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CALIFORNIANS SAY PROP. 2 WILL HAVE FAR REACHING EFFECTS If Michigan voters approved Proposal 2006-2, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, they will see effects going far beyond just university admissions and public contracting, three researchers from California said Tuesday. The state will see a shift in where students, particularly minority students, go to college; fewer minorities and women will go into various professions; and the state will face repeated lawsuits over any sort program or policy that opponents can say shows preference on the basis of race or gender. And voters have to give up their "naive optimism," that if the proposal passes public institutions will still be able to do outreach, said Bob Laird, a higher education admissions consultant, said. "It is ironclad," he said, and any attempts to somehow get around it will be met with legal challenges. But Jennifer Gratz, chair of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, said the officials "are outright lying." Outreach efforts on such things as women's health still continue in California, she said. The three - Mr. Laird, Monique Morris of the Berkeley, California-based Discrimination Research Center and Paul Turner of the Berkeley, Califonrnia-based Greenlining Institute - were on a statewide tour on behalf of One United Michigan, one of the organizations formed oppose the initiative, to discuss effects they had seen in the Golden State after passage of Proposition 209, which is similar in tone and effect to Proposal 2006-2. Proposal 2006-2 would change the constitution to bar the use of affirmative action on the basis of race and gender by public universities and other state and local governmental entities. Mr. Laird said the California proposal has had an enormous impact on the makeup of that state's top public universities, with the incoming classes of UCLA and Berkeley primary white and Asian-American. Out of 4,850 members of UCLA's 2006 freshman class, just 96 are black, he said. Black and Hispanic students are choosing instead to attend schools like UC-Riverside, so there is a general lack of diversity now on those campuses. In addition, more minority students are choosing to go to colleges in other states, making it more likely they will not return to the nation's most racially diverse state when they graduate, he said. Ms. Morris said studies she has conducted show that since the passage of the proposal in 1996 there are significantly fewer women in the construction trades, in part because labor and the construction industry feel limited in their ability to provide outreach to women. And, she said the percentage of state and local contracts going to minority-owned companies has dropped from $400 million in 1995 to $75 million in 2005. Mr. Turner said the effects of the proposal go beyond public contracting. Governments would be prohibited from even keeping lists of minority firms, which private companies use as part of their own affirmative action efforts. But Ms. Gratz said the opposition is trying to scare people "by creating doomsday scenarios." Outreach efforts will still be allowed so long as they are not based on race and gender, she said. And studies show that 13 of the 20 schools labeled the most diverse are located in California. C.E.O. STUDIES: The Center for Equal Opportunity, an organization that it says promotes colorblind policies, has issued several reports charging that admissions to the University of Michigan still factors race and ethnicity too heavily. According to the study, a black or Hispanic student with a 3.2 grade point average and who scored 1240 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test had a 9 in 10 chance of winning admission to the university, while a white student with the same scores had a 1 in 10 chance. Officials from the University of Michigan said grades and test scores are not the only factors considered in admissions. And Mr. Laird said that factors such as a student's parents' educational background also play a role in academic achievement. Students whose parents have no college degrees and lower incomes tend to score lower than students whose parents have degrees and higher incomes. Roger Clegg, the organization's president, said in a release the protests to the study from UM disputed that other factors drew as much weight as grades and scores in admissions