Study: Jeb's One Florida a failure

No surprise here, ten years after Florida banned affirmative-action admissions, minority enrollment in the State University System hasn't kept pace with the number of minorities graduating from high school, an Orlando Sentinel analysis found.

In 1999, a bit more than 20 percent of the state's high-school graduates were black, as were 17.5 percent of university freshmen. By 2008, the last year for which a racial breakdown is available, blacks accounted for 19.5 percent of high-school graduates — but only 14.9 percent of university freshmen.

Similarly, in 1999, Hispanics made up 14.7 percent of high-school graduates and 13.8 percent of university freshmen. By 2008, Hispanics were 21.4 percent of graduates and 19.1 percent of the freshmen class, a wider gap.

By contrast, white and Asian students were overrepresented among college freshmen in 1999 — and still were in 2008, according to the Sentinel's analysis.

"One Florida hasn't been anything but a smoke screen. It really hasn't produced anything," said state Sen. Tony Hill, D-Jacksonville, who has long railed against the plan pressed by then-Gov. Jeb Bush as a "race-neutral" replacement for affirmative action.

Frank Brogan, who was Bush's lieutenant governor in 2000 and later president of Florida Atlantic University before becoming chancellor of the State University System last summer, said One Florida has abolished "quotas" and "set-asides" and found race-neutral ways to open doors to more black and Hispanic students.

"There's no question that our numbers are up in terms of minority enrollment in the State University System," Brogan said.

But those increases mask the fact that minority enrollment has failed to keep pace with growth in the state's student population.

From 1999 to last fall, freshman university enrollment increased 25.4 percent, from 28,542 to 35,784.

Universities attribute the stagnation in part to the fact that over the past decade Florida A&M shrank. Freshman enrollment dropped from 2,313 to 2,119.

Still, that doesn't explain the marginal growth or even decline in the number of black freshmen at several other universities since 1999, notably Florida State University — down 92, to 478 in 2008 — and the University of South Florida.

The University of Central Florida saw steady growth of minority students during the decade, enrolling 616 black freshmen in 2008, a 67 percent increase. Hispanic enrollment jumped to 948, up 103 percent.

Patricia Marin, a higher-education-diversity researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said the numbers show that One Florida has done little to improve access for minorities.

To date, Florida has been the only state to abolish affirmative action without a statewide ballot initiative or court order.

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