The University of California system announced today that it had admitted substantially more black and Hispanic freshmen for the coming fall than it had going into the current academic year, with much of the increase being driven by a surge in the number of applicants from those minority groups.

The preliminary admissions numbers that the university system released show that about 16 percent more black Californians applied to one of the system’s campuses and just over 13 percent more were admitted. The number of Hispanic Californians admitted increased by nearly 18 percent; the number applying, by 16 percent.

The university provided a racial and ethnic breakdown of such numbers only for in-state applicants. But because California residents account for nearly nine out of 10 of the system’s students, its figures suggest that the system’s efforts to reach out to minority communities, in the wake of a decade-old ban on affirmative-action preferences, appear to be having some effect.

The picture varied substantially by campus, however, with much of the systemwide growth in the number of black and Hispanic Californians admitted being driven by sharp increases at the less-competitive campuses at Merced, Riverside, and Santa Barbara.

The University of California at Los Angeles also posted significant increases in its black and Hispanic admittees, a pattern that officials there credited partly to the campus’s adoption last year of a “holistic” admission system that considers what opportunities applicants have had in life. But on the Berkeley and Irvine campuses, the share of admissions offers going to black and Hispanic students rose only slightly, and the actual numbers admitted declined, as the campuses scaled back the number of acceptance letters mailed out to state residents.

Over all, the number of California high-school seniors offered admission to one of the system’s campuses rose by 4.7 percent, to just over 60,000. With applications up by 7.7 percent, however, the acceptance rate among Californians declined from 77.4 percent to 75.3 percent.

In announcing the new admissions numbers, Susan Wilbur, the university system’s director of undergraduate admissions, warned that the system cannot continue to take in growing numbers of students without substantial increases in its state appropriations. —Peter Schmidt