UC System Admission Fall-out

asteriskea · April 6, 2007, 6:34am

… Nationwide, more than 3.2 million students will graduate from high school this June, the largest number since the 1970s, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

UC-Berkeley and UCLA both rejected all but two out of 10 applicants this year. At Berkeley, six of 10 applicants with a 4.0 grade-point average or above were turned away. UC Davis admitted 58.7 percent of applicants, down from 68.5 percent last year.

The steep competition surprised thousands of applicants.

“I would have loved to go to Berkeley. … I thought I might have a chance,” said Clare Richardson, 17, of Palo Alto, who instead will headed to New York University to study international relations.

The one bright spot was for black and Latino applicants, who saw their admission offers increase by at least 10 percent. Historically underrepresented students - blacks, American Indians and Latinos - make up nearly 23 percent of fall 2007 admissions, up from 21.7 percent for fall 2006.

At UCLA, 17.5 percent of underrepresented students of color were admitted, up from 15.2 percent last year.

This was the first year that UCLA used a so-called “holistic approach” for reviewing applications, which looks at a student’s achievement in the context of his or her high school. The more individualized application review - modeled after an approach that Berkeley has been using for several years - is designed to value the high-achieving student from Compton as much as the one from Cupertino.

The increased competition was felt at other California schools…

Elite public schools like UCLA and UC-Berkeley also turned away thousands of qualified students.

UCLA accepted 20.6 percent of applicants, down from 22.2 percent last year. At Berkeley - where the class size grew slightly but the number of applications grew even more - 20.2 percent were accepted, down slightly from 20.7 percent in 2006.

More than one-third, or 38 percent, of UC’s admitted freshmen are from families where neither parent has a four-year degree. About 35 percent come from low-income families, earning less than $40,000 a year. Nearly a fifth come from high schools in the lowest 40 percent of California schools, as ranked by the Academic Performance Index score.

Overall, the academic quality of the incoming freshman continues to be outstanding, Susan Wilbur, UC’s director of undergraduate admissions, said Thursday. The average accepted student has taken 23 yearlong college prep classes, earned a 3.79 grade point average and scored 590 out of 800 points on both the verbal and math sections of the SAT.

UC-Berkeley’s admitted class includes a student who danced with a ballet academy in Salzburg, Austria; several nationally ranked debaters; a member of the U.S. Junior Olympic Water Polo team; a nationally ranked chess player; and several members of a high school team that won the first place in the American Computer Science League All-Star Contest.

<a href=“University of California rejects record number of applicants – The Mercury News”>University of California rejects record number of applicants – The Mercury News;

23 yearlong college prep classes?

frazzled1 · April 6, 2007, 7:43am

Yeah, that baffled me, too - could it mean regular high school classes in the “college prep” track? Do high schools categorize their class offerings that way any more? They did when dinosaurs roamed …

calmom · April 6, 2007, 7:53am

I am sure they mean 23 courses that qualify under the UC A-G system. My daughters high school had 7 periods per day, 7x4=28.

I’d like to post a different take on things:
Record UC freshman admissions from state

The University of California has offered admission to a record 57,318 California high school seniors, including incrementally larger numbers of African American and Latino students widely distributed throughout the nine undergraduate campuses.

The figures, 2,076 admissions more than a year ago, are part of a profile of the prospective 2007 freshman class released Thursday by UC President Robert Dynes’ office. …

The larger numbers of African American and Latino students invited to attend – up more than 10 percent over 2006 in both categories – reflect substantial increases in applications from those groups. …

UC-wide, the prospective class of 2007 also has larger percentages of students from poor families, from poorly performing high schools and from families where neither parent has a four-year college degree. In each of the three categories those increases are distributed systemwide.

UC has admitted 77.4 percent of all applicants, down from 78.2 percent last fall. The drop reflects a tightening of the minimum grade point average required for high school students to meet UC eligibility standards.

All eligible freshman applicants have been offered admission. The admitted class is 55.6 percent female and 43.4 percent male, in line with a long-term trend.

