UC regents on Nov. 20 endorsed an admissions policy that considers socioeconomic factors and administered a rare public scolding to their chairman, John Moores, who has questioned the “comprehensive review” system.
Debate over admissions to the competitive system, always a contentious topic, grew louder this fall after Moores released a report finding that UC Berkeley in 2002 turned away more than 3,200 students who scored better than 1400 on the SAT while accepting nearly 400 who scored 1000 or lower.
More than one-quarter of the nearly 400 were Asian Pacific American.
Overall, UC admitted more than 48,000 freshmen, where nearly two out of five students are APA. Berkeley’s 7,629 admits were 40 percent APA.
Several regents said Nov. 20 they’re concerned lower-scoring students have been made to feel that they don’t belong.
“At the very minimum, a regent should do no harm to the students,” said Regent Tom Sayles. “When you give the impression to students that they’re not welcome at this university, that they’re not qualified, I think you do real harm.”
The regents, who adopted comprehensive review two years ago, did not take a formal vote on the policy — but said Nov. 20 they roundly supported it. Under state law, race cannot be considered as a factor, but application readers can look at such things as family income, quality of high school and personal hardships overcome.
Getting into one of UC’s eight undergraduate campuses depends on meeting minimum grade-point average and test scores. Comprehensive review is used to make the second cut — who gets into UC’s most competitive campuses.
Critics say comprehensive review is too subjective and some suspect it is being used to circumvent the ban on race-based admissions.
Berkeley officials deny they’re looking at race. They also dispute Moores’ interpretation of the data, saying the rejected high-scoring students cited in the report include out-of-state students, who get lower priority, students who withdrew their applications and students who applied to three very competitive engineering programs.
Meanwhile, UC President Robert C. Dynes has appointed a study group to review the admissions process. The group met for the first time on Nov. 20, following the conclusion of the regents’ two-day meeting at UCLA.
The group plans a series of meetings and is expected to come back with recommendations, possibly by March.
Dynes made it clear, however, that the study group won’t be looking at whether or not to keep the new system.
“Comprehensive review is and shall remain the admissions policy of the University of California,” he said.
Moores said his goal was to ensure that UC admissions are “legal, fair and transparent.” He said UC needs to communicate better with parents and students about what it takes to get into the system and called the current application system “consumer-ugly.”
“We should understand and we should make it easy for the public to understand how our admitted students got in, why they got in and how they have done. This is not an attack, it’s not even questioning comprehensive review,” he said. “I’d like to know that each one of the campuses are actually implementing comprehensive review in the way we all think it should be done.”
Regent Ward Connerly, who led the fight to stop considering race in UC admissions and went on to become a national activist in that field, commended Moores for raising the issue of comprehensive review. However, he too said it was unfortunate that some students had been left feeling inadequate.
Regent Judith Hopkinson called Moores’ data narrow and inaccurate. She asked UC lawyers to look into whether it was inappropriate for Moores to use the UC logo on his report, since it was a solo effort.
Moores called that “extraordinarily silly.”
— Michelle Locke