Transcript: University of California president Michael Drake on “Face the Nation,” July 2, 2023

The following is a transcript of an interview with Michael Drake, president of the University of California system, that aired on “Face the Nation” on July 2, 2023.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Prior to last week’s Supreme Court ruling there were nine states with bans on affirmative action and college admissions. California was the first to ban it following a ballot initiative in 1996. Joining us now is the president of the University of California system, Dr. Michael Drake. Welcome back to the program. We wanted to tap into your experience here, the school system has spent $500 million since 2004, to try to drive diversity. Is it possible to have a diverse student body without affirmative action? And how do you define diverse at this point?

DR. MICHAEL DRAKE, PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA:Thank you very much. You know, we’ve had efforts since the 90s and before to try to do everything we could to through outreach and other methods, contact those students who we wanted to see applying to our universities. We use a comprehensive admissions process to look at all the factors that led to this person’s life. And they’re interested in being educated with us. And we think that can be done very effectively. Affirmative Action was one tool that we and others used in the past, we’ve read the court’s decision, and we had the laws in California that changed in the 1990s. And we are very pleased that our ability to be able to attract students from a wide variety of backgrounds over these many years.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Does this court ruling affect you at all?

DR. DRAKE: Well we’ll have to see how it plays out in fact. You know, when we had the law change in California in the 1990s, it affected us quite profoundly in a couple of ways. And one way it limited the way that we were admitting students. But another way, it told students that California and that the University of California were not interested in them. This was something that came from action from our regents before it passed in law. So students that we would love to have admitted students who are fully qualified, felt unwelcome, and we found went to other schools to private schools in California and others across the country. This is the entire nation, so it’s not students aren’t hearing that we’re not interested or the colleges aren’t interested in them. And I think that- so will have less of an effect on us, we think, because it affects the whole- the whole country.

MARGARET BRENNAN: But you’ve used other metrics or tools to recruit. There’s a piece I just read about the socio-economic disadvantage scale, the SED, that the university college or university- that UC Davis and the medical school uses. What’s an adversity score, and how does that work?

DR. DRAKE: What they’re doing- what Davis is doing, we applaud this, and our other universities, other campuses, and our university do in a variety of ways, is look at the life circumstances of those who are applying to come to us, and weigh those in a comprehensive fashion, when they look at the quality of the application and make a decision. And actually we do this for every student, we look at who you are, what you’ve done, what makes you a qualified applicant as we’re recruiting and admitting you to our colleges and universities.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So how do you define diversity? We looked at the undergraduate makeup before affirmative action, and then this past fall. And the percentages, which we can put up on- on screen for- for different groups there, have shifted, the state’s demographics have also shifted. The one thing that stands out is the percentage of African American students held fairly stable at this four or four-and-a-half percent level. Why was that unmoved, really?

DR. DRAKE: Yeah, I think that the issues of racism and lack of opportunity that we find in our society are persistent and- and ubiquitous. And we’ve been fighting against those, we’ve been working to great opportunity fighting against those for all of these years. Affirmative Action was one tool that we used in the past that was removed. We still are fighting the legacy of the centuries of oppression and denial that this country has applied and doing our best to try to create more opportunity for students who come from this unequal society.

MARGARET BRENNAN: But how do you- because- because you’re being asked essentially, to quantify in some way, a- a diverse student body? Do- do you try to match the demographics of this state? I mean, how do you know if you’re succeeding, or if you’re failing?

DR. DRAKE: Yeah, we don’t do anything prospectively, you know, what we do is try to create opportunity, in a comprehensive way, to really evaluate the quality of every application. We can look retrospectively and see how the students that we are admitted look like the students that are graduating from California high schools. And we certainly notice if there’s a great disparity there, and we work on closing those gaps by doing more outreach to high schools that haven’t been sending us students, more support- port programs, to students that make sure that they will apply to us, a number of financial aid programs that help students from low income backgrounds, a- a variety of things that are meant to open up the access to the university that we feel is good for us and good for society.

MARGARET BRENNAN: I’m interested in which part you think works the best. And also, you know, the last time you were with us back in 2020, the school system was ending standardized testing in admissions. You’ve now had that in place for a while. Does that work? Should other schools look at it?

DR. DRAKE: Yeah, what we found, I’d say two things about that. One, we eliminated the SAT in 2020. We did that just before the pandemic, but it happened to be implemented during the pandemic. So it’s a little difficult to know how much that’s affected things versus the pandemic. What we did see was an increase in applications from students who came from diverse backgrounds who were reluctant to apply in the past, even though we may have admitted them. So we’re pleased to see an increase in applications from those- from those people and it’s- and our classes are extraordinarily strong. Today, our students are doing quite well. So this has been quite a positive thing for us.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So you’re keeping it in place, it sounds like?

DR. DRAKE: Yes. 

MARGARET BRENNAN: All right. Dr. Drake, thank you for sharing your insights and your experience. We’ll be back in a moment.