One afternoon in May 1968, members of the University of Washington's newly formed Black Student Union (BSU) marched into the office of their school's president and demanded, among other things, that the UW admit more minority students.

President Charles Odegaard and faculty leaders pledged to address the concerns. But they had a problem: No one knew for sure how many minority students were on campus. University officials simply estimated by looking out an administration-building window during lunch hour and counting students who looked nonwhite.

Of about 30,000 students at the university at that time, the BSU roughly guessed that there were 200 Afro Americans, 20 American Indians and about 10 Mexican Americans, as the groups were identified. Asian Americans were not mentioned.

Odegaard already had created a committee to find ways "to arouse the interest of Negro students in the university" and to find money for their financial aid. But - as at colleges and universities across America that year - the protesting students provided the catalyst.

That summer, affirmative action at the University of Washington was born.

UW officials and BSU members fanned out across the state - some even walked the farm fields - to persuade any minority student who had a high-school diploma and seemed to have a chance of succeeding to come to the university. They created the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) to handle admissions for students of color, as well as any students who were educationally and economically disadvantaged, and who couldn't compete based on high grades and test scores alone.

In the three decades since, thousands of minority students have entered the university through that special EOP door. Not everything has been perfect or an unqualified success. In fact, many of the minority students admitted in those early years didn't graduate. But thanks to their own hard work and special support programs, a hefty percentage did.

By 1997, the UW's Seattle campus was 68 percent Caucasian, 27 percent minority and 5 percent international students.

Most people would likely agree that helping to increase the number of college-educated minorities is a good thing for those individuals and society. But there's one strategy that's been used around the nation that many people don't like: awarding some college applicants an advantage for their race, effectively displacing others who have equal or better grades and test scores.

If proponents of Initiative 200 have their way, race will never again be a factor in college admissions in this state after this year. I-200, on the ballot Nov. 3, will ban preferences based on race, ethnicity and gender in state and local government employment, contracting and education, ending affirmative action as now practiced.

The potential impact of I-200 on higher education is one of the central issues in the campaign. To understand what the measure would mean, The Seattle Times examined the policies and programs of the state's six four-year colleges and universities to see how often preferences based on race and gender are used, what those efforts have rendered and what's likely to happen to such efforts if I-200 passes.

The findings are likely to bolster, infuriate and even surprise people on both sides of the issue.

But few would disagree that the debate potentially is critical for this state, where demand for undergraduate slots is projected to increase dramatically due to the children of baby boomers and the growth rate of the minority population, which is expected to be much higher than non-minorities. Across the nation, race-based admissions policies are used most by selective institutions - schools, for the most part, that have more applicants than they have room. The pool of minority applicants is growing, but still small. And except for Asian Americans, their academic qualifications and graduation rates typically lag behind whites.

However, higher education's push for diversity in the student body is not the same as federally mandated affirmative action for contracting and hiring. It's voluntary. The only schools under court order to admit a certain number of minorities to remedy past discrimination are in the South.

For decades in Washington state, it was left up to the schools as to how hard they pushed. And before the late '60s, they didn't push very hard.

Athough Charles Odegaard passionately agreed there were too few blacks at the UW in 1968, he denied there was a systematic and deliberate attempt to exclude them.

The UW president might have been right, says King County Councilman Larry Gossett, one of the students who stormed Odegaard's office. But, Gossett contends, "custom and the way life occurred on a large university campus meant, by definition, that there could be no African Americans. Nothing was done to recruit or to set up the social, cultural, academic and financial structures necessary to keep us there."

The UW's Educational Opportunity Program aimed to help change that.

During this same time, other colleges in the state committed to policies of nondiscrimination. Central Washington University, for example, aggressively recruited minority students. Western Washington University even formed a College of Ethnic Studies.

But none was more aggressive than the UW.

In 1974, as applicant demand increased, the UW toughened its general entrance standards, including moving from a 2.0 to a 2.5 grade-point-average requirement. But the standards for minority students remained lower and many were admitted separately by EOP.

That same year, Marco DeFunis filed a landmark "reverse discrimination" lawsuit against the UW Law School. A white male, DeFunis charged he had been denied admission while less academically qualified minorities were accepted.

A Superior Court judge ruled DeFunis should be admitted. The UW complied, but also appealed to the Washington Supreme Court. The court sided with the university. DeFunis appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but stayed in school. The high court delayed hearing arguments in the case, then ruled it moot because DeFunis was too close to graduation from the UW.

