BERKELEY: In the 25 years since California voters banned all consideration of race in college admissions, the state has spent more than $500 million to help create diverse student bodies across the University of California system — with some success.

Yet in classes at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, philosophy major James Bennett, who is Black and Filipino, sees almost no one who looks like him.

“I’ve only met two other Black students within all of my classes that I’ve been in,” said Bennett, who enrolled at the system’s flagship school in 2021.

The US Supreme Court is expected to rule this month in a pair of cases that could end affirmative action in college admissions nationwide. If that happens, universities that have used race-conscious admissions to boost enrolment of minority students will look to California, one of nine states that already prohibits such considerations at its public colleges.

California has pioneered race-blind efforts in college admissions by using factors such as socio-economic status and location to identify disadvantaged students, many of whom are from immigrant or diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Those efforts helped the state’s top public colleges make up much of the ground lost in diversity in the years right after California voters passed the ban on affirmative action in 1996.

Black and Hispanic student enrolment at many UC campuses still lags the state’s general population, however.

Berkeley, the system’s most elite school based on high school GPA, offers the starkest example of the struggle to boost their numbers, particularly for Black students. In the fall 2022 freshman class, just 228 out of nearly 7,000 students — about 3 per cent — identified as Black.

Femi Ogundele, Berkeley’s associate vice chancellor of enrolment and dean of undergraduate admissions, who joined Berkeley from Stanford in 2019, said the UC system needed to better reflect the broader demographic breakdown of the state, one of the most diverse in the nation.

According to the latest census data, the state’s population is 6.5pc Black, 40pc Hispanic, 35pc white, 16pc Asian and 1.7pc Native American.

“I’m really proud of the gains we’ve had so far,” said Ogundele. “But I would also say we have a lot of work to do.” The dearth of Black students has itself complicated recruitment efforts to expand their ranks, despite its distinction as the top public university in US News and World Report’s list of Best Global Universities, and the campus’ reputation for progressive politics. Many Black families worry their students will feel isolated and opt to send them elsewhere, administrators and college counsellors said.

Ogundele, who has made improving diversity a centrepiece of his work, came to Berkeley to bolster recruitment and diversity.

Senior Tyler Mahomes, a Black, Puerto Rican and white student from suburban Los Angeles, said he didn’t realise before he arrived at Berkeley how few Black students would be there.

“When you come to campus, you see Black athletes on the walls and stuff like that, and it kind of almost creates this illusion of how diverse the campus is,” he said. “But then when you get on the campus and you’re one Black student in a class of 80 people, it’s like, okay, what’s going on? Where are more people that kind of look like me?”

In the fall of 1998, after the Proposition 209 ballot initiative banning affirmative action went into effect, the number of Black and Hispanic students immediately dropped across UC campuses.

The impact was greatest for the system’s two most selective schools, UCLA and Berkeley, where enrollment of Black and Hispanic freshmen was cut in half, the university system said in an amicus brief filed on behalf of the universities in the Supreme Court case in 2022.

Despite some improvement in the years since affirmative action was banned in California, the sparse presence of students from underrepresented backgrounds impacts the experiences of everyone on campus, the brief said.

“Many students from underrepresented minority groups, particularly those at UCs most selective campuses, will often find themselves the sole student of their race and/or ethnicity in a class,” the brief said.

With diversity still allowed as a goal, the universities focused on expanding the pool of applicants and on recruitment efforts aimed at enrolling minority students once they were admitted.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2023