Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Colleges Regroup After Voters Ban Race Preferences

With Michigan’s new ban on affirmative action going into effect, and similar ballot initiatives looming in other states, many public universities are scrambling to find race-blind ways to attract more blacks and Hispanics.

At Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, a new admissions policy, without mentioning race, allows officials to consider factors like living on an Indian reservation or in mostly black Detroit, or overcoming discrimination or prejudice.

Others are using many different approaches, like working with mostly minority high schools, using minority students as recruiters, and offering summer prep programs for promising students from struggling high schools. Ohio State University, for example, has started a magnet high school with a focus on math and science, to help prepare potential applicants, and sends educators into poor and low-performing middle and elementary schools to encourage children, and their parents, to start planning for college.

Officials across the country have a sense of urgency about the issue in part because Ward Connerly, the black California businessman behind such initiatives in California and Michigan, is planning a kind of Super Tuesday next fall, with ballot initiatives against racial preferences in several states. He is researching possible campaigns in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming, and expects to announce next month which states he has chosen.

Ann Korschgen, vice provost at the University of Missouri, said in a recent interview, “Just this morning, we had a conversation along the line of how we would continue to ensure diversity at our campus if we could not consider race.”

The issue is already heating up in Colorado. This month, two Republican representatives in Colorado asked the state to examine the University of Colorado’s spending on diversity, after a libertarian group questioned the expenditures.

Mr. Connerly said that a decade ago, when California passed its ban, Proposition 209, he thought the state was ahead of its time, but that now, he believes “the country is poised to make a decision about race, about what its place in American life is going to be — and I really believe the popular vote may be the way to achieve that.”

Both defenders and opponents of affirmative action say the lesson of last fall’s campaign in Michigan — where Proposition 2, banning race and gender preferences in public education, employment and contracting, passed by 58 percent to 42 percent despite strong opposition from government, business, labor, education and religious leaders — is that such initiatives can succeed almost anywhere.

“Certain things become popular as state initiatives, like the ban on gay marriages, and restrictions on affirmative action could become one of those things,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education.

If so, he said, private universities, with their wide discretion in admissions and financial aid, could have a competitive advantage regarding diversity, reshaping the landscape of higher education.

“Private universities can do whatever they want, consistent with federal law and the Supreme Court,” Mr. Hartle said. “Where minority students have a choice between selective public universities that cannot use affirmative action, and selective private universities with strong affirmative action programs, the private universities may seem like the more hospitable places, which would give them an advantage in drawing a diverse student body.”

To many educators, that would be a troubling turnabout.

“You’d think public universities are charged with special responsibility for ensuring access, but it could come to be exactly the opposite, if there are a lot of these state initiatives,” said Evan Caminker, the dean of the University of Michigan Law School, adding, “in terms of public values, it’s a big step backward.”

Mr. Connerly is unbothered: If black and Hispanic students are rare at selective universities, the solution is better academic preparation, not special treatment in admissions. “Every individual should have the same opportunity to compete,” he said. “I don’t worry about the outcomes.”

Legally, affirmative action has been a moving target. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in cases involving the University of Michigan that race could be one of many factors in admissions, although admissions offices could not give extra points to minority candidates. Many colleges nationwide then moved to “holistic” review, considering applicants’ ethnicity, but not awarding a set number of points. In states that could face a ballot initiative campaign, though, that standard could fall.

Nationwide, after 30 years of debate, and litigation, over affirmative action, universities have made strikingly little progress toward racially representative student bodies. And recently, with growing awareness that affluent students are vastly overrepresented at selective colleges, the longstanding focus on racial diversity has been joined by a growing concern about economic diversity.

Currently, four states with highly ranked public universities — California, Florida, Michigan and Washington — forbid racial preferences, either because of ballot propositions or decisions by elected officials.

A decade after the California ban, only 2 percent of this year’s freshmen at the University of California, Los Angeles, are black: a 30-year low. Hispanic representation at U.C.L.A. has dropped, too. At Berkeley, the number of blacks in the freshman class plunged by half the year after the ban, and the number of Hispanics nearly as much.

Systemwide, blacks make up only 3 percent of U.C. freshmen, although about 7 percent of the state’s high school graduates are black. Most top black students choose private institutions over state campuses. Over all, of the top third of all students offered admission to the University of California class of 2005, most enrolled and only 19 percent went instead to selective private colleges. But among blacks in that group, 51 percent chose selective private colleges. Meanwhile, up the coast, Stanford University is enrolling more underrepresented minority students. Among this year’s freshmen, 11 percent are African-American, up from 8 percent in 1995; Hispanic enrollment has risen, too.

“Folks look for a place that’s comfortable,” said Richard Shaw, Stanford’s admissions dean. “They want a sense that there’s kids like them at the institution.”

The University of Michigan, with other state institutions, tried to win a delay of the ban so it would not hit in the middle of this year’s admissions cycle. But the courts rejected this effort, so officials have stopped considering race and gender as factors in admissions, and worry that next year’s entering class will be less diverse. Many officials worry that they will lose top minority candidates to selective private universities.

“We know from colleagues in Texas and California that if we can’t take race into account, we’re at a competitive disadvantage,” said Julie Peterson, a spokeswoman for the University of Michigan, where two-thirds of the applicants are from out of state.

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