Alex Saragoza

Ever since the University of California ended affirmative action in 1998, it has struggled to maintain a racially diverse student body. In place of racial preferences, the university has sought to help poor and minority students become better academically prepared in order to compete for seats at one of UC’s nine campuses. Showered by millions of dollars from the Legislature, the university has plunged into public schools like never before. Yet, the expanding array of outreach programs--to improve teaching, enrich curriculum, tutor students and get them on the college track--have, so far, shown no significant results.

The numbers of black, Latino and American Indian students remain depressed at UC Berkeley and UCLA, the two most competitive campuses. Across all campuses, these underrepresented minorities have increased slightly, but nothing close to the university’s goal of doubling their numbers by 2002.

So when UC’s central office began searching for a new leader of its outreach program, “It was the talk of the town,” recalls Alex M. Saragoza, a Berkeley ethnic-studies professor. “We all realized the huge stakes.”

Saragoza didn’t want the job, however. This son of San Joaquin Valley farm workers who went on to earn a PhD in history was already doing his part: mentoring some students, recruiting others and regularly giving inspirational talks at high schools. He also served on a faculty committee overseeing Berkeley admissions.

It wasn’t until the search committee came up empty-handed that Saragoza applied at the urging of an old friend on the committee. “I never thought I’d be a finalist, but I wanted to show them there are a lot of us who care about this important work.” He got the job as UC’s vice president for educational outreach.

Saragoza’s new post at UC’s plush headquarters in Oakland is a long way from the one-room house without indoor plumbing in Madera, Calif., where he grew up speaking only Spanish. Saragoza bootstrapped his way through Cal State Fresno and earned a master’s in education at Harvard and his doctorate at UC San Diego in Latin American history. He wants nothing more than to blaze new paths so thousands more poor, minority students can also make it to college.

Saragoza, 53, lives in Martinez, Calif., with Juanita, his high school sweetheart and wife of 30 years, and their 10-year-old daughter, Alejandra. He spoke passionately about the far-reaching changes he hopes to direct from his 12th-floor office overlooking downtown Oakland.

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Question: Why did you end up taking the outreach job?

Answer: It’s horribly unfair to create a situation where kids like me are more likely to fail than succeed. The system didn’t make it easy for me. I’m here mainly because of a constellation of lucky incidents in my life. Education should not be a matter of luck. So I’m giving myself two or three years to see if I can make a difference.

Q: To make a difference, does the university need to figure out how to save the public schools or save a few kids from the schools?

A: Our impact on the schools is relatively small. We are actually involved in 7% or 8% of schools in California. So we are not going to save the schools. I see the task as accelerating the promotion of a college-going culture. Often, it’s creating a college-going culture for the first time.

Q: What do you mean?

A: Let me give you an example. We found a school near UC Santa Cruz where 70% of the sophomores are not on track to become eligible for UC admission. We have to work with these kids to at least get them on track to go to community college, so we can monitor them and get them to transfer later to UC.

Kenneth R. Weiss covers higher education for The Times.

Q: You talk about community colleges. But the UC regents and others have focused almost exclusively on increasing minorities as UC freshmen.

A: The criteria for our success is based on getting kids to go to college. If that’s UC, then great. If it’s a [Cal State University] campus, we’ll try to pick them up when they are ready for graduate school. I have no problem if someone ends up going to Cal State. If it’s the community college, we’ll try to get them to transfer.

Q: So you plan to focus on community colleges as a way to get more underrepresented minorities to UC?

A: The community colleges are in many ways better poised to get them into the college-going track than we are. We also need to focus more on the rural areas of California, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley. . . . About 30 community colleges produce about two-thirds of the UC transfer students. If you look at which community colleges send us students, they are not in the San Joaquin Valley. We have to reach out to those poor rural areas.

Q: Under your predecessor, Karl Pister, much of the focus was on schools in Los Angeles County, which produces nearly half of the black and Latino high school graduates in California. Are you thinking of pulling back from that effort?

A: No. It’s not an issue of withdrawing resources, but balancing them with other areas. [My] Rural Schools Initiative [intends] to allocate new resources to rural areas. The San Joaquin Valley will be the pilot for this program. Rural areas face special problems. UC recruiters in Fresno have to drive two hours to a high school, and rural schools have relatively few resources and often have a high proportion of poor students.

