Events since the passage of California's Proposition 209, ending affirmative action, have shown Asian-Americans benefiting more from the change than the whites who overwhelmingly supported the initiative. These gains, writes PNS commentator Joan Walsh, are neither surprising or sinister, but they should stir a reexamination of the idea of educational opportunity. PNS associate editor Joan Walsh, a Bay Area based journalist, authored a recent report for the Rockefeller Foundation entitled "Stories of Renewal: Community Building and the Future of Urban America." This is the forth in a series of articles on post affirmative action America. If you want us to resend any of the others in the series, please call George Gundrey at 415-243-4364.

Just by chance, on the eve of the Supreme Court's decision to let Proposition 209 stand, the University of California released figures showing that Asian-Americans are benefiting more than whites from the end of affirmative action at the nine UC campuses.

UC-Irvine, which is already 58 percent Asian-American, admitted a freshman class this year that is more than 60 percent Asian. The Riverside campus is 47 percent Asian-American, Berkeley 39 percent, UCLA 34 percent. Officials at the flagship Berkeley campus say the school is likely to admit a majority-Asian freshman class by the year 1999, which will make Berkeley a majority-Asian campus by early next century.

So at UC, at least, the end of affirmative action has barely benefited whites, who overwhelmingly favored Prop. 209. That irony may cheer many of the measure's opponents, who no doubt enjoy the spectacle of white people being beaten at their own game of exclusion. But anyone who cares about diversity has to worry a little about the UC numbers. A multiracial society cannot have a nonracial educational elite, whatever its color.

Thus the triumph of Prop. 209 should force the nation beyond its obsession with race and inspire new thinking about exclusion, and the ruthless sorting mechanisms this society uses to pick its winners. That reckoning is going to have to cross racial lines, and include white people, too.

There's nothing sinister about the way Asians have come to dominate public higher education in California. Asian cultures that link achievement to hard work, not innate talent, have been enormously successful at inspiring a generation of young people to take advantage of American opportunity. Lower divorce rates and strong extended families also give Asian American kids strengths that their white and black peers increasingly lack.

And the current UC enrollment figures have been a long time coming. In the early 1980s UC campuses tried to suppress rising Asian enrollment by favoring students with European language skills, lots of extracurricular activities and so-called leadership qualities. Activists complained, and the system dropped these exclusionary tactics. The result is that a lot of reasonably smart but complacent white kids, who historically coasted into all-white colleges, no longer have slots reserved for them -- unless their fathers are rich alumni who give the school lots of money, because affirmative action for rich people was not abolished by Prop. 209.

Who cares about smart but complacent, not-rich white kids? Well, I do, because I used to be one of them, and I'm trying to raise my daughter differently, but parents these days have no guarantees. The great thing about being a white person who's always favored affirmative action is that you get to be consistent. I didn't believe in single-race institutions when they were all white, and I don't like them any better when they're on the way to becoming almost exclusively Asian.

But majority-Asian UC campuses should cause Californians of every ethnicity to wonder about the scarcity of higher education options, for everyone. The vast majority of the black, Latino and white students who used to get into UC campuses, but whose places are now going to higher-achieving Asians, did well at those schools, going on to success in life. Are those students not worth educating now?

Two things should come of the intersection of Asian dominance at key UC campuses and the triumph of Prop. 209. First, white leaders -- and all leaders -- should think about the winner-take-all way that opportunities for advancement are distributed in our society. White parents, for instance, might finally take seriously long-standing African American complaints about the way grades and standardized test scores favor certain kinds of learners over others.

Small elite campuses such as Stanford have done a better job at diversifying their student population by examining a portfolio of student achievement, not just grades and test scores. The nation needs to redefine its ideas about intellectual merit, and that inquiry is long past due.

Second, and most important, it's time to place more value on education, for everybody. Californians of every race need to become more Asian, and nurture their children's educational achievement more attentively. On the political stage, we need measures that expand educational options for everyone's children.

I'd like to see 209 backers Ward Connerly and Glynn Custred join Jesse Jackson and NOW's Patricia Ireland in launching a ballot initiative to open three more UC campuses. Affirmative action as we know it is dead, and its opponents and defenders need to stop fighting old battles, and make common cause around expanding educational options for all.