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In my opinion it is valid evidence. "What took them so long?" In 2020, many major institutions suddenly became much more concerned about avoiding the appearance of discriminating against black people. This gave universities like Berkeley the motivation to try to admit more black students. The fact that they were able to do so in such a short time shows that they do have some ability to change admission decisions based on the race of applicants (either they were previously discriminating against black students or they started discriminating in favor of black students or both). If admissions were truly race-blind this would very likely have been impossible. Admittedly, university admissions in 2021 were also effected by covid (e.g. that was part of the justification for many universities to drop SAT requirements) and this makes the argument weaker than it would be otherwise. However, it seems obvious to me that 2rafa's point is evidence in favor of "covert AA" at schools like Berkeley and that "what took them so long" is not a convincing rebuttal.
It was not meant to be a rebuttal; the OP's conclusion might well be true. It certainly would not surprise me, esp given the low enrollment of African Americans freshmen at Berkeley the year before (see data discussed below). It was meant to be a commentary on OP's poor use of evidence, or really their laziness. As you and others have noted, there is much better evidence on both sides, and one would think that, having seen one very weak data point, OP would at least have wondered what the data looked like in the intervening years before posting with such confidence in his conclusion.
Re institutions being more concerned about the appearance of discriminating against black people, the timing is not right. Despite the OP's statement that the increase was in 2021, if you look at the article and the links, the increase was for Fall of 2020 (note the article's reference to admissions "this past fall", and see link below). Admissions decisions are announced in March, which was before the George Flloyd incident.
BTW I don't know why you claim that the outcome would be impossible if admissions were race-blind. First of all, the 40% is overstated, because overall numbers of admittees increased. The pct of total freshman admittees who are black went from 3.57 pct to 4.76 pct, an increase of 33%. Second, as I implied in my original post, admissions decisions at Berkeley are made at the college level, not the university level. So, while overall acceptance rate at Berkeley is 14%, at the College of Engineering it is 7%. Given Simpson's paradox (ironically first identified re Berkeley grad admissions), we need to see those numbers in order to make valid inferences; if more black students started applying to less selective colleges (eg Letters and Sciences), then the increase could easily be possible.
PS: Another possible explanation: Some of this might be PR; the acceptance rates include wait listed students and students offered Spring admission. The actual enrollment at Berkeley went from 178 students to 229 students out of 6000 total (and that 178 figure is an unusually low base, esp as a pct of total enrollees).
First, I don't think it's a poor use of evidence. Prop 209 is supposed to mean that public universities cannot decide admissions based on race. The fact that when the school has an incentive to suddenly admit more people of a certain race it is able to quickly do so shows that they likely do have the ability to at least let race have some influence on admission. The fact that this happened 25 years after Prop 209 passed doesn't matter much since the relevant change in incentives happened in 2020 and the change in admissions happened in 2021.
Second, I agree that it is a problem for 2rafa's argument if the change took place in 2020. Looking at the links you sent, it looks like there was a change in 2021, but you are also right that, especially for Berkeley in particular, there was a bigger change in 2020.
Third, saying "impossible" was too strong on my part and I apologize. Also it is reasonable to critique 2rafa for overstating the magnitude of the change. However, I don't buy your second argument here. If you want to explain a change in overall admission rate using the fact that different colleges have different admission rates, you have to explain why black people suddenly started applying to the various colleges at different rates than they had previously. Of course there are many possible explanations for a sudden change in admission rate but the one you propose does not seem plausible on the time scale of one year. A better counterargument, in my opinion, would be to cite changes in admissions policies (such as waiving SAT requirements) brought on by covid. Although this counterargument no longer works if the change happened in 2020 rather than 2021. Your argument about massaging public statistics by including waitlisted students is reasonable too, although again there is the question of why the university wouldn't have done this in previous years (more relevant if the change was in 2020 than in 2021).
EDIT: I should clarify that when I say "I don't think it's a poor use of evidence" I mean when 2rafa's claims are taken at face value. If 2rafa had the year of change or magnitude of change wrong then it may be poor evidence.
Yes, the increase in 2021 seems to be a function of the increase in applicants; admission of black applicants admitted actually declined in 2021: It was 850/6587 (13 pct) in 2021 versus 733/4454 (16 pct) in 2020.
Well, an obvious hypothesis would be that the university encouraged them to do so. See the links in OP's post, where university reps explicitly talk about efforts to increase enrollment. But, regardless, I want to emphasize that my point is not that no chicanery is happening, but rather that the data presented is insufficient to conclude one way or the other. I taught high school in Oakland for many years and had a lot of students apply to Berkeley, and the Asian-American students (who were a majority of the students, or a large plurality) overwhelming applied to the colleges of engineering, or chemistry, etc. I assume that is true statewide. Yet, the pct of Asian-American students admitted in 2021 (6113/36827) is greater than the pct of black students, as was the case in 2020. Whites were 16% in 2020 and 14% in 2021, which is the same or higher than black applicants. From the campus-level data alone, it is hard to make a claim of racial preferences, but data at the college level might imply that (since college of application is a [very] rough proxy for quality of student.
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