In 1978, Allan Bakke, another rejected white applicant, made history, suing the University of California system for turning him down for medical school while admitting minorities with lesser academic qualifications. The Supreme Court ruled that strict quotas were illegal, but that race could be one of many factors considered in college admission. Bakke was allowed to enroll.

That decision became a founding doctrine for admissions policies at colleges nationwide.

In 1987, Washington state's Higher Education Coordinating Board, which had general oversight but no real authority over the state's colleges, called on the schools "to provide leadership for the rest of society" by making sure minorities participated fully in higher education.

The board, for the first time, set minimum admission criteria for the colleges. Subsequently, the board allowed each school, in special cases, to admit up to 15 percent of its freshman classes below that minimum. This was as close as the board got to advocating admitting students based on race.

That prompted some schools to take a serious look at whom they wanted to admit - and how. Western beefed up recruiting at high schools with large minority populations. The Evergreen State College created a plan - used little so far - to give points for race, nontraditional age, veteran status and first generation in a family to attend college.

The UW decided it needed to do even more. Although the school had had some success recruiting minority students, it could not graduate them in significant numbers. (As an example, while the UW's six-year graduation rate was 58 percent for all students who entered in 1981, only 18 percent of African Americans completed school in that time, 22 percent of Native Americans and 30 percent of Hispanics.)

"Gradually, the institution became aware of its responsibility. . . . It wasn't enough to admit people," said Myron Apilado, vice president for Minority Affairs.

Today, all six schools have an arsenal of special programs aimed at attracting minorities, making them feel comfortable in college and helping them to succeed. Together, those programs cost millions of dollars to run. ADMISSIONS POLICIES

The UW and Western are the only Washington schools that consider race in undergraduate admissions, and then only with applicants who meet minimum qualifications but can't automatically get in on grades and test scores.

In diversifying their campuses, the schools face a small pool of minority candidates who, on average, are not as academically competitive as whites and Asian Americans. The challenge is magnified when space is limited and demand for that space is high, true especially at the UW.

At Evergreen, Central, Eastern Washington University and Washington State University, there's plenty of room, so almost every applicant who meets minimum qualifications gets in. Not so at Western and the UW.

The UW awards points to borderline students for various academic and personal factors, including 31 points to "underrepresented" minorities - those groups whose percentages in the student body fall short of their share of graduating high-school seniors. The UW considers underrepresented minorities to be African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. Most Asian Americans, except Filipinos and Pacific Islanders, are no longer eligible for special consideration because they've attained such large numbers on campus.

Western considers similar factors, but without awarding points. The school uses the standard federal categories to define minority: African American, Hispanic, Native American and Asian American.

Overall, the number of minority applicants for whom race is the deciding factor in undergraduate admissions in the state is small.

Washington's colleges and universties made about 27,700 offers to high-school seniors who applied for admission this fall. Of those, the UW and Western accounted for 14,000. Race made the difference in roughly 440 cases, primarily at the UW.

Specifically, officials at Western say race was the significant factor in 75 of the 5,343 offers made to high-school seniors this year. About 40 of those minorities eventually enrolled - African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asian Americans. If race was not a factor, many of those offers would have gone to Caucasians.

Of the 8,786 offers made by the UW, 733 were made to African Americans, Native Americans and Hispanics. About 1,785 went to Asian Americans. Eighty-five percent of all those minority students qualified for admission without consideration of their race, based on academics and other factors. Without Asian Americans in the mix, 71 percent of African-American, Native-American and Hispanic students received offers without consideration of race.

But race was the deciding factor in offers to 366 residents and nonresidents.

If extra credit for race were taken away, these young men and women would have been denied admission. In their place would be different young men and women, primarily Caucasians and Asian Americans.

Of the 4,219 students who enrolled this fall, 1,426 are students of color: 1,053 Asian Americans, 124 African Americans, 196 Hispanics and 53 Native Americans. Race was a factor for 154 of those students who would not have been able to enroll if they hadn't received a boost for their minority status. If that had happened, the numbers of Asian Americans who enrolled would have dropped by 6.3 percent, African Americans by 27.4 percent, Hispanics by 21.4 percent and Native Americans by 22.6 percent.

It's impossible to pin down the cumulative effect of these policies at the UW. But UW officials estimate they've made about 120,000 offers to entering high-school seniors of all races over the past 15 years. About 8,100 of those offers were made through the EOP program, 95 percent of them based on race.

