are going elsewhere - African-Americans are recruited by a lot of private colleges. Many also choose to go to universities which have a larger African-American population. (UCLA and UC-Berkeley are very competitive but being state institutions (in a state which is cutting higher ed. budgets) cannot give out the financial aid packages that private universities often can (that's why I went to a private college: it cost me only a bit more than the state university would have (excluding my loans! but such a better place); UCSD is a little less so amongst undergrad institutions).
But still, it shows that too many are not getting the K-12 education they need.
from the LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-me-ucla3jun03,0,7995735,full.storyIn an interview, Hunt acknowledged the difficulty for a campus like UCLA, which received 47,000 applications this year. Yet he criticized the school for rejecting many black students based on what he described as factors of questionable validity, and that he said may be linked more to socioeconomic privilege than academic merit.
"There's a common misperception that this is a horrible problem but that black students just need to do better," he said. "But most of the black students who don't get in go to other top-notch schools — Harvard, Duke, Michigan. We're losing students who could be here."
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The new figures were part of an annual report showing that a record-setting 37,000 freshmen plan to enroll at UC campuses in the fall. Overall, across all nine undergraduate campuses, the new class shows a continued trend of slight increases in black, Latino and Native American students. These groups, which are still considered underrepresented at UC, will make up just under 20% of the 2006 freshman class, compared with just below 19% for the current class.
<snip>
In Los Angeles County, blacks accounted for 11%, or 9,152, of the 84,677 public high school graduates. Statewide, blacks made up 7%, or 25,267, of the 343,481 students who graduated from California's public high schools in 2004, the most recent year statistics are available.