UCSD Admits 700 More Students Than It Can Handle

UC San Diego has admitted more students than it can handle for the fall term, while the most popular of the University of California campuses--Berkeley and UCLA--have admitted too few students under a new admissions system implemented this year.

According to preliminary figures from the campuses, UCSD has about 700 more “statements of intent to register” than its target of nearly 3,300 freshmen. UC Irvine has 900 more freshmen students planning to attend than the 2,200 it expected. UC Santa Barbara is about 750 above its target of 3,200. And UC Santa Cruz is about 400 over its target of 1,680 freshmen.

At the same time, Berkeley is about about 500 short of the nearly 3,900 freshmen it had expected for the fall. UCLA is about 400 under its target of 4,200 freshmen.

UC Riverside is also slightly below its target figure of 1,100, but that is because not enough students have applied. As a result, that campus is still accepting applications; Berkeley and UCLA are not. Those two campuses report that they were inundated with applications this year.

“We could have filled the class with all 4.0s (students with straight-A averages) if we had wanted to,” said Berkeley spokesman Raymond A. Colvig.

UC Davis reports that, like Berkeley and UCLA, it is also “somewhat behind” its target for the fall, although Maynard C. Skinner, assistant vice chancellor for student affairs and undergraduate admissions, said he is certain that the campus will be able to fill its classes with qualified students for the fall term.

Indeed, officials at all eight campuses have expressed confidence that, before the summer is over, the problems in the admissions process will be solved and all qualified students will find places at the university.

The change in the 23-year-old admissions process was designed to give students more choice in where they go to college. Previously, students could apply to only one campus. If they were qualified but not admitted because of lack of space at that campus, the university directed them to a campus that still had room. Practically speaking, it meant that students who did not get into their first-choice university often did not end up attending their second-choice campus either.

Under the new system, however, students have been allowed to apply to as many undergraduate campuses as they want and are then free to chose from among all the campuses that accept them.

As a result, applications to individual campuses have soared--even though the actual number of students applying to the system rose only about 2% this year.

Because students on the average applied to two or more campuses, the problem has been for the campuses to figure out how many students to accept. Typically, private colleges and universities in other states rely on years of data about how many students accept their offers of admission.

Fearing that they could “over-admit” and end up with more students than they could accommodate, Berkeley and UCLA officials said they were quite conservative in the number of students they took this year. As it turned out, however, an unexpected percentage of students who applied to those two campuses elected to go elsewhere, while qualified students who might have wanted to attend those campuses were turned down.

Although neither campus intends to admit students who have already been rejected, they have sent letters to students whose admission had been deferred to the winter term, offering them a place in their fall classes.

San Diego and other campuses that accepted too many students have also written letters to some incoming freshmen who live near UCLA and Berkeley, asking if they would just as soon attend those campuses. If that does not draw enough students away from the newly overcrowded campuses, letters will be sent to other students, offering them the same option.

Ronald Bowker, UCSD’s admissions officer, said the school received 19,000 applications this year, almost three times the normal load of 7,000. He said university officials had no experience with so many applications and thus did not know how many of those 19,000 should be offered admission. The school offered admission to 13,000 of the applicants and referred the rest to other campuses.

Unfortunately for UCSD, 4,200 of those accepted decided to attend. Even with normal attrition before registration, Bowker said he still expects to be 300 students over his goal unless more of the school’s prospective students decide on their own to attend UCLA or Berkeley.

“It’s going to be awfully crowded around here,” Bowker said.

Joseph P. Allen, UC Santa Cruz’s director of admissions, said he and his counterparts at Santa Barbara, Irvine and San Diego were delighted to know that their campuses are so popular, even though the new system has caused headaches.

Rae Lee Siporin, director of admissions at UCLA, and Richard H. Shaw Jr., associate director of admissions at Berkeley, both expressed concern, however, that publicity about the problems in the new admissions system would lead students and their families to the mistaken assumption that UCLA and Berkeley are both going begging for students, which is clearly not the case. Each campus had more than 20,000 applications for about 4,000 places.

To even qualify for admission to the University of California, state residents must be in the upper eighth of their high-school graduating classes. Individual campuses, however, are free to select from that group the students they would like to admit. The campuses generally take into consideration not just a student’s grades and scores on standardized tests, but also the number of honors courses the students took and their extracurricular activities.