I don’t doubt that is what was meant, but again it is addressing the same old complaint. The advantaged kid from the great suburban school isn’t getting into their preferred UC, so their solution is to make more room by keeping out kids who don’t match that profile. It is elitist at its core, and it ignores the mission of not only the UC system, but of each UC school.
As for this concept that there are UC’s for the best kids and UC’s for the rest, it is utter nonsense. While hyper-competitive parents constantly rank the UCs as worthy or unworthy, they are all great schools. In fact, if we are to believe the rankings, they are all top 100 Institutions, which means that the a UC you consider “downstream” or “remedial” is higher ranked than the flagships in most states. More importantly, they ALL exist to educate the top kids from every community in an extremely diverse state.
It doesn’t serve the state’s interests to further segregate its UC schools by rules that would further favor middle class and rich suburban kids from excellent high schools.