Posted on July 20, 2018

Lib Racists Salivate over ‘Brown-Skinned’ UC Merced, Ignore 37% Graduation Rate

Ed Straker, American Thinker, July 20, 2018

Liberals love skin color, as long as it is not white. That’s why the New York Times had a glowing article about the University of California at Merced, which is majority-Hispanic.

As he walks to class at the University of California, Merced, Freddie Virgen sees a sea of faces in various shades of brown.

This was the very first sentence of the article. The NYT was giddy about a place in America full of brown-skinned people. As I say, those liberal racists love those non-white skin colors!

He is as likely to hear banda corridos blaring out of his classmates’ earphones as hip-hop. With affectionate embraces, he greets fellow members of Hermanos Unidos, a peer support group for Latinos[.] … During student orientation each summer at Merced, parent workshops are offered in Spanish. Each year, there are large celebrations and altars for Día de los Muertos and performances from the campus ballet folkorico.

Though he rarely spoke Spanish with his friends in Los Angeles, growing up in Koreatown and attending high school in Silver Lake, Jason De Leon, 20, finds himself using it far more often at Merced, where he is majoring in cognitive science.

So we have a college, in America, that has basically adopted the failed culture of Central America. Why is this a cause for celebration? And what kind of mindset will this ethnic Balkanization create?

Mr. Virgen, a psychology major, … [worries] that entering graduate school or the professional world, where he may encounter far fewer Latinos, may be jarring. “That’s one of my fears. Latinos aren’t very well represented in the professional work force now compared to whites. So will I be in for a culture shock then?”

The attitude of students quoted in the article is that they want to live in a bubble of Hispanic culture. Why, then, are they in America?

Another question: how good of a school is it?

The college does not attract the state’s top-scoring applicants when it comes to test scores and grade-point averages. Eligible students from California who are rejected from other University of California campuses are often funneled to Merced, which offers them a spot even if they have not applied. But more than 90 percent of those students rejected the offer, according to a 2016 state audit. The campus draws students from all over California, but almost none from other states or countries.

The article claims that 45% of students graduate in four years, curiously using dated figures from 2009. No wonder. More current figures put that percentage at 37%. That’s because California automatically offers college admission to anyone who scores in the top 9% of his high school class, even if he comes from a high school where everyone performs poorly.

The article never debates whether U.C. Merced, created in 2005, should even exist, given that the majority of students fail to graduate in four years. Consider that graduating from U.C. Merced is far, far easier than graduating from Stanford or even U.C. Berkeley. With majors like ethnic studies and women’s studies, students can virtually coast through as long as they can write variants on “the whites oppress me” or “the men oppress me” for four years. If nearly two thirds of them can’t even do that, it raises the question of whether too many people are being admitted to college.

But that’s not a question that liberals will entertain, as they desperately need college as a liberal indoctrination machine for their newest crop of voters. In the meantime, let me know when the Times reports with the same tone of adoration about a college with “a sea of faces in various shades of white” where everyone speaks English.