SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – California’s politicians are revisiting race relations, including how to better provide higher education opportunities to people that reflect the diversity of the state.

The State Senate is set to decide on whether to do away with an existing law that prohibits colleges from taking race into account in the admissions process.

As it stands today, college campuses still don’t reflect the diversity of the state’s residents.

That’s the belief of California’s assemblymembers who voted overwhelmingly in support of affirmative action for students seeking higher education.

They passed Assembly Constitutional Amendment 5 (ACA 5) and repealed Proposition 209, which for the last 24 years, has prohibited university admissions applications from taking race, ethnicity, and gender of a student into account.

Assemblyman David Chiu of San Francisco was one of the majority who voted to get rid of it.

“I think we’ve seen since Proposition 209 was passed a quarter of century ago that it hasn’t worked as it has intended. We’ve seen entire communities shut out of our public education system,” Chiu said.

Prop 209 was intended to shift the focus away from race, hoping it would make the admissions process more fair, and lead to more diversity on California’s college campuses – but taking a look at UC Berkeley’s new freshman enrollment in 2019, there were just 5.4% of incoming African-American and Black students compared to 30.5% of various Asian groups, 25.5% White, and 20.3% of Hispanic or Latino students.

So the UC Board of Regents this week unanimously endorsed ACA 5 and the repeal of Prop 209.

President Janet Napolitano says it stood in the university system’ way of fully representing the rich diversity of the state.

“In the years since Prop 209 passed, many of us have watched with dismay and largely tied hands as the number of students from underrepresented groups at UC declined and plateaued. This was despite our continued and creative efforts to attract the best and brightest students from all backgrounds,” Napolitano said.

“So we think that being able to allow for some consideration of race will actually help in the long run at addressing these disparities, the inequality and the fact that we haven’t been able to educate the full diversity of California,” Chiu said.

The Senate will now have to decide on the legislation by June 25.

If ACA 5 is passe by the Senate, California’s voters will then be tasked with the ultimate decision by marking their vote on November’s general election ballots.

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