University Of California Uses High School Racial Composition For Admissions, Data Suggests

in 2020, california voters rejected affirmative action, but data suggests that ucsd is finding a way around that

USCD’s Geisel Library | Image credit: Ali Eminov

University of California San Diego (UCSD) admissions data recently unearthed by Orange County-based parent Steve Miller on Twitter suggests that despite California’s ban on affirmative action, the university is using applicants’ graduating high schools’ racial composition as a determining factor in the admissions process.

Miller found that there seemed to be no correlation between the percentage of students at a school offered admission to UCSD and the high school’s average AP score, number of AP classes, or percentage of students exceeding California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASP) standards.

Steve Miller @SteveMillerOC

The percentage of all eligible students at the school who were offered admission to UCSD, regardless of whether they even applied, was essentially unrelated to the average AP score, the average number of AP classes, or the percentage of students exceeding standards.

For Orange County public schools, Miller found that the higher the school’s average AP score was, the lower their school’s UCSD acceptance rates.

At the same time, metrics from UCSD’s website show that acceptance rates at majority Asian California high schools have trended precipitously downward since 2017 while acceptance rates at majority Hispanic high schools have shot up during the same term.

Steve Miller @SteveMillerOC

I finished UC San Diego data for all LA and OC public high schools with more than 30 applicants to UCSD in 2022 where the applicants were either majority Asian (red line) or majority Hispanic (blue line) The lines connect 2017 admit rate to 2022 rate, left to right.

Miller used University of California’s own data in his analysis, as well as the publicly available data on EdData. Read his full tweet thread here.

In 2020, California voters re-affirmed their rejection of affirmative action in higher education when they voted no on Proposition 16, which aimed to repeal Proposition 209 (passed in 1996) and thus allow race, ethnicity, and gender to be considered in public education, employment, and contracting decisions.

If higher education institutions in California such as UCSD used the racial composition of graduating high schools as a determining factor for admission, it could be considered a violation of Proposition 209.

-Brandon Gorrell

Some parts of this article were drafted by GPT-4.