Berkeley and Harvard and Stanford oh my!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20, 2019

Top schools admit no one but white kids: When the current "college admission scandal" broke, the New York Times swung into action, doing the one thing it knows.

The New York Times began working from script. In this circumstance, this meant that the New York Times began telling black kids that they were getting royally hosed and should feel deeply aggrieved.

In fact, very few students were affected, in any way, by the recent scandal. But this is the one thing the Times does well. Last Saturday, we showed you one of the more unfortunate passages produced in the Times' blizzard of misleading coverage.

"So disheartening," the headline says. This is the passage in question:

LEVIN, DE LEON AND ASSAN (3/16/19): At the University of California, Los Angeles—among the campuses ensnared in the shocking scheme—students like Ayesha Haleem said she and her classmates were both heartbroken and fuming.

“The higher education system has always benefited people who come from privileged backgrounds,” said Ms. Haleem, a Pakistani 23-year-old senior. “Students of color have it so much harder to even get to these places.”

At UCLA, the New York Times said, a heartbroken student was fuming. “Students of color have it so much harder to even get to these places," she was quoted saying.

By Sunday, the Times had refined its message. An essay in the Sunday Review seemed to say that admission procedures at these upper-end schools were designed to admit as few "students of color" as possible.

That essay principally dealt with Cornell. Yesterday, we showed you the current enrollment figures there—figures which are impossible to square with the Times' ugly, dim-witted propaganda.

Today, let's return to UCLA, the school which is so hard for students of color to get in to. Have they managed to keep the school all white? According to the NCES enrollment data, the answer would seem to be no:

Undergraduate enrollment, UCLA
White students: 27%
Black students: 3%
Hispanic/Latino students: 22%
Asian-American students: 28%
Two or more races: 5%
Race/ethnicity unknown: 2%

Foreign students: 12%

As we noted yesterday, the NCES data treat foreign students as a separate category, with no race or ethnicity recorded. At UCLA, that accounts for 12% percent of the undergraduate student body.

Among UCLA's undergraduate American kids, 27 percent were white; 53% were students of color, with an additional 5% listed as biracial. Compare that with the fuming quotation the Times had chosen to run.

It's hard to have sufficient contempt for a lazy, upper-class newspaper which functions the way the Times does—for a newspaper which aims to mislead its readers about elementary facts, then builds on that by filling good, decent American kids with waves of resentment and grievance.

In fairness, UCLA is a bit of a special case; California is different. These are the enrollment figures for Cal Berkeley, one of the nation's most elite state universities:

Undergraduate enrollment, Cal Berkeley
White students: 26%
Black students: 2%
Hispanic/Latino students: 15%
Asian-American students: 35%
Two or more races: 6%
Race/ethnicity unknown: 4%

Foreign students: 12%

It's true, of course, that black enrollment is quite low at both these upper-end schools. We'll be discussing that general topic all next week, when we focus on the latest front-page report by the Times about New York City's high-powered "specialized high schools."

That said, Berkeley currently enrolls 26% white students and 52% "students of color," with an additional 6% biracial kids. If current admission procedures are intended to keep enrollment by students of color as low as possible, the powers that be at Westwood and Berkeley are doing a rather poor job.

You don't, and you won't, see data like these in the New York Times. Tomorrow, we'll look at Harvard and Yale and Stanford and such—at elite private schools, where you'll see a higher black enrollment.

Deeply serious national issues are involved in the data we've shown you. The New York Times, working from script, continues to propagandize and misinform. It's behaving like the pseudo-liberal, upper-class clown car it has long been.

Are the most elite private schools trying to admit the fewest possible students of color? Tomorrow, we'll show you the data for a range of such schools, and we'll quote that pitiful New York Times essay again.

The Times has played it this way for decades. Rather clearly, this helps explain why Donald J. Trump is in power.