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Jenna Kyle is quite distressed by the ramifications the increase in UCLA’s academic standards will have on ethnic diversity. She wrote that her “invaluable UCLA education” taught her to look further into the story. Laudable initiative, but let me try to go a step further in the same vein.

Kyle notes that “the search (to ensure that all University of California students receive a quality education) has been halted” by the GPA increase proposal. In point of fact, this proposal is aiming for exactly that quality education.

School resources are traditionally measured per “ADA,” that is, how many dollars are being spent per student in average daily attendance. If the amount of money in the pie does not increase, one cannot increase the number of students and maintain the level of education. It’s only a two-variable equation. To the extent that funding affects quality of education, the schools must increase spending or reduce attendance.

The initially proposed increase in eligibility requirements will result in eligibility reductions between 1 percent and 3.7 percent for (from smallest to largest reduction) Latinos, blacks, whites and Asians.

However, Kyle notes the current eligibility rates are not equitable: 31.4 percent of graduating Asian students, 16.1 percent of white students, 6.5 percent of Latino students and 6.3 percent of black students are UC-eligible. As a percentage of the already-small presence of black or Latino, Kyle notes these populations will be disproportionately affected. This lies in “direct opposition with the prevailing idea that this GPA increase will affect all ethnic groups equally.”

I wasn’t actually aware that this was the prevailing idea. Allow me to formalize what I believe Kyle attempts to say: Equality of opportunity does not necessarily ensure quality of results. The closer you arrive at a pure meritocracy, the more obvious this becomes.

With respect to ethnic “equality,” the NBA springs to mind. So, I’m not sure, first, why people would assume that a standards increase would affect all populations equally, or, second, why Kyle believes that this matters. She says the disparate effect is “cause for alarm.”

This seems to be putting things a little too strongly, surely. The admissions process has a sort of triage aspect to it: some applicants are shoo-ins, some are clear rejects, some are borderline. Depending on how many of the shoo-ins decide to accept their offers, many of the borderline cases will or will not be admitted. Having been admitted, however, there is no intuitively obvious reason that they should be afforded any sort of protection of their status based on ethnicity.

The notion that ethnic diversity be the foremost criterion certainly strikes me, at least, as counter-intuitive. How about judging people not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their ... academic records (my apologies to Dr. King)?

Melodrama aside, nobody is being denied “higher education.” At issue is where students will receive that higher education. Which students will be sent to pursue their educations at schools that rank somewhat lower in reputation, like the California State University system. I vote that this is a decision not made with an eye toward any artificial view of what the racial makeup of a campus should look like, but instead with direct application of relatively objective standards such as GPA, which provide a pretty useful measure of student capability and past diligence.

If we can’t all fit in the boat (and we could do an entire newspaper on just why we can’t) then it’s the most borderline cases, in a color-blind analysis, that should step down to the next lower tier. This is not to say that they are being denied a higher education.

Kyle finishes her article with a series of “imagine the message we’re sending” statements. Rather than treat these as purely rhetorical, let me suggest a few answers.

“Imagine what we will be telling future applicants of color if we close the door of opportunity.” How about we tell them that four Bs and a C (2.8 GPA) is not good enough for admittance to some of the top academic colleges in the country? How about we tell them to tell their younger brothers and sisters that they’d better study hard in high school if they want to get into UCLA, or Berkeley, or Hastings, because it’s tough, competitive and over 30 percent of their Asian counterparts are meeting some very tough standards? How about we tell those Asian students that their hard work will not be sacrificed at the altar of diversity?

One could make the NBA a model of diversity by artificially enforcing racial quotas on each team. Would that be more “fair”? This might fit the social engineering agenda that is often found in academia, but it would certainly do no benefit in the search for excellence.

How about we tell them that while diversity is wonderful, when it goes heads-up against excellence, it’s excellence that we are choosing to make our highest priority. This, in fact, would be the “radical message” that Kyle seems to think would be made by making diversity the ultimate benchmark. In fact, it is increased standards that would be the most radical departure from the trajectory of American education.

Oakes is a first-year law student.

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