Behind Withe Skin & Blue Eyes

UCSB has a 47% of Caucasian student population, and only 5% are Latinos.

Do they really take qualifications into consideration? Or, are other factors more important when it comes to select candidates for certain schools in California?

This was it; I finally was going to transfer to my dream University UCSB. I had all the requirements and a higher than the required GPA for the “Transfer Admission Guaranteed” contract between UCSB and MJC, but I was not the typical white surfer student that usually makes it to get accepted in such university. Was that really a problem? I did not think so; since I applied with the ”TAG contract” I had my admission guaranteed, right? Well, for some reason, it wasn’t that way. I did not get accepted.

A friend of mine, who also is a Latina and who also applied with the TAG having all the qualifications to get accepted, did not make it either; however, a Caucasian classmate who had a lower GPA and less qualifications than us, was notified of his acceptance the first day they released decisions. A great illustration of institutional racism don’t you think so?

            Institutional racism refers to policies, laws, and institutions that reproduce racial inequalities (Golash-Boza 184)

One of the many effects of institutional racism is the persistence of racial segregation in the educational system, and thus a reproduction of racial and educational inequality between white and non-white students.  

I would like to focus my writing specifically in UCSB and UCM, since those two campuses are strictly related to my personal story.

Although UCSB claims to be an “equal opportunity school” I still do not understand why most Latinos and black candidates, who have a great personal statement and more qualifications than required, are not admitted. I believe they have a hidden curriculum, which obviously favors white people. Another important factor might be symbolic violence, which I think plays an important role in the UCSB’s acceptance criteria. That is to say, white people as a dominant group, have the power to establish preferences and norms, so their interests are unevenly promoted, which affects nonwhite prospective students.

We definitely need new policies or at least reinforce the ones that already exist in order to combat institutional racism, and thus ongoing discrimination in the UC system and in the education system in general.

I’ve heard joking comments that UCM stands for UC Mexicans because a 45.6% of the UCM students are Hispanic, while only 14.1% are white, which I consider is a kind of racial segregation. I believe that all campuses of the UC system should have the same acceptance criteria regardless of the prestige and antiquity of each school; after all, it is only one system.

Historically, in the United States “laws [have] prevented many non-white children from accessing the best educational opportunities.” Today, there is no law that prevents us from an equal educational opportunity; however, non-white children still struggle getting such “equal” educational opportunities at all educational levels. According of PBS Newshour , for the first time in almost 15 years, the Department of Education reported a pattern of Inequality by Race in Public Schools. 

Historically, the majority of nonwhite students have attended schools with a high percentage of nonwhite students and a low percentage of whites, and vise versa. The persistence of racial segregation in the UC system is due to the institutional racism that clearly exists among the system, and in the educational system in general. Unfortunately, little has been done to prevent it. As it is stated in chapter 8 of the Race & Racisms text, “this high level of racial segregation is often associated with poverty: in 2001, 88 percent of the schools that were over 90 percent non-white were also majority-poor” (Golash-Boza 213) As a general rule, children who live in a low-income neighborhood will attend a low quality school because of the unequal school funding. 
The school system

in the US is funded mostly by local property taxes, which means that the poorer the neighborhood, the less funds the school district is going to have, and thus the educational level is going to be lower. It is a reproduction of social inequality that affects all educational levels from preschool to college.

45.6% of the UCM students are Hispanic, while only 14.1% are white.