by Harry P. Pachon

About the author: Harry P. Pachon is president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute and a professor of public policy at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California.

A good way to measure the impact of Proposition 209, the initiative that widely eliminated affirmative action in California, is to analyze the regulations the University of California (UC) adopted to mirror the proposition. The UC trustees rescinded these regulations in late May [2001]. Therefore, a look at the data from 1998 to 2000, when these regulations were in force, shows the effect of eliminating racial and ethnic preferences in college admissions and may be illustrative of the overall impact of the Proposition 209 initiative.

Across all eight UC campuses, admission rates for black and Latino students dropped by more than 25 percent. At the flagship campuses—Berkeley and UCLA (University of...