Prop 16 and a Brighter Future for All Californians: A Synthesis of Research on Affirmative Action, Enrollment, Educational Attainment and Careers at the UC

This educational policy brief is short but research-dense, and synthesizes findings from over a hundred studies.  

It focuses on five themes related to the importance of race-conscious tools and Prop 16: 

1) positioning California's future economic competitiveness; 

2) UC freshmen enrollment access; 

3) undergraduate graduation rates and career success/earnings (contra claims of "mismatch"); 

4) educational benefits of diversity versus the harms of Prop 209/racial isolation regarding campus racial climate; and 

5) Prop 209's negative impact on UC medical school enrollment, and physician diversity as well as 209's contribution to worsening health disparities for vulnerable communities of color in CA, with a brief discussion of other UC professional/graduate school harms.  

The brief is primarily focused on African American and Latinx impacts, but also documents where Prop 16 could add to the toolkit to address access needs within acutely disadvantaged Asian American and Pacific Islander communities: intervention needed to support UC's Hmong graduation rates; CA needs more doctors who speak Tagalog and Vietnamese, etc.

There are also two original data charts: one on the latest graduation rates with/without affirmative action and the other on long-term pre/post-209 UC African American M.D. degree impacts.

This item can be found on eScholarship at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5t39d0qx