Probe Finds No Bias in Admissions at Berkeley

A seven-year federal investigation into admissions practices at UC Berkeley exonerates the University of California’s flagship campus of charges that it discriminated against white students applying for entrance as undergraduates, according to findings released Wednesday.

It also finds that Berkeley’s complex affirmative action practices have not caused a diminution of academic quality, a charge frequently made by critics of racial preferences.

In fact, the 15-page report points out, academic quality rose during 1993, the period finally examined by the federal investigators. Among freshman applicants, both grades and test scores increased, as did the overall performance of students after they were admitted.

The report, dated March 1, was produced by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in response to a complaint filed in 1989 by Arthur Hu, a software programmer who conducted his own analyses of UC Berkeley admissions figures.

To the consternation of some UC insiders, Berkeley officials did not make the findings public until Wednesday. A spokesman for the Northern California campus said the document had to be reviewed at several levels before release.

Patrick Hayashi, Berkeley’s associate chancellor for admissions, said Wednesday: “I think the [federal investigators], when they looked at our processes over the last seven years, got to understand exactly what we’re doing--that Berkeley has been able to simultaneously integrate and increase the quality of our student body.”

Jerome Karabel, a UC Berkeley sociologist and one of the chief architects of the university’s admission standards, said the federal findings provide supporters of its affirmative action policies with a strong defense.

“This is a historical vindication of one of the strongest and most scrutinized affirmative action programs in the country,” Karabel said, “It is also a pointed repudiation of Gov. Wilson’s repeated claim that federal law requires the elimination of affirmative action.”

The report’s findings also were a striking counterpoint to a federal appeals court ruling Tuesday in a Texas case, knocking down the use of affirmative action in a state college or university.

Conservative critics of affirmative action, most of whom applauded that ruling, were displeased with the Education Department’s report, contending that its findings were biased by what they called flaws in the study’s design.

Sean Walsh, a spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson, said neither the governor nor his staff had seen the civil rights agency’s report. But, said Walsh, “I am quite suspicious of the timing, following the 5th Circuit’s ruling yesterday and the clearly demonstrated discrimination that has occurred at Berkeley and at other UC schools.”

Ward Connerly, the UC regent who now heads the effort to place an anti-affirmative action initiative on the November statewide ballot, also expressed skepticism.

“The Office of Civil Rights has shown pretty clear bias in favor of preferences,” he said Wednesday. “They would, deep in their souls, like to preserve racial preferences. I would call their attention to the decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeal which makes it very clear that race is suspect and should not be used.”

That appellate court decision has been dubbed “Bakke II,” after the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision that restricted the scope of academic affirmative action. The appeals court ruling said that the University of Texas may not use race as a factor when admitting students. It concluded that a white applicant to the law school had been denied admission despite a 3.8 grade-point average because of racial preferences given to less qualified black and Latino candidates.

The slow pace of the Berkeley investigation, which was launched during the Bush administration, angered political conservatives such as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), who began to accuse federal officials of “foot-dragging” shortly after the probe was opened.

Eileen Hanrahan, chief of post-secondary education policy in the Office for Civil Rights, said the investigation was so lengthy in part because Berkeley revised its admissions practices several times after federal officials began their examination. Investigators also had to analyze mountains of documents, including about 10,000 applications from prospective students.

The probe centered on compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin by educational institutions that receive federal assistance.

Based on reams of documents provided by university officials and interviews conducted with Berkeley administrators, the civil rights enforcement agency found that Berkeley “does not maintain illegal quotas for black, Hispanic and Filipino applicants” to the freshman class in the College of Letters and Science, the undergraduate college.

Nor does Berkeley illegally discriminate against minority students by funneling them away from other UC campuses to Berkeley, a second charge made in the Hu complaint.

The report offers a detailed description of Berkeley’s admissions policies and practices. Like all other UC campuses, it adheres to the state Master Plan for higher education, which requires the UC system to admit the top 12.5% of the state’s graduating high school seniors. Meeting the requirements for grade-point average and course work assures an applicant admission into the system but, the report notes, “does not guarantee admission into any specific UC campus.”

In 1993, the report states, UC campuses were bound by a 1988 regents policy that required them to examine other factors besides academic merit, including enrolling a student body that reflects the cultural, racial, geographic and socioeconomic diversity of California.

The UC policy required that at least 40% but no more than 60% of the freshman class on each campus be chosen strictly on the basis of academic criteria. For the remaining students, consideration could be given to special talents or interests, special circumstances such as poverty, and ethnic identity, gender and geographic location.

Each campus establishes its own procedures for weighting those factors.

In 1989, an admissions committee at Berkeley devised a framework for freshman admissions that was intended to ensure both diversity and high academic standards.

The committee established “flexible targets” for admitting students with certain attributes, including those from low-income families, those who were athletically gifted or those who belonged to minority groups that were underrepresented in the state’s public higher education institutions.

The report noted that the committee made adjustments in these policies, deciding, for instance, to phase out affirmative action consideration for Filipino applicants by 1993 after determining that Filipinos were no longer underrepresented. A similar change was made in regard to Latinos in 1993, when a policy took effect reducing the weight given Latino applicants for affirmative action purposes.

In 1992, the report also notes, significant modifications were made in the admissions procedures that diminished the weight of race and ethnicity.

The civil rights investigators found that only 3% of the freshmen admitted in the fall of 1993 were admitted “by exception,” meaning that they did not meet the academic and other standards required in UC policy. The report noted that this was “well below” the percentage allowed by the regents’ policy and that the percentage of such students has continued to decline. It also found that high school grade-point averages and Scholastic Assessment Test scores rose across the board for all new freshmen in 1993.

And it said that persistence rates--the rate at which students continue to remain enrolled in UC--leading to graduation also had improved. It cited Berkeley figures showing that the current six-year graduation rate for blacks at Berkeley is 62%, almost double the national average of 37%.

Some analysts suggested Wednesday that there is no easy remedy to confusion that may stem from the Texas and Berkeley cases.

“Given the developments in the 5th Circuit,” said Gary Morrison, deputy general counsel for the UC system and one of the attorneys who represented UC in the Bakke case, “it is quite clear that at least that [court] panel and the federal government have entirely different views as to the continued vitality of Justice Powell’s decision in the Bakke case.

“The Office of Civil Rights continues to premise its reviews of claimed violations on a reading of the Bakke case which would conclude that diversity in the student body is a compelling governmental interest, whereas the 5th Circuit has concluded that is no longer the law.”