Actual Enrollment

The San Francisco Chronicle looks at the numbers of freshmen who actually enroll at UC - as opposed to the applications and finds that shifting the pool of applicants doesn't have much effect on the eventual enrollment. 

...Black students made up just 4.4% of the overall 2021 freshman class, which is just slightly up from 3.7% in 2011. According to estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey collected from the Minnesota Population Center, 6.2% of Californians between the ages of 18 and 24 are Black — almost two points higher than the share of Black freshmen enrolled at a UC school. Hispanics make up about 49% of the 18-to-24-year-old California population, compared to 25% of Latinos among UC freshmen (The Census Bureau collects data on whether people identify as “Hispanic,” while the UC collects data on “Latino” identification). White students are also underrepresented among UC freshmen, according to these estimates — 28% of Californians between 18 and 24 years old are non-Hispanic white, compared to 19% among the student body. Asians are the only group with higher representation in UC enrollment than in the California college population, by about 20 percentage points...

Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Record-number-of-Black-and-Hispanic-students-are-16969458.php.

Editorial note: Yours truly gets nervous when these types of analyses appear and suggest - implicitly to be sure - that Asians are a problem for UC that needs to be "solved." We are all aware of recent incidents of anti-Asian sentiment and physical attacks. If there is a problem in UC enrollment, it has to do with California's K-12 system, California's income distribution, and other societal forces. UC restructured its admissions practices - mainly by dropping the SAT/ACT. More people applied as a result. But there were no changes in California's K-12 system, California's income distribution, or other societal forces. These are the results. They look similar to what we had before the restructuring. Maybe that shouldn't be a surprise.