The average California high school senior awarded a UC slot has a grade point average of 3.79, virtually unchanged from a year ago. …

Nine in 10 of all admitted freshmen are California residents. UC has offered admission to 6,283 out-of-state and international students, up from 6,143 last year.

Source: <a href=“http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/06/UC.TMP[/url]”>http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/06/UC.TMP</a>

asteriskea · April 6, 2007, 8:45am

Calmom, thanks for the explanation and an article with a positive spin:“UC has offered admission to 6,283 out-of-state and international students, up from 6,143 last year.”

mootmom · April 6, 2007, 11:26am

Not to sidetrack the discussion, but…

And the other 1% are…? (And yes, it’s a typo in the original article, I checked. )

whittierst · April 6, 2007, 11:37am

…from San Francisco?

calmom · April 6, 2007, 11:54am

Hey, we have a lot of transgendered here in the bay area!! They want to go to college too!

xiggi · April 6, 2007, 12:06pm

Whittierst, ask CC to change your name to wittiest. :D

xiggi · April 6, 2007, 12:10pm

Btw, nice way to present the two articles side by side. Thanks Asterix and Calmom. Added to the Merced story, we have a pretty complete picture. Of course, we still miss a good story on the comparative value of a 4.0 GPA in California.

asteriskea · April 6, 2007, 12:20pm

Xiggi - I was thinking of the Merced story as well. Your post - and Calmom’s - reminded me of this article on UC Riverside (Jan 2007):

…UC Riverside, sometimes viewed as a dumping ground for students who can’t get into other UC campuses, has become the university of choice for many black and Latino students, whose numbers remain disproportionately low at other UC campuses.

While campuses like UCLA and UC Berkeley struggle to attract students from underrepresented minority groups, UC Riverside increasingly enjoys a reputation as one of the most ethnically diverse research universities in the nation.

“Maybe they should be looking at what UCR is doing right in attracting minorities,” said Jayna Brown, an assistant professor of ethnic studies there.

Since 1996, state law has forbidden using race in college admissions. But at Riverside, administrators say they have worked hard over the last decade to reach out to eligible minority applicants, giving financial aid packages to promising students such as Curry, and creating race-based programs to assist minority students once they enroll.

UC Riverside Chancellor France A. Cordova, hailed as the first Latina chancellor in the UC system, notes that more than half the students say Riverside was their first or second choice.

“We are not UC rejects,” says Samantha Wilson, 19, a white student who chose Riverside because of its diversity. “We are UC on the rise.”

On the campus of 17,000 students, the university’s success in achieving a diverse student body is obvious. At midday, the Commons is filled with young people of many ethnic backgrounds, some sitting in mixed groups, some with others of the same heritage.

Nearby are offices set up by the university to serve targeted groups. There are places for black students, Chicano students, Asian Pacific students, Native American students. There is a Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center and a Women’s Resource Center. Similar programs exist at many colleges, but the effect is palpable.

“It’s the face of California,” said Ellen Wartella, UC Riverside executive vice chancellor and provost. “It’s not the campus of last resort. It’s the place that minority students feel comfortable coming to because we are diverse.”

This year, the UC Riverside undergraduate student body is 7.1% African American, 43% Asian American, 25.1% Latino and Chicano, and 18.7% white.

In 2005 ? the last year for which system-wide figures are available ? UC student bodies overall were 3.1% African American, 39.9% Asian American, 14.3% Latino and Chicano, and 35.8% white.

Riverside has the highest percentage of African Americans of any of the 10 UC campuses and the highest percentage of Latinos of any UC campus except the small, new Merced campus, which has slightly more.

By law, UC guarantees a spot for every California high school student who graduates in the top 12.5% statewide.

But there has long been a pecking order among the campuses, with Berkeley and UCLA at the top and Riverside near the bottom.

