UC Oceanview — Option 5: The Lottery

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The Equity Benchmark

What If We Used a Lottery?

No criterion. No algorithm. No committee discretion. No AP/IB count, no GPA floor, no geographic cap, no holistic review. Just a random number generator and a budget cut.

In expectation, random selection produces a removal pool that is demographically identical to the admit pool. Every group's share of those removed equals its share of total admits. Adverse impact: zero across every dimension.

This page compares all six options — including the 1a/1b contrast — on a single question: how much demographic pain does each criterion inflict relative to a process that inflicts none?

✓ Option 5: No adverse impact detected — all groups proportionally represented

Option 5 Results: Random Removal

Hypothetical data, not UC records · what is real here?
Reading the sign: a positive number is bad news. "Adverse impact" is the harm; the plus sign measures how much of it, not whether it is good. Each figure is a gap, in percentage points, between two shares — a group's share of the 2,800 removed, minus its share of the 8,000 admits. Positive means the group was over-removed: the criterion removed more of it than its share of the pool. Negative means under-removed: it removed less. Zero is this page: removals track the pool exactly. Under Option 1a, Hispanic admits run +14.8 pp and Asian admits −15.3 pp.

Column definitions: Admits N = total admits in this group. Removed N = expected number removed under random selection. Admit Pool % = group's share of all admits. Removed % = group's share of those removed. Adverse impact (pp) = Removed % minus Admit Pool %; positive = over-removed relative to the group's size in the pool; negative = under-removed.

GroupAdmits NRemoved NAdmit Pool %Removed %Adverse impact (pp)removal share − pool shareStatus±0.5 pp

Adverse Impact by Racialized Identity — Option 5

Adverse Impact by Gender — Option 5

All Six Options Compared

Each bar represents the adverse impact (in percentage points) of one removal criterion on one group. Bars above zero mark groups over-removed relative to their share of the admit pool; bars below zero mark groups under-removed. Option 5 (lottery) is the teal baseline at zero. All eight groups appear in these charts; the total-disparity measure below is built from the four largest. Hover any bar for its exact value.

By Racialized Identity — All Options

By Gender — All Options

Total Disparity: The Cost of Choosing

Total disparity = the sum of absolute adverse-impact values across the four largest groups in the admit pool — White admits, Asian admits, Hispanic or Latino admits, and Black or African American admits. Because the values are summed as absolute magnitudes, this measure has no sign: it runs from zero upward, and a higher number means the criterion distributes its harm less proportionally. Option 5 is the floor.

Total Disparity by Option (Sum of |Impact| Across the Four Largest Groups)

How this number is computed. Total disparity adds the absolute adverse impact of the four largest groups in the admit pool — White, Asian, Hispanic or Latino, and Black or African American admits — which together account for 7,370 of the 8,000 admits (92.1%). The four smaller groups shown in the charts above are excluded: Middle Eastern or North African (205 admits), Two or More Races (316), Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (64), and American Indian or Alaska Native (45). At those sizes a percentage-point value moves on a handful of students, so including them would let sampling noise drive the ranking. Their exclusion here is a measurement choice, not a judgment that harm to those admits matters less — read their impact directly in the tables and charts above. The four gaps are added before rounding and the total is rounded once, so summing the rounded values on screen can land 0.1 pp low: Option 2 reads 37.9 from the displayed figures and 38.0 computed unrounded.

What Each Option Leaves: The Class of 5,200

Hypothetical data, not UC records · what is real here?

Adverse impact measures who bears the cost of the removal. This table shows the result: each group's share of the 5,200 admits who remain. It is not a legal test, and it adds no new information — a group's change in class share equals −0.54 times its adverse impact (2,800 ÷ 5,200). It shows the same choice from the side of the class a campus would actually enroll. The small figure under each share is the change from the admit pool, in percentage points; here the sign runs the other way, so an over-removed group shows a negative change.

Debrief & Reflection →
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