Bringing the Best to UC Berkeley

San Francisco Chronicle Op-ed
April 24, 1998

Bringing the Best to UC Berkeley

By Robert M. Berdahl
Chancellor,
University of California, Berkeley

Since the morning of March 31, when we announced the sharp decline in admission for underrepresented minority students in the first class admitted under Proposition 209, I have been meeting with student groups from across the campus and with students who have devoted themselves to recruiting to Berkeley students from their minority communities. It has been a difficult two weeks for all of us.

I have been in meetings where remarkable students have shared their stories -- stories of success against the odds. I met a student whose high school counselors had told him he couldn't make it at Berkeley, but is now going on to graduate school at Harvard having been accepted at seven other universities. I listened to another student tell of the boost she knows she received in gaining admission to Cal and her gratitude for the doors it has opened for her.

We belong here, they are saying, and so do our brothers and sisters. I know that they, and virtually all the students we have admitted, have earned their right to attend Berkeley. They have all been admitted fairly and in accordance with admission practices employed at nearly all selective universities following the Bakke decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court.

What has been so hurtful to them, and what moves me to speak on their behalf, is the implication by some and outright assertion by others, that only now, when race cannot be taken into account in university admissions, will we see who truly deserves to study at Berkeley. Only now, they say, that group preferences are eliminated, will individual merit determine who is admitted. This, of course, is just plain wrong.

First it should be made clear, and few critics have done this, that there is only a hair's difference in academic achievement between those students who "made the cut" and those in the next band down who did not. To suggest that we have used two widely divergent, unequal tracks in the admission of undergraduates is inaccurate.

This year, of 30,000 applicants, 22,000 were turned away. Of those denied admission, 7,200 -- including 800 underrepresented minority students -- had GPAs of 4.0. The median SAT score for the 800 underrepresented minority students was 1,170. All of these students could have succeeded at Berkeley and, until recently when competition became fierce, would have been admitted. To have admitted some of those 800 underrepresented minority students in order to provide greater diversity to our student body would not have meant admitting anyone who did not merit admission or could not do the work.

Second, it is equally important to remember that admissions decisions at the most selective universities, including places such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford, have never been based on individual merit alone and individual merit has never been determined exclusively by GPAs and test scores. Universities have always tried to balance individual merit with the educational goals of the institution and the broader interests of the society. Harvard, for example, has long tried to avoid drawing its student body exclusively from the Northeast; it has considered geographic representation important to the education it offers.

The University of California continues to give weight to a number of factors that are completely unrelated to individual merit. We give some preference to students from rural backgrounds, to disabled students, to older students seeking re-entry to higher education and to student athletes. A decisive preference is offered to California residents. Why do we give forms of preference? Because we believe that it serves the interest of the institution or the interest of society. If, however, we were to adopt a purely merit basis for admission, all of these preferences would also disappear.

The only factor that we are required to ignore is race, even though it would be in the best interest for the educational experience of all students at Berkeley to be educated in an environment that reflects broad racial diversity and even though it is in the interest of California to keep these students, now heavily recruited by out-of-state institutions, in California.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that only public universities in California are prohibited from considering race as a factor in admissions. Private colleges and universities are still free to consider race as a factor as they recruit underrepresented minority students who will add to the diversity of their campuses with the assistance of state-funded Cal Grants. We now have private college and universities, with the help of public funds, able to consider the public interest in their admissions, while public colleges and universities cannot. It is a strange world we live in.