As classes started on Sept. 23, the University of California’s governing board sweated, fretted and finally voted, 16-4, to raise the minimum GPA for UC admission from 2.8 to 3.0. In an effort to avoid a scramble to meet the new standards, the change won’t take effect until fall of 2007.
To the average UCSD student, accepted with a 4.1 GPA, the change sounds minor and inconsequential. But the tightening of admissions standards is enough to prevent approximately 750 more students a year from being admitted to the University of California. Unfortunately, the university must accept the reality of the budget situation and devote its increasingly limited resources to the students it is mandated to serve.
The rationale behind the GPA hike was simple. According to the California Master Plan for Education, the top 12.5 percent of the state’s high school graduates should be eligible for UC admission. But a study released in May reported that 14.4 percent of high school graduates are actually eligible under the university’s current GPA standards.
In short, according to the study, the university is accepting too many students, and it doesn’t have the resources to provide all of these students with the caliber of education they expect. And, if those involved in making the decision did their math correctly, raising the minimum GPA to 3.0 will eliminate the 750 or so students who fell outside the top 12.5 percent group.
Opponents of the change in eligibility requirements have two major complaints. First, many say that the original study’s methodology was questionable and its estimates crude. As reported in the Sept. 21 issue of the Guardian, retired UC Berkeley physicist Charles Schwartz told the UC Board of Regents that the study had such a high potential for error, it was uncertain whether the GPA hike was needed to bring eligibility down to 12.5 percent.
The potential effects of the hike are also under scrutiny. The regents, and especially UC President Robert C. Dynes, realize that the change in eligibility requirements will no doubt need to be adjusted and its effects studied. In a Sept. 23 San Francisco Chronicle article about the GPA hike, Dynes said that the regents plan to re-examine the changes once the effects “play out.”
Further, a Sept. 24 article in UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian reported that Gerald Parsky, the chairman of the Board of Regents, said that the new GPA requirements were “subject to changes and readjustments over the next two years.” Naturally it would be unacceptable for the eligibility requirements to be changed based on flawed data, and it’s imperative — and likely — that the Regents will fulfill their promise of making sure the eligibility change has the intended effect.
Many vocal opponents of the hike focus on the 750 students who will be denied admission based on the new requirements. They point out that since those students are bound to be disproportionately black and Latino, denying them admission will harm the university’s racial diversity. That’s an unfortunate consequence of a necessary move — tightening admissions standards in response to a greater number of highly qualified students.
It is sad that the first students to be denied admission to the university are those already the most underrepresented in the UC system, but that implies a problem at the primary and secondary institutions these students attend, not one with the university’s admissions standards. In other words, these minority students are underperforming because they are locked into poor, underperforming schools. It is not the university’s job to deny their deficient educations by accepting them; rather, it’s everyone’s job to bring primary and secondary schools up to speed.
Yes, this change in admissions requirements is linked to fundamental problems with California’s education system. But those concerned with racial equality in education and diversity at the university level need to realize that the university can’t make up for all the flaws in the educational system that manifest themselves in lower GPAs for minority students.
At the end of the day, the university won’t solve any problems by admitting more students than the system can handle; it will only strain the university’s resources and reduce the quality of a UC education.
Regent Sherry Lansing cut to the heart of the issue when she told the Daily Californian, “We are in this position because we don’t have the money. If we start to accept a higher level of students that are coming to this university, they will find that the quality of their education will slip greatly.”
The University of California, while a public system, is designed to take the cream of the crop of California’s students. The line between a good student and an excellent student needs to be drawn somewhere, and the line has simply been redrawn from a 2.8 GPA to a 3.0 GPA. The important basis of that decision — that the university has a duty to accept the top 12.5 percent of California’s high school graduates — hasn’t changed.
And let’s not forget that if a student can’t manage a B (3.0) average in high school, they’re probably better-suited for the California State University or community college systems anyway. Denying students admission to the University of California is disheartening, but when it’s done on the basis of very clear admissions standards, it hardly signals a gross injustice. Instead, it’s an unfortunate reminder that the university has limited resources and can only educate a limited number of students.
