The University of California released statistics last week on the freshman class planning to enroll on the system’s nine undergraduate campuses this fall, and the numbers of underrepresented minority students trended slightly upward, with one notable exception. According to an article in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times, only 96 out of the 4,852 freshmen expected at UCLA will be black students, 20 fewer than last year and the lowest number since at least 1973.

The university’s chancellor, Albert Carnesale, called the figures “a great disappointment,” but he cited the anti-affirmative-action ballot measure passed in 1996, Proposition 209, as one reason for the continuing decline in black admissions. The university’s Berkeley campus, UCLA’s chief rival in the system, uses a more holistic approach in admissions, and that may have helped it admit more minority students. Other major public universities have used the technique with that goal in mind (The Chronicle, April 5 and May 24). But UCLA finds that approach difficult to adopt, given that it receives 47,000 applications a year.