepresented minority students that this Court has recognized as a legitimate objective in the context of higher education.

Page 33 to 34 (discussing under-representation in graduate programs):

In particular, business schools, which play an influential role in shaping tomorrow's business leaders, have very low proportions of underrepresented minorities, and UC's business schools compare poorly in that respect to similar programs nationally.  Systemwide, UC enrolled fewer minority students in business (4.5 percent) than did comparable programs nationally (12.8 percent).  In California, where an estimated 46.4 percent of the 2011 population is Latino/Hispanic, African American and American Indian, recent entering classes of MBA students at UC campuses have averaged only one to two percent African American and three to four percent Latino students.  Indeed, during ten of the last eleven academic years, two or more of UC's six business schools enrolled zero African Americans.  ... Entering law school classes in recent years have averaged only three to four percent African American, with one UC law school in 2009-2010 reporting only ten African American students in a student body of over 600, considerably below the numbers in the years immediately before Proposition 209.

Here's the brief filed by 80-20 and some other organizations opposing affirmative action.

SCA-5 Is Alive???

Just to recap:  On March 17th, Assembly Speaker John Perez, at the behest of Senator Ed Hernandez (the driving force behind SCA-1), pulled the plug on SCA-5.  On March 26, State Senator Leland Yee was arrested by the FBI on corruption charges.  With the Democratic super majority in trouble due to two State Senators in hot water, Senator Yee was surely the nail in the proverbial coffin.  As discussed in my earlier posts about the mechanics of all this, SCA-5 requires a two-thirds vote of both houses to get onto the ballot as a proposition.  Without a super majority in both chambers, Democrats have no chance of bringing back SCA-5 any time soon.

So that means SCA-5 is dead right?  As it turns out, SCA-5 may be dead as a bill, but it is ALIVE as an issue.

The California Latino Legislative Caucus and California Legislative Black Caucus, in a statement issued March 25th, blasted the Democratic leadership and Republicans:

We understand the desire of leadership to have further discussions about this important issue and are committed to ensuring the success of the bicameral commission on issues surrounding recruitment, admissions, and retention. However, we must not ignore the fact that the major reason this measure has been delayed is due to a malicious disinformation campaign being waged by disingenuous ultra-conservative partisans intent on denying equal opportunity for all Californians.

And they started slamming fellow Democrats who had betrayed the cause.

That same day, six state legislators (Senators Ricardo Lara (Bell Gardens), Norma Torres (Pomona), and Holly Mitchell (Hollywood) and Assembly members Lorena Gonzalez (San Deigo), Anthony Rendon (Lakewood) and Jose Medina (Riverside)) withdrew their endorsement of State Senator Ted Lieu (who had joined Leland Yee and Carol Liu in asking for Senator Hernandez to slow down SCA-5) for Congress. 

Today, members of the Latino and Black caucuses withheld necessary votes in a bill sponsored by State Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi that would have expanded the number of vehicles entitled to use HOV / carpool lanes.

Sen. Holly Mitchell, the Los Angeles Democrat who chairs the Legislature's black caucus, said she was not surprised to hear that so many lawmakers withheld their votes on Muratsuchi's bill. Does she expect black and Latino Democrats to continue withholding votes from colleagues they feel do not support a return to affirmative action?

"Perhaps," Mitchell said, adding that lawmakers who believe in restoring affirmative action are concerned "that there is a lack of commitment to a core Democratic party priority."

With Democrats attacking each other, is it a surprise that Republicans using SCA-5 as a wedge issue to divide the Asian-American community?

[At the state Republic Convention] California Republican Party vice chairwoman Harmeet Dhillon told reporters Saturday that her party’s candidates have been seizing on disaffected Asian voters across the state.

“It is just math that affirmative action suppresses Asian-Americans and Jewish Americans,” Dhillon said. “So that is going to turn out those Asian voters who live in California because their dream is to send their kids to UC Berkeley or UCLA or one of those top schools.”

(See article)

Republican candidate Peter Kuo, on his campaign website, is keeping the issue alive by telling voters that SCA-5 will return after the November election.  Also, as long as Democrats keep talking about it, Republicans like Kuo get to keep on talking about it too (responding to Black & Latino causus' joint statement). 

So, to recap, SCA-5 was brought to life, killed off, and brought back to life again.

Read more here: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2014/04/in-sign-of-backlash-democrats-help-stall-al-muratsuchi-bill.html#storylink=cpy