The Daily Bruin reports that:
UCLA Undergraduate Admissions could be violating Proposition 209, a California law that prohibits state institutions from taking race into account during the admissions or hiring process, according to a report by a UCLA law professor.
Richard Sander, who studies affirmative action policy, wrote a report that suggests race may factor into the admission of students who are on the line between acceptance and rejection. ...
Currently, admissions at UCLA is based on a “holistic” process, which was adopted in 2006. The process takes into account 14 different categories of attributes for every student, including non-academic categories like whether an applicant’s parents went to college, family income and whether they had “difficult personal or family situations.” ...
“What seems to be happening is that there is discrimination after the holistic scores are generated,” Sander said. “(Admissions officials) seem to be making discriminatory decisions with lots of black and Hispanic students with poor holistic scores being admitted.”
It wouldn't surprise me if holistic admissions is being used to evade Prop 209. As I wrote in The Holes in Holistic Admissions:
UC Berkeley's experience with its similar system of comprehensive review suggests that holistic admissions in fact will affect the racial composition of the student body:
Although race is not overtly mentioned as a factor in the comprehensive-review admissions process, the numbers indicate that it plays a significant role. A Los Angeles Times analysis shows that at UC Berkeley, low-scoring blacks and Hispanics were admitted at twice the rate of similarly scoring Asians and whites.
A cynic thus might wonder whether the readers charged with holistically evaluating admission files share UM President Coleman's refusal to "stand by while the very heart and soul of this great university is threatened," and are taking into account the race of candidates despite Proposition 209's ban. Indeed, when Berkeley adopted comprehensive review, student activist Hoku Jeffrey noted that it gave "admissions officials the ability on paper to reverse the segregation ... and that's what must be done."
The trouble with holistic admissions is that the readers don't have to explain why they make their admission decisions. They simply score the files. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the readers thus could systematically bias their scores so as to promote diversity, and no one would be the wiser. Even if required to offer an explanation for their scores, moreover, readers likely would point to some wrinkle other than race in each application that purportedly justified their decision.
 Lance T. Izumi, Berkeley's "F": Unfair admissions game, Nat'l Rev. Online (Nov. 24, 2003), available at http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/izumi200311240932.asp