Berkeley and UCLA typically draw students from the top 3% of the state’s high school graduates, a pool that is more white and Asian American than California’s population as a whole. Riverside draws a more diversified student body, but accepts nearly every eligible student who applies…

<a href=“http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-riverside15jan15,0,6287115,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines[/url]”>http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-riverside15jan15,0,6287115,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines</a>

bluebayou · April 6, 2007, 1:04pm

xiggi: normally when UC gives out this type of data, they mean a 4.0 gpa is the UC-weighted gpa, not the HS transcript.

cellardweller · April 6, 2007, 2:17pm

The UC GPA is based on 10th and 11th grades only, eliminates + and - and gives a 1.00 boost for certain Honors and AP classes. (AP classes only for OOS).

For OOS applicants to UCLA, the admit % was around 25% or slightly better than for in-state applicants, largely because of the self-selecting nature of the OOS pool.

bluebayou · April 6, 2007, 2:34pm

cellar:

Each campus and the system publish different gpa’s, so its always important to ask. In addition to UC-gpa for admissions (capped), there is a UC gpa for elc (uncapped). The standard academic gpa (uncapped, four years) has also been published on individual campus websites.

asteriskea · April 9, 2007, 4:55am

John Fund “On the Trail” opines on UC admissions:

… While … black and Hispanic enrollment at UCLA and Berkeley went down after Prop 209, these students simply didn’t just vanish. The vast majority were admitted on the basis of their academic record to somewhat less highly ranked campuses of the prestigious 10-campus UC system, which caters only to the top one-eighth of California’s high school graduates. In the immediate wake of Proposition 209, the number of minority students at some of the nonflagship campuses went up, not down.

This “cascading” effect has had real benefits in matching students with the campus where they are most likely to do well. Despite what affirmative action supporters often imply, academic ability matters. Although some students will outperform their entering credentials and some students will underperform theirs, most students will succeed in the range that their high school grades and SAT scores predict. Leapfrogging minority candidates into elite colleges where they often become frustrated and fail hurts them even more than the institutions…

There were lots of black students capable of doing honors work at UCSD. But such students were probably admitted to Harvard, Yale or Berkeley, where often they were not receiving an honor GPA. The end to racial preferences changed that. In 1999, 20% of black freshmen at UCSD boasted a GPA of 3.5 or better after their first year, almost equaling the 22% rate for whites after their first year. Similarly, failure rates for black students declined dramatically at UCSD immediately after the implementation of Proposition 209. Isn’t that better for everyone in the long run?

University admissions officers don’t think so. Ever since race-based admissions ended in California, they have tried to do end-runs around the ban and reinstate de facto preferences. For example, UCLA’s new “holistic” approach to admissions, which purports to take into account an applicants’ “whole person,” including nonacademic achievements and obstacles they have overcome, was adopted in response to Proposition 209. The results have been dramatic. The number of black students admitted for the 2007-08 academic year has surged by 57%, to 3.4% of the overall student body…

But the increased numbers come at a cost. As Peter Schmidt reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the number of students from Asian backgrounds fell to 43.1% from 45.6…“The overall number of minorities seems to have fallen using criteria that downplay academics and substitute factors designed to boost minority numbers,” notes one UCLA professor. …

<a href=“http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110009916[/url]”>http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110009916</a>

calmom · April 9, 2007, 5:24am

Do you really want to advocate a system of de facto discrimination in California? In which Berkeley becomes the Asian campus, and hispanics and African-Americans end up clustered at Riverside?

It seems to me that the problem highlighted in the article is pedagogical – maybe smaller classes and more focus on the quality of undergraduate teaching for students at Cal & UCLA would benefit all the students there.

I noticed you also quoted out of context – the first part of the article discussed Justice O’Connor’s position on affirmative action, quoting her as follows:

asteriskea · April 9, 2007, 5:46am

Calmom, I truncated the article substantially because of quotation constraints, but I don’t think I quoted out of context because John Fund argues against O’Connor :

I also do not advocate Fund’s position on AA and did not say that I did - I did find Fund’s notion that the “cascading effect” of assigning students to “less highly ranked campuses” directly linked to AA and UC diversity goals to be highly provocative to say the least.

asteriskea · April 9, 2007, 5:54am

I read the WSJ piece shortly after reading the following article “Record number of freshmen are admitted to UC system” and was struck by just how suspicious people are of the changes in UC admissions:

A record number of incoming freshmen were admitted to the University of California this year, including the largest group of African-Americans accepted systemwide in more than a decade.

