When The Field Is Level

The African-American science majors eating lunch in a University of California Irvine dining hall are on the brink of brilliant careers. Aisha Kennedy, a chemistry major, has done ozone research with a Nobel-prizewinning professor. John Williams, a biology major, is off to Kenya this summer for a project on malaria transmission. And Brian McCurtis, a computer-science major with a summer job at Novell, is seeing years of hard work pay off. "I'd say my biggest problem is sifting through the job offers," he says. "There's been no job hunting for me."

It seems things have never been better for minorities on this picturesque campus 40 miles south of Los Angeles. Freshman enrollment in the past two years has jumped 45% for Hispanics, 47% for blacks, and Irvine is becoming known as a powerhouse for minority scientists-in-training. Many blacks and Hispanics say it's a far more supportive place than other U.C. campuses with bigger names and better reputations. "We're a hidden secret," says Genae Jefferson, an African-American physics major who chose Irvine over UCLA. "But a lot of people don't realize it until they get here."

If it all looks so good, why are some people saying that what is going on at U.C. Irvine is a disaster for minority education? The problem is, the rising minority enrollment at Irvine is largely a result of California's two-year-old ban on affirmative action at public colleges. As preferences were removed that had helped minorities qualify for the top U.C. campuses, notably Berkeley and UCLA, students who once would have gone there were redistributed down to such less selective campuses as Irvine. In California it is known as cascading, because minorities are sliding down from high-ranked schools to lower-ranked ones.

Supporters of Proposition 209, California's controversial 1996 ballot initiative ending racial preferences, say cascading is good: it means U.C. applicants are finally being judged on their abilities, not the color of their skin. Advocates go a step further, saying that it even benefits the minority students who end up being turned away by more prestigious campuses. Students are better off, the argument goes, when they attend colleges that match their academic level.

Those who disagree say cascading is just a nice way of saying minorities are being shut out of the best U.C. campuses. And it means that fewer minorities will graduate with the elite credentials that would help them become top doctors, lawyers and business leaders. "Some people don't believe African-American and Mexican-American students deserve to be at these institutions," says Ted Shaw, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. "That should be refuted."

For now, this post-affirmative action world of cascading exists mainly in California and Texas, where the University of Texas, responding to a federal court order, has also stopped considering race in admissions. But other suits challenging racial preferences are under way elsewhere in the U.S., notably at the University of Michigan. Other states are considering Prop. 209-style initiatives, among them Florida, where a drive is on to put an anti-affirmative action referendum on the 2000 ballot. If cascading goes national, what impact will it have on America's college students? The answer is unfolding in California, on campuses like Irvine.

The U.C. system can be divided, by general consensus, into three tiers of quality. At the top are Berkeley, UCLA and fast-rising U.C. San Diego. In the middle are Irvine, Davis and Santa Barbara. And then there are Santa Cruz and Riverside. The rollback of affirmative action has had only a small impact on admissions to U.C. as a whole--the eight U.C. campuses took 47,804 students this year, 7,439 of them black, Hispanic and Native American--only 27 fewer minority students than in 1997, the last year race was part of the process. But the new rules have caused a lot of cascading down the U.C. pecking order. At the most selective campus, Berkeley, freshman enrollment of Hispanics has fallen 34% in the past two years, and it's down 57% for blacks. The least exclusive campus, Riverside, has seen black admissions rise more than 54% and Hispanics 66%.

Could this ethnic rearrangement be a good thing? Yes, says Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a leading affirmative-action critic. Thernstrom argues that minorities suffer when affirmative action puts them on campuses that otherwise wouldn't have admitted them. The dropout rate of black U.C. undergraduate students back in the days of affirmative action was 42%--twice the rate of whites. That stands to reason, Thernstrom says, because blacks and Hispanics were forced to compete against whites and Asians who came to the same schools with higher test scores and grade-point averages. "As students are better matched to their institutions, as they cascade to places where they are prepared to the average level, the graduation rates should go up for minorities," she says.