Angela Li and Vivrd Prasanna have achieved the pinnacle of a public university education — she a senior at UCLA, he a freshman at UC Berkeley. Both are children of immigrants, with Li’s parents from China and Prasanna’s from India.
They share values of hard work and high expectations. Li checked out school textbooks during the summer to get a head start on fall classes and in high school took test prep courses with money her working-class parents saved by giving up family vacations. Prasanna took college classes in data science as a high school student.
But when it comes to Proposition 16, the Tuesday ballot measure that would once again allow affirmative action in public education, contracting and hiring, the two UC students and their families sharply diverge.
Li supports the measure as a way to expand diversity in education — but her parents oppose it, suspicious that it will limit the enrollment of Asian Americans. Prasanna opposes it as the wrong way to deal with root causes of educational inequity, while his parents are torn over their twin desires to stand for civil rights and to ensure equal opportunity for their community.
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