With college application deadlines approaching, questions surrounding UC admissions practices continue to surface amid a lawsuit from a student organization and demands backed by the Trump administration challenging how the system considers race in admissions.
Students Against Racial Discrimination (SARD) filed a lawsuit, currently ongoing, against the University of California system in February. The lawsuit alleges that the UCs violate Proposition 209, the state’s ban on affirmative action, which was enacted in 1996. The proposition bans the consideration of race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, education, and contracting. SARD believes that advantages should be given to students based on their socioeconomic status rather than race.
“If served, we will vigorously defend our admission practices. We believe this to be a meritless suit that seeks to distract us from our mission to provide California students with a world-class education,” Omar Rodriguez, Senior Media Relations Officer for the UC Office of the President, said in response to the SARD lawsuit.
On May 20, 2025, the UC Regents and defendants filed a memorandum to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming SARD does not have the right to sue because they were not directly harmed in a specific or personal way by UC admission policies, and that they did not provide enough detailed evidence to support their allegations.
“Many of the UC schools tried in good faith to follow Proposition 209 for a decade after it was passed, but starting around 2006 and 2007, they began to undercut it and progressively became more and more blatant in disregarding it,” SARD Founder and UCLA Law Professor Richard Sander said. The UCs have denied these allegations.
“There were cases where statistically, the white person was extremely more likely to get the job simply because of racial biases,” senior Eboni Freeman said. “That’s why DEI was implemented. It was not necessarily to raise certain races or specifically minorities, it was more to equalize the playing field and make sure that personal bias wasn’t implemented in academic spaces and in the job market.”
On a national scale, in 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (Harvard) and SFFA v. University of North Carolina (UNC), but added that schools can consider how race shaped their applicants’ lives if it is mentioned in their essays.
In addition to the SARD lawsuit facing UCs, President Trump signed an executive order on Aug. 7, 2025, requiring colleges to submit data to prove they do not consider race in admission practices. The requested data includes the race, grade point average, and standardized test scores of applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students. The Department of Education has three months to submit the data to the National Center for Education Statistics.
On Oct. 24, 2025, the Trump administration’s 27-page proposal to UCLA, demanding a $1.2 billion settlement, was made public and accused UCLA of discriminatory practices by considering race in their admissions process. The proposal also prohibits the use of “personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity as a means to introduce or justify discrimination” in its admissions process, making it far more restrictive than the 2023 Supreme Court rulings.
Despite these restrictions, the post-affirmative action era has brought in an influx of low-income Black and Latino students to the UCs. However, SARD does not view this as progress, but rather argues that the UCs are giving unfair advantages to different races rather than advocating for students based on socioeconomic status.
A report by the San Francisco Chronicle reveals that some high schools with a greater number of low-income students have higher admission rates to the most selective UCs, despite lower standardized test scores.
Mission High School, a public school in San Francisco whose student body mainly consists of low-income Black and Latino students, has had above-average admission rates to the UCs, specifically UC Berkeley.
In 2023, 90 Mission students applied to UC Berkeley, and approximately 43% (39 students) were admitted. In comparison, M-A had a 14% acceptance rate to UC Berkeley, with 179 applicants and 25 acceptances. The average in-state acceptance rate for UC Berkeley is 15%, making Mission’s acceptance rate almost three times greater than the average.
Graph of M-A admission rates to UCs in 2023.
Graph of Mission High admission rates to UCs in 2023.
In the 2023-24 school year, 72.01% of M-A students met or exceeded state standards for English Language Arts, and 54.27% of students met or exceeded state standards for math. In the same year, 15.93% of Mission students met or exceeded state standards for English Language Arts, and 4.46% of students met or exceeded state standards for math—significantly less than M-A.
Graph of M-A and Mission pass rates in 2023-24 school year.
The UC system has its own application, unlike more than 1,000 colleges that use the Common App. Instead of taking applicants’ personal statements or SAT and ACT scores, the UCs place an emphasis on the applicants’ personal insight questions (PIQs)—a set of four reflective responses composed of 350 words, unique to the UCs.
“They’re unique prompts, like, they’re different from each other, so you can write things that don’t really overlap. You can show a lot of different aspects of who you are. So I think the best way that you can really show who you are is through the PIQs,” senior Quinn Robbins said.
“You have to fill out demographics, like what your race is, gender, etc. But to be fair, the Common App has that too,” Robbins said. “There’s a lot of information that just doesn’t feel necessary to fill out.”
When asked if the UCs ask more identity-based questions compared to other colleges, Robbins said, “I think it’s probably around the same, but [the UCs have] a decent amount.” He added, “The identity-based questions are all multiple choice, click the boxes, so it does seem like they’re, you know, data collecting.”
While the SARD lawsuit is ongoing, President Trump’s executive order to colleges regarding data collection is set to take effect in November, and UC applications for fall of 2026 are due this December.
