When The Field Is Level

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Minorities will also do better, supporters of cascading say, because they will end up on campuses like Irvine that may be more socially welcoming than pressure cookers like Berkeley or UCLA. It's a view some minority students at Irvine share. "A lot of my friends said, 'Berkeley, Berkeley, Berkeley,'" Tiger Dunams, a junior at Irvine, recalls of her college-choosing days. "I went there and looked at it, and it didn't seem like it was the thing for me. My friend goes to Berkeley, and she doesn't really meet people. I'm interacting with professors and graduate students, and I've met the chancellor. You can tell the faculty is really reaching out to students." Melissa Marchand says she chose Irvine over UCLA in part because 34,000-student UCLA struck her as big and impersonal. "At UCLA, a biology class could be 500 people, while here 200 people is huge," she says. "My major is bio, and I didn't want not to be able to go up to a professor with a question."

Irvine students say that although the education is rigorous, the atmosphere is supportive. "A lot of universities, including Berkeley, have a cutthroat attitude--I'm going to do well and I don't care about you," says Karen Fleming, a black sophomore who went to Irvine after turning down Berkeley. "This campus has more of a family feeling." Irvine students say minorities on campus pull for one another, both informally and formally, through the Irvine chapter of the California Alliance for Minority Participation, a program, funded by the National Science Foundation, for minorities in the sciences. "At Berkeley and Los Angeles, there's so much competition, even between black bio majors," says Marchand. "That's not how it's supposed to be--we're supposed to be helping one another out."

But don't students take themselves off the fast track by going to Irvine rather than Berkeley or UCLA? Many Irvine faculty and students say it isn't so. They point out that Irvine grads are admitted to the nation's top graduate schools and get jobs at top corporations alongside graduates of the more selective U.C. campuses. "I know it's not what the public thinks, but it's not true that you have to go to only a few schools to make it," says James Fallon, a professor at Irvine's medical school and chairman of the U.C. Irvine academic senate. "It used to be that way, but it's not today."

Then why are critics of cascading so strongly against it? The hard truth, they say, is that the status of a college still matters. And students from the more selective U.C. campuses will, on average, get into better graduate schools, get better jobs and have more influence in society. "Education has become more and more a credentialing process," says the NAACP's Shaw. "What is at stake is access to the corridors of power and influence."

That was the argument of a recent book co-authored by former Harvard University president Derek Bok. In The Shape of the River, Bok wrote that minorities who attend choicer colleges are likely to do better for themselves and for society than ones who go to less exclusive schools. "If there weren't some positive differences with selective colleges, they wouldn't be so hard to get into," he says. It's the prestige of the name, the access to informal job networks and the higher expectations for success, as much as the education, that make the difference, says Bok. "Students' aspirations are very much shaped by the aspirations of their peers," he says. "When you go to a very selective school like Berkeley, you probably set your sights higher."

Critics of cascading also say it hurts the whole U.C. system by stripping it of ethnic diversity at the upper levels. The entering class at Berkeley this fall will be only 9% Hispanic and 3% black (in a state that's 29% Hispanic and 7% black). That deprives students of a chance to learn in the kind of diverse environment they'll have to navigate when they graduate. It also means California's premier public university isn't serving the whole state. Says Juan Lara, assistant vice chancellor at U.C. Irvine: "If the diversity of the state is reflected in the U.C. system, but only in what you would call the third-tier campuses, then this university would have failed in its mission."

Still, cascading is a new fact of life, and it is not likely to end any time soon. Perhaps the clearest sign that California is entering a post-affirmative action era is how civil rights groups have responded to cascading. Their flagship lawsuit, Rios v. Regents of the University of California, doesn't bother trying to restore affirmative action. Instead it argues that if the U.C. system is going to use race-blind admissions criteria, it really has to be race blind. In calculating GPAs, Berkeley gives extra weight to grades in advanced-placement classes. The problem is, more than half of California schools--many in poor and minority areas--don't even offer these classes. A student who aces every class offered in his high school in the barrio and ends up with 4.0 could lose out to a student from Beverly Hills who gets A's in advanced-placement classes and graduates above 4.0. It's not a bad argument. But the fact is, even if U.C. cleaned up its criteria, as long as race is not considered, the number of blacks and Hispanics at the top campuses is not likely to go up much.