Lawsuit accuses University of California of racial discrimination in admissions

SANTA ANA, Calif. — A lawsuit filed this week accuses the University of California of racial discrimination in undergraduate admissions by favoring Black and Latino students over Asian American and white applicants.

A group called Students Against Racial Discrimination sued Monday in federal court, alleging the university system admits students with inferior academic credentials at the expense of better-qualified ones.

The complaint claims UC’s admissions practices violate a state law approved by voters in 1996 that forbids considering race and other factors in public education, public employment and public contracting.

In addition, the filing alleges that the California campuses are violating the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars federal funds recipients from discriminating based on race.

UC officials didn’t immediately respond Tuesday to emails and phone calls seeking comment on the lawsuit.

The lawsuit asks a judge to block the university system with 10 campuses from asking about race in student applications and to appoint a court monitor to oversee admission decisions.

Asian American and white applicants are discriminated against because of their race, while Latino and Black students are “often placed at a significant academic disadvantage, and thus experience worse outcomes, because of the university’s use of racial preferences,” the complaint alleges.

“Students of all races are harmed by the University of California’s discriminatory behavior,” the lawsuit says.

It accuses UC officials of ordering campuses to use a “holistic” review of undergraduate admissions, “in other words, that they move away from objective criteria towards more subjective assessments of the overall appeal of individual candidates.”

As an example, the filing cites a statistic that in 2010 the University of California, Berkeley admitted 13% of Black, in-state students, compared with an overall 21% admission rate. By 2023, the Black admissions rate at Berkeley was 10%, compared to an overall rate of 12%, the complaint said.

The lawsuit comes more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, declaring race cannot be a factor and forcing institutions of higher education to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies.