The California Master Plan: Admissions, Race, and the SAT

50 years ago Monday the California Legislature signed into law the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education. In honor of the anniversary of this seminal document, I’ll be doing a series of posts on important Plan elements, starting yesterday with a brief history.

Blame the Baby Boom generation and the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California for the widespread use of admissions tests for college. With the passage of this document 50 years ago yesterday, California became the first state to codify which students were to be eligible for which higher education institution. It set clear guidelines: The University of California was to enroll the top eighth of all high school graduates, the California State University schools were to enroll students between the top one-eighth and the top one-third, and the California Community Colleges were to be open to all other students. But, to handle a quadrupling of student demand between 1960 and 1975, the state had to come up with equally clear guidelines about how to define its student populations.

Enter the SAT. In 1951, 81,100 students took the SAT, mainly in seeking admission to an Ivy League school or other private institution in the Northeast. By 1961, with California leading the way, the number of test takers had climbed above 800,000. Clark Kerr, one of the key architects of the Master Plan, had been affiliated with ETS, the makers of the SAT, since his days as Chancellor of UC-Berkeley. Kerr was close personal friends with one of James Bryant Conant, a Harvard President and one of the founders of ETS. With the requirement that the entering class of 1960 take the SAT, the University of California became the first major public university to require applicants to take the test. The UC became the SAT’s biggest client overnight.

It wasn’t entirely a clean transition. The University’s academic senate conducted a study on this first crop of entering students, and their results were not promising. Their analysis of the data left them, “wholly convinced that the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores add little or nothing to the precision with which the existing admissions requirements are predictive of success in the University” (More recent evidence has found this to still be the case). In response to this finding, the board voted unanimously to remove the SAT requirement for the fall class of 1962.

The board was fighting a losing battle to demographics and political necessities. In negotiating the 1960 Master Plan, the University had agreed to raise its admission standards from the top 15 percent of high school seniors to the top 12.5 percent [Updated for clarity]. To do so required making hard decisions about which students got in. A prophetic 1964 study found that SAT scores provided an “added practical advantage” of being less politically volatile than decisions based on high school GPA alone.

This is where race comes into the story. In 1964, Kerr used $100,000 to establish an Educational Opportunity Program to recruit disadvantaged students, offer them financial and academic assistance, and encourage them to enroll. Similar programs sprouted at all of the UC schools, but these EOPs were attracting students who did not meet the ordinary academic requirements. Instead, they were being admitted under a “special action” pool of applicants that was limited to 2 percent of students. Even this was not enough. A 1967 study found that African-Americans made up 3.6 percent of the graduates of California public high schools, but only 1.2 percent were eligible for entry to the UC. Of the eligible students, only 17.6 actually enrolled in the UC. The rates for Hispanic students were similarly low. The study also found that, despite changes in admissions policies in response to the Master Plan, the UC was still enrolling students from the same high schools they had in 1950.

The pressure to raise admissions standards ran into the pressure to admit disadvantaged students, and the SAT became part of the compromise. In order to again require the submission of SAT scores, the UC expanded its special action pool from 2 to 4 percent of students. As Nicholas Lemann wrote in The Big Test, an excellent chronicle of all this history, the UC was caught in an issue of access versus excellence:

African-American and Chicano-Latino students had relatively low high school graduation rates. Of those that graduated, only a few were UC eligible. Here lies the crux of a long-term problem: While the university attempted to alter is [sic] admissions criteria, broad access to the university related more fundamentally to growing inadequacies in the schools, in the cultural predilections of different ethnic groups, and in the expanding disparities in society. How could the university take the nascent affirmative-action tools it and other public universities had developed and do more?

By 1968 the UC was back to requiring the SAT, and the tension Lemann describes continued into the early 1970s and in 1974 the legislature passed a bill insisting that public higher education should, “strive to approximate by 1980 the general ethnic, sexual, and economic composition of the recent California high school graduates.” In other words, demographics of high school graduates should match the demographics of college enrollees. It did not mention anything about credentials.

Anyone familiar with higher education and the battle over affirmative action knows what happened next: In 1978 the Supreme Court heard the case of Allan Bakke. Bakke had applied to medical school at UC-Davis in the early 1970s, and he’d been turned down twice. Bakke claimed, and the Supreme Court agreed, that he’d been turned down in favor of minority students with inferior academic records in order for the school to attain a racial quota. In striking down the quotas, the Court ruled that race and other socioeconomic factors could be considered in admissions decisions so long as they’re not binding numerical guidelines. That distinction has more or less stood the test of time.

The admissions battles in California have continued in the aftermath of Bakke. The chart below shows the percentage of minority students admitted to UC schools over time. The dark blue line at the top represents the percentage of California high school graduates who are under-represented minorities (URM). As this line makes clear, the state has gotten quite a bit more diverse over the years. The UC, on the other hand, has not matched this trend. In 1994, California passed Proposition 209, which barred “public universities, colleges, and schools…from discriminating against or giving preferential treatment to any individual or group…” The percentage of under-represented minorities at the UC immediately began falling and bottomed out in 1998. The red line at the bottom, the difference between under-represented minorities graduating from public California high schools and the percentage enrolled at UC schools, rose 15/17 years between 1989 and 2005, but has fallen slightly since then.

The spots at UC institutions are somewhat of a zero-sum game, and a 2009 proposal that may lower the percentage of Asian students from 36 to 29-32 garnered criticism. The plan, which will take effect in 2012, will eliminate the SAT II subject tests currently required of all applicants. Students in the top 9 percent of their high school class will now have automatic acceptance at a UC institution. This number is up from four, and is a sign that high school GPA may be weighted more heavily in the future.

The development of college admissions tests and racial preferences in admissions are deeply inter-woven into California’s higher education system. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at the state’s policies affecting transfer students.

Tagged as: California Master Plan, Clark Kerr, James Bryant Conant, Nicholas Lemann, SAT