The University of California system reports that 5,692 African American students from California applied for admission to its nine undergraduate campuses for the class that will enter college this coming fall. The number of Black applicants is up 17.5 percent from a year ago. Overall applicants to the university from all races and ethnic groups were up 9.8 percent.
Blacks made up 6.1 percent of all applicants this year, up from 5.7 percent of applicants a year ago.
There were 2,394 African American applicants from California for admission to the flagship campus at Berkeley. This is up from 2,156 a year ago. This is an an increase of 11 percent from 2011. Blacks are 5.8 percent of all applicants to Berkeley this year.
That’s progress, but it is still a low number. I know it’s still too early to know, but how many Black kids will graduate this year? Of those (in California), how many were UC-eligible? I’d like to see those numbers when they come out. The UC system needs to figure out a way to make the campuses (ALL of them, not just UCLA and UCB) more diverse. Nobody’s talking about ‘dumbing down’ the campuses or admitting kids who are otherwise incapable of doing college-level work, but why such a strict, rigid adherence to gpa/test scores? Since when is a ‘B’ student considered incapable of doing college work?!?
The overly-competitive atmosphere that now exists at my alma mater (UCB) makes me sad, and I attribute it to the student body. Something needs to change on these campuses.
It would be great if Black enrollment at UCB even came close to the percentage of Black high school graduates – between 7% and 8%. However, I think that the percentage enrolled for Blacks is more like 3% to 4%.