The number of black and Latino students admitted rose by 10 percent, while white and Asian-American student figures rose by 2 to 3 percent across the nine undergraduate-campus system.

At the University of California San Diego, the change in admit numbers was more pronounced. That’s because the campus admitted 10 percent fewer freshmen than last year, when an unexpectedly large number of students decided to attend UCSD.

The number of white students admitted to UCSD dropped by 14 percent this year, while figures for Asian-Americans dropped 8 percent and Latino admit numbers fell 5 percent. Black student admit numbers did not change. 

The figures represent a significant shift for the 209,000-student system. Since the late 1990s, white and Asian-American freshmen admit numbers have grown dramatically, while African-American student figures have crept up more slowly.

UC officials said this year’s change reflects an increase in the numbers of African-American and Latino students applying to UC, and the high qualifications of those students.

The numbers were most notable at UCLA, which implemented a new admissions process this year, after considerable community outcry over its low black freshman enrollment figures. The number of UCLA black freshmen admitted rose by 143 students this year, or 57 percent.

“This is our first year using the holistic approach,” said Susan Wilbur, UC’s undergraduate admissions director, ?and we’re very pleased with what we’ve seen."

UC’s diversity figures have been closely watched since 1996, when California became the first of several states to ban race-based admissions in public colleges.

Some were suspicious of the changes, including Ward Connerly, a former UC regent who led the campaign to dismantle affirmative action in college admissions.

“I’m convinced that the university is, if not breaking the law, then somehow orchestrating proxies to enable them to increase the number of black students,” Connerly said.

UCSD officials discounted that, noting that application readers are given clear instructions to ignore race in the admission decision.

“The university continues to adhere to the law of the land,” said Mae Brown, UCSD’s director of undergraduate admissions.

Brown said the differences in admissions rates are not significant.

UCSD admitted about 42 percent of its 45,000 freshman applicants. Admitted freshmen had a mean grade-point average of 4.06, and an SAT score of 1,941 out of a maximum of 2,400.

<a href=“http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/education/20070406-9999-1m6uc.html[/url]”>http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/education/20070406-9999-1m6uc.html</a>

calmom · April 9, 2007, 6:49am

You know, throughout the first half of the 20th century, “scientific evidence” was used as a justification for racism and racist policies, and I am sure that the proponents of segregation probably claimed benevolent reasons to support their policies, just as proponents of slavery did in the 18th & 19th centuries.

The end result is the same: exclusion. Fund’s is arguing for a tiered education system, and you know that the end result would be to widen the economic divide among races, since graduates of UC Berkeley are already viewed much more favorably in the eyes of prospective employers than graduates of the lesser campuses.

The higher GPA’s at some campuses simply reflect grade inflation – Fund’s argument is based on the implicit assumption that URM’s are intellectually inferior and therefore should be relegated to easier colleges for their own good.

If that doesn’t get you angry, how would you feel if Fund argued that women should be discouraged from pursuing graduate or professional education, because experience has shown that many end up abandoning or restricting their work in order to have more time with their children? I’m sure the conservatives could come up with plenty of “studies” to support their argument – it’s not too difficult to play around with statistics to get them to make whatever case you want to make.

asteriskea · April 9, 2007, 8:09am

I couldn’t agree with you more except to say that it is all too easy.

mam1959 · April 9, 2007, 11:54am

I don’t think Fund is arguing that certain groups of people are intellectually inferior. Rather, what is clear is that certain groups - in particular blacks and hispanics, receive considerably lower scores on standardized tests that, in the aggregate, are very good markers predicting academic success in college. This is not an easy issue to grapple with, especially in State universities in California where consideration of race is at least putatively illegal.

UC System Admission Fall-out

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