The Admission Dispute: Asian American Versus University of California at Berkeley

Since the 1960s, the enrollment of foreign and American born Asian students at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) increased at a consistently higher rate than that of other minority groups. Consequently, a sharp decline of Asian American freshman enrollment at UCB in 1984 led to a five-year admissions dispute between UCB and the Asian American community in California. This book reconstructs the case, identifies the causes and changes resulted from the dispute, and discusses the related social issues. It demonstrates the conflict between the overabundance of UCB-eligible Asian American applicants and the goals of UCB’s admissions policy: to enroll students representing the cultural, racial, geographic, and socio-economic diversity of the California population.