Jul 19, 2008

ON COLLEGE: UC system eyes changes to admission requirements

By Jason Katz / Bay Area News Group

Q: I have heard that the University of California system is considering changing the minimum eligibility requirements for admission. What do you know about this?

A: The University of California is currently considering a proposal to change the minimum eligibility requirements for admission. In order to further answer your question, I interviewed Dr. Mark Rashid, professor of civil engineering at UC-Davis, and chair of the University of California Academic Senate's admissions policy committee.

Jason Katz: What are the proposed changes?

Mark Rashid: For students and their parents, the most significant change - and really the only one that impacts applicant behavior - is that UC applicants will no longer need to take two SAT Subject tests. As far as prospective applicants are concerned, everything else remains the same as far as required college prep courses and standardized tests.

In addition to dropping the SAT Subject test requirement, the proposed policy construct calls for all California high school seniors who achieve certain markers of college-readiness to be guaranteed a full application review at all UC campuses to which they apply. This means that the entire application is read before an admit/deny decision is made.

In addition to this entitlement to a full review, about 10 percent of the state's high school graduating class would be guaranteed admission via the referral mechanism, as is now the case for all UC-eligible students. This means that a student in this 10 percent who is not admitted to any campus to which they apply would be "referred" to a campus with remaining space - Riverside or Merced in recent years - for admission.

But it is important to understand that an applicant need not be in this 10 percent "guarantee" group in order to be admitted. They need only satisfy the college-readiness markers to be "entitled to review" and then be successful in one or more campus selection processes.

This construct is proposed as a replacement for the current one, whereby all UC-eligible students are guaranteed admission by referral, and almost all ineligible students are denied by the campuses to which they apply. In the current policy, there is no "gray area:" You are either guaranteed admission via referral, or you are invisible to UC.

JK: If the proposal is approved by the board of regents, do you believe the new eligibility requirements will affect diversity on UC campuses?

MR: High-achieving but technically ineligible students are more likely to be from traditionally underrepresented groups of all kinds - economic, geographic and racial - than fully-eligible students. These are kids who are real UC material, but are currently invisible to UC because of some trifling variance from the eligiblity policy.

Some of them apply to UC, and almost all of them are denied. But many more don't even apply currently; perhaps because they are discouraged from doing so by UC's publicly-articulated eligibility policy. Under the proposed policy, these kids would very much be in contention for admission at selective UC campuses.

It is impossible to predict the future, but given these statistical facts, it is easy to imagine UC freshman classes looking increasingly like the whole of California in many different ways.



Jason Katz is an independent college counselor and is founder of JKatz College Counseling in Redwood City. E-mail Katz at jkatz@jkatzcollegecounseling.com.