“This is not just a moral obligation; it is our economic imperative,” he said. “Everyone has a responsibility. Everyone can step up. Education is our national mission. Education is our best hope.”

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That was a theme of discussion during the American Association for Affirmative Action (AAAA) annual meeting in Raleigh, N.C., on Wednesday. The main question: how can organizations maintain diversity when the bottom line forces downsizing?

“You have to pay attention to what’s happening and what decisions are made because downsizing is an opportunity for inequity,” said Dr. Benjamin D. Reese, Jr., vice president of the Office for Institutional Equity at both Duke University and Duke University Health System. “It’s difficult to develop a strategy around diversity. We all want to create an inclusive environment, but in practice, it’s very, very challenging.”

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UC San Diego stepped up efforts to recruit black students after an off-campus “Compton Cookout” party mocking African Americans made national headlines and led to protests.

The university says there will be 68 black freshman this fall, up from 50 last year.

Of the incoming class of 4,206, Asian Americans make up 48 percent. White students are 20 percent of the class and 16 percent are Hispanic.

Other UC campuses plan to release their enrollment figures next month.

Despite recent efforts by about 100 selective colleges to provide more need-based aid and improve graduation rates of recipients, low-income and minority students are increasingly concentrated in the least selective schools, the report says.

“It doesn’t do any good to offer a generous financial aid package to low-income students if you don’t also admit them,” says Richard Kahlenberg, a longtime advocate of class-based preferences in admissions, and editor of Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College, published today by the Century Foundation.

A 2003 Supreme Court ruling allows colleges to consider race in admissions, but the SAT research finds that socioeconomic factors, such as parents’ education and income, contribute significantly to differences in student scores.

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“If we just do a snapshot of minority performance today and project that 20 years out, we’re going to have a poorly skilled workforce,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

Census Bureau data released yesterday show whites of European ancestry will soon bear less than half the nation’s new babies. Blacks, Asians, American Indians, Hispanics and other traditional minority groups had 2.07 million children in the 12 months ended July 1, or 48.6 percent of all births, an increase from 45 percent in 2005, the Census Bureau said.

For the period ending July 1, non-Hispanic whites had 2.19 million children, or 51.4 percent of all births compared with 55 percent four years earlier, Census figures showed.

While the educational performance of blacks and Hispanics has improved in recent decades, they continue on average to score about four grade levels below whites in the 12th grade, said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation in Washington.

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His parents wanted him out of their battle-scarred south-central Los Angeles neighborhood and in college. But his mother also didn’t want him to stray too far from their home.

Three years and some bumps later, with graduation within reach, Roberto’s father suffered a heart attack and was diagnosed with diabetes — the kind of family crisis capable of derailing any college career.

But instead of becoming a dropout statistic, Rodriguez will graduate with honors this month from UC-Riverside, where graduation rate gaps that separate Hispanic students from their peers on a national level simply do not exist.

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The study specifically focuses on 2 California universities — Stanford University and UCSF — as examples of institutions that have effectively increased the number of underrepresented groups in their medical schools.

Both institutions were early adopters of effective methods to enroll, sustain, and graduate medical students from underrepresented ethnic and racial groups in the United States, including blacks, Latinos, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders.

“These institutions offer a roadmap for continued increases in diversity of medical school populations,” said coauthor Patricia E. Franks, senior research associate at the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, in a UCSF news release.

The study, titled “Diversity in US Medical Schools: Revitalizing Efforts to Increase Diversity in a Changing Context, 1960s-2000s,” was released in March.

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In a handful of media interviews, most recently on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” Wednesday evening, Paul would not commit to a firm yes-or-no answer when asked when he would have voted for the landmark legislation.

Paul has contended that while the legislation was correct in ending racial discrimination, he’s turned the question into a philosophical one over whether or not the federal government should be able to intrude on how a private business conducts itself. That may work well in the classroom, but it’s a tricky position to take as a political candidate on national television.

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Even when black families earn a significantly higher income than whites, the study found, they accumulated much less wealth. That disparity can’t be attributed to personal saving habits either, since blacks and whites save at the same rate. White families earning more than $30,000 a year accumulated $74,000 in wealth between1984 and 2007, whereas black families earning more than $50,000 accumulated only $18,000 in wealth during that period.

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The governor, Jan Brewer (R), has signed into law a bill that was passed because the state superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, who happens to be running for attorney general, dislikes a Mexican American studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. The program allows students to learn in history and literature courses about how particular ethnic groups influenced history, the Associated Press reported.

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