UC Berkeley Admissions Discriminate against Minorities - Essay Example

I. Introduction I once read about a catchy article in the Daily Californian en d “Berkeley High protester claim UC Berkeley admissions discriminate against minorities”. In this article, I found the following opinion very interesting: “This campus should look like California” (Daily Californian, 2012). Thus: does it mean that UC Berkeley should follow race proportion in California when making its admission decisions or it should decide based solely on each student’s ability? In this paper, I am going to analyze the factors that can lead to one race having a bigger proportion than the others in UC Berkeley. I am going to compare average SAT scores, parent’s education, and family income level across different races in California. Also, in this paper I am going to compare the proportion of each race in California, UC Berkeley, and CSU East Bay. The reason why I included CSU East Bay is that I want to compare UC Berkeley with other public schools that have different qualifications in admitting students. My hypothesis is that UC Berkeley is not following the proportion of each race in California since it is a very competitive school with higher tuition fees compared to CSU East Bay. II. Data, Methods and Analysis In this paper, I limited the types of race into five categories: White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Others. I did this because they are the majority in California so that I can have consistency when gathering data. I began my research by comparing the proportion of each race in California, UC Berkeley and CSU East Bay. In figure 1, I made a clustered histogram that represents the percentage of each race. Here, I gathered the data from US National Census Bureau, UC Berkeley’s official website, and CSU East Bay’s official website.According to the data, White, Black, and Others are well represented in UC Berkeley as their proportions are not significantly different compares to their proportions in California. What captures an attention from this data is that Asians are the majority group in UC Berkeley with up to 43% from the total students compared to California population where it only takes up to 13%. Also, another highlight from this histogram is that Hispanic is under represented in UC Berkeley. California has 37.2% of Hispanic and UC Berkeley has only 13% of them. Different things appeared when we compared the race proportion in CSU East Bay. The proportions of White, Asian, Hispanic, and Others are almost equal which is around 20% while Black has lower proportion but not slightly different with its proportion in California population. Thus, the difference between proportions of each race in California, UC Berkeley, and CSU East Bay, led me to do further analysis on what might cause it. The first factor that I analyzed is related to academic achievements of high school students by race. I believe that this is one of the crucial reasons that might explain why there is a big difference in race proportions above. According to US News (2012), UC Berkeley ranks number 21 among national top universities, while CSU East Bay’s ranking has not been published. This proves that selectivity in admitting students must be different between these two schools. In figure 2, I constructed a scatter plot according to the data from National Center for Education Statistics for the mean SAT scores by race and data from The Nation’s Report Car for mean GPA by race for high school students. Here, I put SAT mean on the x-axis and GPA mean on the y-axis. By looking at the scatter plot, these two academic measures proved that Asian race has the highest for both average SAT and GPA. White has the second highest, and Hispanic has the third and Black has the fourth. According to this data, the difference between the average academic achievements of Asian and White is pretty small but the difference between White and Hispanic is way larger. This can help in explaining why Asian is the majority in UC Berkeley while Hispanic is under represented. If we want to compare high school student’s academic achievements and race proportion in CSU East Bay, we cannot find any correlation. Thus, we might assume that student’s academic achievement is not very relevant to race proportion in CSU East Bay. Another factor that I suggest might be correlated with the difference in the race proportion is parent’s education. This is because parent’s education might affect children’s academic achievements. In this case, I used IPUMS to generate stacked bars that represent education attainment of each race in California. Before generating the chart, I created a new variable so that I can have Hispanic as race instead of ethnicity.To be more specific to my target, I also limited the data so that it only counted for people aged between 40 and 60 in 2010. The result turned out to be positively correlated with high school student achievements from figure 1. Asian race has the highest percentage of parents who finished at least 4 years of college while they have the highest average of high school student’s academic achievements, and they are also the majority in UC Berkeley. Then, it is followed by White then Hispanic. Compared to other races, Hispanic has the smallest proportion of parents who finished at least 4 years of college. This can be correlated with why Hispanic is under represented in UC Berkeley. Although parents’ education is positively correlated to proportion of each race in UC Berkeley, this does not hold if we compare parent’s education with proportion of each race in CSU East Bay. Although Hispanic has the smallest percentage of parents who finished 4 years of college, the proportion of student’s population is almost equal with White and Asian. The next factor that correlates with the difference in race proportion is family income level. This is relevant because the tuition in UC Berkeley is much higher compared to CSU East Bay. According to US News, UC Berkeley’s tuition fees for in-state students is around $11,767 while in CSU East Bay, the tuition is nearly half of it, which is $6,927. This allows us to realize that apart from academic performance, family’s income level might affect where each student goes to school. In this case, I used IPUMS to generate family income level by race in California. Before generating the stacked bars, I created another new variable where I divided the income level into five categories so that it becomes easier to see the distribution of income for each race. Instead of using the “race” variable that IPUMS had originally, I used my new variable that I created for figure 2 so that I will still get Hispanic as a race. According to the data, the median family income for Asian and White is pretty similar, which is around $50,000-$70,000, while the median income for Black and Hispanic is around $30,000-$50,000 per annum. This result proves that there are bigger proportions of White and Asian families who can afford higher tuition fees compared to Black and Hispanic families. This helps to explain why there are bigger proportions of Hispanic and Black in CSU East Bay, while White and Asian are dominant in UC Berkeley. III. Conclusion According to the analysis that I have done, student’s abilities, parent’s education, and family income are factors that affect the proportion of race in UC Berkeley. Although the data support my initial hypothesis just like any other scientific analysis, it also has some limitations. The first limitation is that the high school student’s academic records data is nationwide and might be slightly different from that applied to UC Berkeley and CSU East Bay. The second limitation is that the data from IPUMS, such as family income and parents’ education is for California residents as a whole. Thus, this might also be slightly different from those who live in East Bay or those who actually applied to UC Berkeley and CSU East Bay. Another limitation is that in IPUMS, we made an assumption that those who categorized themselves as Hispanic might have more than one race. Thus, it is not very clear whether this really matched with those people whom UC Berkeley and CSU East Bay counted as Hispanic. Although these limitations might occur, I believe that this will not affect the analysis of the results. In conclusion, according to the analysis that I have done, UC Berkeley is certainly not following the proportion of race in California as it is competitive and slightly more expensive. Race with higher student abilities, parents’ education, and family income has higher proportion in UC Berkeley. If we want to compare with the race proportion in CSU East Bay, those factors do not really correlate with the race proportion in it. Thus, in answering the question that protesters claimed about UC Berkeley, I should say that UC Berkeley is not a usual public school. It is a prestigious university that dedicated itself for the public. Even though one of its jobs is to educate people of California, it also needs to set some standards in order to maintain its reputations. I can say this by looking at the factors that correlate to race proportion in California which include the following: student’s academic performance, parents’ education and family income. Read More