UC Riverside

A Master Plan for Higher Education in California (Master Plan) is a historically renowned policy document that transformed uncoordinated and competing colleges and universities into a coherent system by providing each system (California Community Colleges, California State University, and the University of California) with its own distinctive mission and pool of students. Master Plan combined quality educational policy with expansive access for students for the first time in higher education. This policy document set forth broad guidelines for who would be admitted to each system of higher education, with the University of California (UC) responsible for enrolling the top 12.5% of the state’s high school graduates. Using Master Plan as the guiding, overarching policy document, UC established its eligibility and admission policies. These policies have had a disparate impact on African American male students. Using a policy discourse analysis methodology, I explore the articulated goals of UC’s eligibility and admission policies and the discourses and positions they advance. In particular, I consider how these policy documents and discourse impact African American males’ quest for a UC education. I present evidence that the dominant discourses of merit and prestige, countered by alternate discourses of access, eligibility, diversity, race, and mission, provide a limited range of available policy themes and opportunities. I argue that the dominate discourses constrain understandings of UC eligibility and admission, and potentially narrow the UC educational opportunities available to African American males, which has negative implications for the state of California and the nation. If Master Plan and its premier university system, the University of California, are to serve as instruments for creating and expanding opportunity, UC and its eligibility and admission policies must be more than a necessary outcome; it is important to examine and expand more closely the definitions of merit and the construct of UC eligibility on the pathway to admission and the overwhelming role of prestige, as set forth in A Master Plan for Higher Education in California.

Lastly, I argue that the interplay of prestige, race, and access in UC’s eligibility and admission policies utilizing the backdrop of the historic policy document, Master Plan, can serve as a gatekeeper or opportunity path in African American males’ access to the University of California.