Q: Are there other areas that deserve special attention?

A: I’m particularly concerned with the suburbanization of poverty. What we have is the flight of middle-income folks to edge communities, people who travel from the Bay Area to Tracy or Modesto to find affordable housing. In Southern California, people are commuting from Santa Clarita to L.A. This has happened so quickly that agrarian communities are surrounded by this moat of suburbanites. So you have the shiny new elementary school in the suburban area, and the other school remains what it was before: decrepit and dilapidated. What you have is a greater isolation of poor kids, and they have become even more marginalized.

Q: How do you decide how broadly or narrowly to focus your efforts, given that you only have so much money? You don’t want to abandon students in some areas, but if you spread yourself too thin, will you be able to help anyone?

A: That’s one of my challenges. We need new resources, and we have to have the cooperation of the people involved. The University of California cannot do it alone. We need the help of our partners, the K-12 schools, the CSUs and the community colleges.

Q: Hasn’t there been some tension among these other segments?

A: These partners have long resented the way UC has handled some of its outreach programs. The notion that we come in and tell a school: If you follow this recipe, we will turn your school around. We need to improve our connection and not take the attitude that we are know-it-alls. We have to work better with the public schools, the CSUs and the community colleges.

Q: Are there other things you have picked up that need special examination?

A: I want to look at the disparity between the number of females and males on track for college. It’s one of those things that people don’t want to talk about. But we need to find out what’s going on there. Maybe it’s a teenage-boy thing. Does it have anything to do with the embedded sexism in the K-12 system, where the overwhelming number of teachers are females? Is it a role-model thing? The gap is already there among African Americans going to college. It seems to be widening. It’s happening to Latinos. We need to look at it.

Q: Some legislative aides think that UC is setting itself up for failure by claiming it’s spending $250 million a year on outreach--as a way to impress folks that it’s doing something. That figure, in their view, is creative accounting, because it includes matching funds from K-12 schools and money passed through to programs run exclusively by community colleges. Do you see that inflated figure as a setup, especially when the Legislature wants to know what it’s getting for its money?

A: I know the perception is that we have this huge pot of money. Of course, that’s not the case. It involves all those other actors. I’m less concerned about the money than about results, whether it be in improving teaching, getting more of our kids into UC or increasing our number of community-college transfers. If I can show we are successful with hard data, then the money issue becomes less important.

Q: The UC Outreach Task Force in 1997 gave the university five years to double the number of underrepresented minorities who meet minimum eligibility requirements and increase by 50% those who are competitively eligible to compete for seats at places like UCLA and UC Berkeley. Are these realistic goals?

A: I think there was a lot of wishful thinking in developing those goals. I don’t think people realized how bad our relationship was with community colleges. I don’t think people understood the difficulty of the task or were talking to the people who do the work. What does graduating from high school mean in terms of getting into UC? A lot of these kids who graduate from these schools are horribly underprepared. It would be like it was when I got to Berkeley in 1979. We had a revolving door. We were bringing the kids in. “Hey, man, look, we’ve got 200 more Chicano students here.” But who was there two years later? Literally half of them were gone. That’s why we expanded the Learning Center at Berkeley to address the problem of underpreparation. We need to do the same thing in our academic outreach programs.

Q: You are talking as if you prefer the outreach program to affirmative action.

A: Would I prefer it? Well, no. In the best of circumstances, you would have both things working together. If we had affirmative action, with the kinds of resources we are putting into the effort to get students on track for college, it would be an incredible success.

Q: But without affirmative action, are the goals of doubling the number of underrepresented minorities realistic?

A: Whether or not the goals are realistic, I’ll have a better way of answering that after [today’s] meeting of admissions directors. I will plead my case for a variety of changes at that meeting.

Q: What kind of changes?

A: We need to give credit to students who have been successfully involved in our Early Academic Outreach Program. If we are going to give AP courses one [extra grade] point, I would argue that EAOP activities count for at least half a point. If we don’t, then why in the heck are we spending all this money? What is the payoff for a student who is going to a school with very few AP courses?

Q: How long do you think you’ll have a honeymoon in this job?

A: I have, at best, a one-year window, and it terrifies me. This is not a new effort. I think the Legislature and the governor’s office are going to want results.