Gender never has been considered in undergraduate admissions in Washington. Indeed, women outnumbered males last year at every state school except WSU, and entered with overall higher academic qualifications. Gender can be a factor at the UW in a few programs - women, for example, entering the college of engineering.

GAPS IN GRADES AND TEST SCORES

At every state college and university, there are disparities among the races in the grade-point averages and SAT scores of high-school students who were offered admission for fall 1997.

Most often, the scores of African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans admitted were somewhat below the averages of whites and Asian Americans - less than 100 points on the SAT (1,600 points are possible) and less than 0.2 in grade-point average, on a 4-point scale.

The largest gaps were typically between blacks and whites.

It's difficult to draw conclusions about the disparities, says Kris Zavoli, director of admissions and guidance services for the Western Region of the College Board. That's because the numbers of minorities and whites are vastly different and characteristics - like which courses they took in high school - are unknown, she explains.

But it's fair to say that the national gap of about 90 points on SATs between large groups of whites and blacks is considered significant. It's also fair to say that differences in scores for races are one reason "why affirmative-action issues have really raged most strongly on the most selective campuses where they're trying to make very fine distinctions as they select the class," she says.

But, among the UW's top applicants who were admitted on grades and test scores alone, racial disparities fell away.

For example, the 76 African Americans admitted on the basis of grades and test scores alone had a 1,193 mean SAT score - higher than the average combined SAT scores of Asian Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans in this group and only 18 points behind whites.

But the data also show that if the UW wants to admit more than token numbers of minorities - especially African Americans - then more than grades and test scores need to be considered in the admissions decision, especially at the graduate and professional level.

GRADUATE AND PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS

Two of the most competitive schools in the state are the University of Washington's schools of Law and Medicine, the kinds of programs that have received the heaviest attention in the national affirmative-action debate.

Over the past decade, the UW's law and medical schools have worked hard at their stated goal to produce more minority lawyers and doctors. The challenge, however, is a tough one because competition nationally for top minorities is fierce and the pool is small.

Both schools already give credit for many factors beyond academics in admission. But if only grades and test scores could be considered in admission, no more than a handful of minorities would receive offers from either school. The Law School class - which now is 30 percent minority, including Asian Americans - "would be almost exclusively white," says Richard Kummert, chairman of the admissions committee.

Kummert says there are perhaps 50 African-American applicants in the nation with grades and test scores comparable to the averages for whites entering the UW.

Last year, the Law School's entering class was 69 percent white and the medical school's was 75 percent white. Ten years ago, the entering classes at both the UW Law School and School of Medicine were close to 90 percent white.

Should I-200 pass, both schools say they're determined to preserve diversity. UW medical-school officials expect to maintain admission policies they've had for the past 20 years that don't directly consider race but have the effect of creating diversity in the student body by looking at other factors.

Law School administrators are pessimistic but say they'll try to broaden their criteria for eligibility beyond what they already consider, which includes disadvantage, life experiences and cultural heritage.

ENROLLMENT

As Washington's minority population has burgeoned - from 5 percent in 1970 to 12 percent today - so has the percentage of minorities in state colleges' student bodies.

Minority students' share of the state college population has grown from 8 percent in 1976 to 18 percent last year. But, that's primarily attributable to Asian Americans, whose gains are huge. Hispanics have grown at a more moderate rate, Native Americans only slightly and African Americans' share remains about the same..

At the UW, black enrollment is actually down from 20 years ago.

Why? For a lot of reasons, says Myron Apilado, UW vice president for Minority Affairs.

The best African-American students accept offers from other schools, both historically black institutions and prestigious schools like Stanford.

Additionally, the UW's admissions standards are higher now than in years past.

And, says Apilado, "it's just not a level playing field." Blacks (for whom, many argue, affirmative-action programs were created in the first place) "have not been allowed to participate as fully as other Americans."

Interestingly, though, the most significant overall drop at the UW has been experienced by whites, both in overall numbers and in percentage share of the campus population. In 1976, whites were 90 percent of Washington's K-12 population and 87 percent of the UW student population. In 1997, whites were 77 percent of the K-12 population and only 68 percent of the UW student body.

Why the decline in the numbers of whites at the UW? Whites are experiencing more competition from Asian Americans at the college level, and more may be choosing to go to private or out-of-state schools.

And some lost spots to minorities helped by extra credit for race.

