California Insider Weblog: The diversity machine

Sacramento Bee 12/26/06

By Daniel Weintraub

One of the great untold stories of the past decade is the rapid rise of the California State University system as an elevator for moving ethnic minorities into the middle class. While a lot of attention has been paid to the end of affirmative action at the University of California, the CSU has quietly become an engine for ethnic upward mobility.

Since 1996, the percentage of bachelor's degrees granted to minorities has increased from 45 percent to 56 percent, based on the ethnicity students report to the universities. In 2005, the CSU granted about 59,200 degree to students who reported an ethnicty. Of those, 32,900 went to non-whites, including Latinos.

The number of bachelor's degrees granted to Latinos has soared from 7,431 in 1996 to 13,153 in 2005.