There's no keeping young Californians down

As a veteran of the unsuccessful struggle in the mid-1990s to preserve access for the young Californians designated by the ungainly label "under-represented minorities (URM)" to the UC education system, I'm always interested when the system releases its annual break down of its incoming classes. The Los Angeles Times summarizes: 

In a revised playbook guiding University of California admissions, the system’s nine undergraduate campuses accepted a record number of California first-year students for fall 2022, while significantly narrowing entry to out-of-state and international applicants amid widespread demands to preserve coveted seats for state residents, according to preliminary data released Wednesday. ... Offers to out-of-state applicants declined by 19%, or 5,359 students, and those to international students decreased by 12.2%, or 2,442 students.

Campuses also set records for diversity, as students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups increased to 43.8% of the admitted first-year class. For the third straight year, Latinos were the largest ethnic group at 37.3%, followed by Asian Americans at 35%, white students at 18.6% and Black students at 5.7%. Overall, both applications and admission offers increased for Latino, Asian American, Black and Native American students and declined among white and Pacific Islander students.

... About 47% of admitted California first-year students are low-income, and 44% would be the first in their families to earn a bachelor’s degree.

It was pretty clear in the years after 1996 when California's voters outlawed affirmative action by way of Prop. 209 that diversity plummeted, especially at the premier campuses.

In what some media insisted on calling a "majority-minority" state, that's a problem. And the California higher ed system has adopted a series of expedients to try to admit classes whose demographic make up looked more like the state's. It guaranteed admission to the top four percent of high school grads -- without reference to other criteria, a program called "Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC)". That increased the percentage of URM by about 3.5%. Some campuses adopted "holistic review" of applicants which partially mitigated URM declines. (Source.)

And now, the system is cutting back on tuition-paying out-of-state and foreign student admissions, whose numbers were close 25 percent in the years of lean California budgets for higher ed. The money had to come from someone ... or so the UC bureaucracy acted. 

As a consequence, admittances are looking more like the people of the state. Yes, the system still doesn't welcome Black students in their proportion to the population. And there are still distortions at the prestige campuses. But over all, good for California higher ed.

There's another simple reason why California higher ed is getting more diverse. Look who is graduating from California high schools these days:

Click to enlarge.

This is who Californians are.