for those of you who think getting rid of AA is the answer, think again:
a GREAT nytimes article from a month ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/education/edlife/07asian.html?ex=1170824400&en=faac6e9bd81d690f&ei=5070
*******random clips for those who aren't subscribed********
I ask Mr. Hu what its like to be on a campus that is overwhelmingly Asian what its like to be of the demographic moment. This fall and last, the number of Asian freshmen at Berkeley has been at a record high, about 46 percent. The overall undergraduate population is 41 percent Asian. On this golden campus, where a creek runs through a redwood grove, there are residence halls with Asian themes; good dim sum is never more than a five-minute walk away; heaping, spicy bowls of pho are served up in the Bears Lair cafeteria; and numerous social clubs are linked by common ancestry to countries far across the Pacific.
Mr. Hu shrugs, saying there is a fair amount of selective self-racial segregation, which is not unusual at a university this size: about 24,000 undergraduates. The different ethnic groups dont really interact that much, he says. Theres definitely a sense of sticking with your community. But, he quickly adds, People of my generation dont look at race as that big of a deal. People here, the freshmen and sophomores, theyre pretty much like your average American teenagers.
Spend a few days at Berkeley, on the classically manicured slope overlooking San Francisco Bay and the distant Pacific, and soon enough the sound of foreign languages becomes less distinct. This is a global campus in a global age. And more than any time in its history, it looks toward the setting sun for its identity.
The revolution at Berkeley is a quiet one, a slow turning of the forces of immigration and demographics. What is troubling to some is that the big public school on the hill certainly does not look like the ethnic face of California, which is 12 percent Asian, more than twice the national average. But it is the new face of the states vaunted public university system. Asians make up the largest single ethnic group, 37 percent, at its nine undergraduate campuses.
The oft-cited goal of a public university is to be a microcosm in this case, of the nations most populous, most demographically dynamic state and to enrich the educational experience with a variety of cultures, economic backgrounds and viewpoints.
But 10 years after California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racial preferences in the public sector, university administrators find such balance harder to attain. At the same time, affirmative action is being challenged on a number of new fronts, in court and at state ballot boxes. And elite colleges have recently come under attack for practicing it specifically, for bypassing highly credentialed Asian applicants in favor of students of color with less stellar test scores and grades.
In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics. This year, in a class of 4809, there are only 100 black freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles the lowest number in 33 years. At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion. (In 1997, just before the full force of Proposition 209 went into effect, the proportion of black freshmen matched the state population, 7 percent.) The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).
This is in part because getting into Berkeley U.S. News & World Reports top-ranked public university has never been more daunting. There were 41,750 applicants for this years freshman class of 4,157. Nearly half had a weighted grade point average of 4.0 or better (weighted for advanced courses). There is even grumbling from the old Blues older alumni named for the school color who complain because their kids cant get in, says Gregg Thomson, director of the Office of Student Research.
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In summary: Asians are basically the only group really getting screwed due to AA. For the other majority who think you're getting screwed over, trust me it's not a good idea to get rid of AA.
