Blacks Are Still Suffering From Jeb Bush’s One Florida Plan

In 2000, Jeb Bush, then the governor of Florida, proposed the One Florida plan in which state-operated universities and graduate schools would no longer be permitted to use race as a factor in admissions decisions. He implemented the One Florida plan by executive order and it remains in effect today.

Initially, there was a huge drop-off in black first-year students at the flagship campus of the University of Florida in Gainesville after the One Florida plan went into effect. Those numbers have recovered somewhat. Today, blacks make up 8.8 percent of the total undergraduate student population, about one-half the level of blacks in the college-age population in Florida.

But it is at the graduate level where the One Florida plan continues to have a major harmful impact on African Americans. At the University of Florida law school, black enrollments have dropped from 106 in 1999 to 65 in 2009. The percentage of blacks in the law school dropped from 9.4 percent to 5.3 percent.

But the most dramatic statistics occur at the University of Florida’s College of Medicine. This year, there are only two blacks among the 128 first-year students at the medical school.