GRADUATION RATES

On a statewide basis, most groups' six-year graduation rates in recent years have held steady or slowly improved. But the rates for African Americans, Native Americans and Hispanics still lag behind whites and Asian Americans. The graduation rates for Hispanics have steadily declined.

(The graduation rate is the percent of freshmen who start out together in a certain year and graduate in a certain amount of years. Six years is a measure commonly used.)

The statewide graduation rate for all students who entered college in 1991 was about 62 percent, a comparable figure to the entering classes in 1989 and 1990.

In 1991, the graduation rate for African Americans was 44 percent and Native Americans, 40 percent, both improvements from recent years of entering classes. The rate for Hispanics was down from 54 percent of those who entered in 1990 to 46 percent of those who entered in 1991. The rate for whites entering in 1991 was 63 percent, and for Asian/Pacific Islanders, 66 percent.

The UW's graduation rates for blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics have improved nearly every year, though they still lag behind those for whites and Asian Americans.

Once at the UW, underrepresented minorities also lag behind whites and Asian Americans in academic achievement, according to a report for fall quarter 1997. The report shows undergraduate African Americans, as a group, have the lowest cumulative GPAs, 2.67, compared with whites, who have the highest at 3.14.

DIVERSITY EFFORTS CONTINUE

So-called selective schools count race in admissions for several reasons: self-interest and social responsibility, the richness they say racial diversity brings to education, a mission to educate students of color who will take positions of leadership in the community.

At the UW, most people say the work is not done, though efforts to diversify the campus have made a difference.

Ernest Morris, vice president for Student Affairs, points to the large number of minority young people who've graduated over the years and the rich mix of races on campus.

"I just think we've had a tremendous impact on the life of this region, this state. I'd even go so far as to say this nation."

What about the decline for African Americans?

Morris says he "shudders to think" what their numbers would look like absent affirmative-action efforts.

As for the efforts to increase diversity statewide, Cedric Page at the Higher Education Coordinating Board sums it up as "moderately successful" with "pockets of change."

The rate of enrollment "for students of color both at community colleges and public four-year schools has kept pace with the rate of population increase for people of color," he says.

Meanwhile, giving certain racial groups a leg up in admission is being challenged on a state-by-state basis. In the past three years, popular votes or court decisions have stopped public colleges from making race-based admissions decisions in California and Texas. Additionally, lawsuits alleging minorities were admitted over more-qualified whites have been leveled at the University of Washington Law School and the University of Michigan's undergraduate process.

The suit against the UW is expected to go to trial early next year.

The debate over academic disparities and schools' attempts to compensate has been hashed out in recent weeks in two opposing research studies focused on blacks and whites.

One is published in a newly released book titled "The Shape of the River" by former presidents of Harvard and Princeton, Derek Bok and William G. Bowen. Their study examines the college records and post-graduation experiences of 45,000 students of all races who attended 28 of the nation's elite schools.

The two supporters of race-sensitive admission say that minorities' six-year graduation rates from these schools are a whopping 75 percent, far higher than the national 40 percent rate of minorities who attend more average schools.

The study also tracks the post-graduation experiences of these minorities and finds they go on in greater numbers than their white classmates to graduate and professional schools. Ultimately, they win high-paying jobs and participate more than whites in civic leadership.

In the other study, the anti-preference Center for Equal Opportunity focuses on black and white applicants to the UW and WSU.

It asserts that the greater the degree of difference in grades and test scores among races, the greater the degree of preference based on race in admission. It also asserts that the bigger the gap in academic qualifications, the bigger the gap in graduation rates.

The Washington report is the latest in a half-dozen the center has produced on schools nationwide.

The fight over using race in admissions is as much over differing philosophies as what statistics do or don't reveal.

Administrators and admissions officials at each of Washington's six state four-year schools practically line up to insist it's not time to give up on race-based admission. It serves the greater good of society, they say.

"The world is getting more diverse. We have always benefited politically and economically from the fullest participation of everybody," says Evergreen President Jane Jervis. "Anything we do that narrows that breadth of participation is bad for us and we'll pay or our children will pay. And that's even worse."

Critics say it may actually harm minorities psychologically.

"Over the years, preferential treatment has helped some, but also hurt some," says John Carlson, chairman of the I-200 campaign. "And it's hurting more with each passing year for a number of reasons.

"First, more deserving applicants are being kept out of school by less deserving applicants. Of the less-deserving applicants who get in, some make it but they feel stigmatized. . . . Are they here because they deserve to be or are they here because the bar was lowered so they can slip in?"