Release of admissions data delayed by UC regents

By Katy Murphy, San Jose Mercury News

Amid a state budget standoff and a growing sense that a UC education is slipping out of reach for Californians, the University of California won’t reveal its admission rates until next month — an unusual delay that may reflect a startling number of rejections and wait-list notices high schoolers have already received.

Observers say UC could be withholding record-low admission rates to avoid further inflaming tensions as UC President Janet Napolitano tries to break a funding stalemate with Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers quick to accuse the university of shutting out their constituents.

Last year, admission rates at UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara fell to less than half of what they were in the mid-1990s, an analysis showed — and the drop is expected to continue this year, with still more applicants vying for the same number of spots.

News of longer wait lists could fuel the sense that the university is becoming inaccessible, or worse — playing politics with high school seniors’ futures. State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon — who is still waiting for data he requested weeks ago on how many UC applicants were placed on wait lists — says the university is “using the hopes of wait-listed students as a bargaining chip in funding negotiations.”

The university usually releases overall admissions figures in mid-April, but UC officials say this year’s delay is simply the result of so much uncertainty over enrollment and funding in the coming academic year.

Without knowing if they will get the extra money they need to educate more students, campuses are keeping their enrollment flat and relying more heavily than usual on wait lists so they can admit as many students as possible, said UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein. Publishing the freshman admissions numbers now, she argued — including the number of wait-listed students — would be misleading.

“We are not prepared to release extremely preliminary, and therefore very inaccurate, data,” Klein said.

But with so much at stake in Napolitano’s bold play for more state money, every public-relations decision is a political one, said John Ellwood, a UC Berkeley public policy professor.

“If there’s bad news there it would hurt her position,” he said. “So maybe she’s hoping to get a deal with the governor before she lets out the bad news.”

Since November, when UC caused an uproar by announcing a 5 percent annual tuition hike if it didn’t get equivalent increases from the state, Napolitano, Gov. Jerry Brown and the state Legislature have been battling it out over who should pay for the university system and how much money it needs. But also at issue is whether UC can afford to let in more California students clamoring for a spot and how many out-of-state students, who pay nearly three times the tuition, to admit.

Getting into UC is a dream for many of the state’s academically minded teenagers, but even campuses once thought a solid bet for good students — Davis, Santa Cruz, Riverside — are receiving record numbers of applications and wait-listing or turning away top achievers, frustrating students and perplexing teachers and counselors.

“I’ve always had students who looked at Davis as a safety school and it’s not, and neither is Santa Cruz,” said Linda Clark, a guidance counselor at Northgate High School in Walnut Creek. “It’s just kind of a crazy time, and nobody has the answer. All I know is that I can’t in good conscience tell people just to apply to UCs, because we just don’t know.”

Lucinda Perez, a straight-A student from Oakland who will be the first in her family to attend a university, is a finalist for the prestigious Gates Millennium Scholars program, which gives winners a full ride to the college of their choice.

But the 18-year-old had a miserable March. One after another, the UC rejections came in: Berkeley, UCLA, Davis, and Santa Cruz.

“I got denied from all of them,” said Perez, who plans to attend Holy Names University in the fall. “It was a shock.”

In 2008, the Oakland Tribune published a story about Perez’s small public high school, Life Academy of Health and Bioscience, because some 40 percent of its graduates, most of them first-generation college-goers, had been admitted to a UC campus.

This year, by contrast, nearly half of Life’s 62 graduating seniors applied to the university, but only nine — about 15 percent of the class — got in and four were wait-listed, according to data the school collected from students. Those in the top 9 percent of their class are generally guaranteed a spot in the UC system and will likely still get an invitation to attend the newest campus, UC Merced.

Those numbers, much lower than just last year, have the school’s faculty considering more SAT preparation and a grading system that gives honors and AP courses extra weight in a student’s GPA, a change that would clash with the school’s philosophy against tracking students into different course levels.

“It definitely feels like there’s a shift happening, and it’s nerve-wracking for me as a teacher and it’s heartbreaking for students,” said Suneal Kolluri, a 12th-grade government and economics teacher and UCLA graduate.

At the ultra competitive Lynbrook High School in San Jose, similar stories have made their way to the counselor’s office.

“I know the students are feeling or hearing that nobody seems to be getting in,” said Malissa Goldstein, a guidance counselor there who has yet to see a final tally. “I think the biggest surprise for us is UC Merced has denied some of our highly qualified applicants, as has UC Riverside.” Those campuses have traditionally had the system’s highest admission rates.

Goldstein believes the trend is driven, in part, by fear: Each year, students alarmed by dropping admission rates are applying to more campuses than they otherwise would, pushing the volume of applications on each campus ever-higher — and admission rates lower and lower.

At Coliseum College Prep Academy, a small public high school in East Oakland, less than one in three UC applicants were admitted to a single campus, according to a college counselor, compared to more than 75 percent in 2012 and 2013.

The high school’s valedictorian, Carlos Rangel, was admitted to UC Berkeley, one of the system’s two most-selective campuses — but was wait-listed at UC Davis, where, not long ago, he would have been a shoo-in.

“The whole system overall, it was shocking almost,” Rangel said. “It’s getting harder each year.”

[Source]: Daily Democrat