Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action - Reason Foundation

25were at less competitive schools where their performancewas more likely to be acceptable. Id.Then came CCRI. CCRI went into effect in timeto affect the undergraduate admissions decisionsfor the entering class of 1998, causing Berkeley’s offersof admission to African Americans, Hispanicsand American Indians to go from 23.1 percent ofthe total offers to 10.4 percent. Id.Of course, the minority students who wouldhave attended Berkeley in the past had not simplyvanished. They had been accepted to somewhatless highly ranked campuses–often UCLA andUCSD–based on their own academic record ratherthan race. In turn, students who previously wouldhave been admitted to UCLA or UCSD on a preferencehad usually been admitted to somewhat lesscompetitive UC campuses. UC-Riverside and UC-Santa Cruz both posted impressive gains in minorityadmissions. At Riverside, for example, Blackand Latino student admissions shot up by 42 percentand 31 percent respectively. UCSD reportedmixed results. Black enrollment there was down19 percent, but Filipino and Latino enrollment wasup by 10 percent and 23 percent. Id.At UCSD, the performance of Black studentsimproved dramatically. No longer were African-American honor students a rarity. Instead, a full20 percent of the African-American freshmen wereable to boast a freshman-year GPA of 3.5 or better.That was higher than the rate for Asians (16 percent)and extremely close to that for whites thatyear (22 percent). Suddenly African-American studentsfound themselves on a campus where achiev-