The UC system offered admission to a record number of prospective freshmen this spring, but for top UC campuses, this also meant a record number of rejections.
This year, both UC Berkeley and UCLA accepted roughly 20 percent of its applicants. Even with UCLA’s new “”holistic”” approach to admissions, the process was still extremely competitive.
Less popular UC campuses have also received an increased number of freshman applications.
The newly implemented Shared Experience program offered between UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UC Irvine and UC Merced is meant to give UC-eligible students the opportunity to study for two years at UC Merced, with the prospect of a guaranteed transfer to any of the four other campuses. Officials hope that the program will increase enrollment and that students will stay at UC Merced rather than transfer.
“”While we expect that some students who have been offered this opportunity will accept the offer, we do not have projections at this time for the actual number of students who will enroll,”” UC Office of the Preisdent Director of Undergraduate Admissions Susan A. Wilbur said.
The admissions data also showed a 10-percent overall increase in black and Latino admits. The increase makes this year’s admits the largest group of African Americans accepted by the UC system since the 1990s.
Associate Vice Chancellor of Admissions Mae W. Brown said in a press release that the differences in UCSD admissions rates between this year and last are not particularly significant. In fact, the campus’s figures show that there is actually a 5.5-percent decrease in the admission of blacks, Latinos and American Indians.
Though California passed Proposition 209 a decade ago to ban the use of race as a factor in public university admissions, falling rates of underrepresented minority admits have plagued the UC system. The university says that there are simply more intelligent students than the top UC campuses can hold, with the average admitted student having a self-reported GPA of 3.79, an average SAT composite of 1778 and 23 yearlong academic courses completed in high school.
Regardless of race and ethnicity, competition for entrance into the system remains high. More than a third of those admitted for fall are the first in their families to go to college, with 35 percent of applicants coming from low-income families and 20 percent from high schools in the bottom 40 percent of California schools, according to the schools’ Academic Performance Index scores.
Wilbur said that the different methods to evaluate applications employed by UC campuses accommodate differences in the applicant pools and selectivity of the admits. As a prime example, she said, UCSD is widely recognized as a leading science-oriented school, which is reflected in the majors declared by freshman applicants: biology, chemistry, economics, bioengineering and mechanical and aeronautical engineering.
UCSD, second only to UCLA as the most applied-to school among the nine UC campuses, was certainly more critical in its acceptance process than last year. Of the 45,067 freshmen applications, a record 21,943 were rejected.
Freshman admits have until May 1 to make their final acceptance decisions.
