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In 2006, Corey Matthews was the first person in his family to go to college.
The application and selection process was so foreign to him that community programs that illuminated his options and helped him apply to several schools were a godsend. But when he had to decide where to actually enroll, Matthews merged what he had been taught with a criteria straight out of the movies.
“I grew up in L.A. so I associate UCLA with sports, which I didn’t really have an interest in, but I did have an interest in big parties,” says Matthews, now 34 and a vice president of global philanthropy with JP Morgan Chase. Today, he helps to manage a grant portfolio in Los Angeles consistent with the company’s goals, the kind of multifactor strategy work that makes him chuckle about his 17-year-old logic and sigh when he thinks about just how significant that decision and, in many ways, his freshman class became.
What Matthew found on campus was something far different than a series of ragers interrupted by classes and coursework. In 2006, 10 years after California voters first banned race consideration in college admissions with Proposition 209, just 96 Black freshmen were admitted to UCLA, one of the state’s two flagship public universities. After a few more students were admitted during the appeals process, Matthews ultimately became one of just 100 Black freshmen out of 4,852 total. But the initial news of 96 Black students – a figure unseen at one of California’s most prestigious public universities since the early 1970s – situated a respected institution in one of America’s most diverse cities and a state often understood as a caricature land controlled by progressive policy and people as the place to watch for those on both sides of the affirmative-action debate. California had become the first state in the nation to ban affirmative action in admissions, to lean into a…
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