Record Number of UC Applicants Flood System

Record numbers of freshman applications have flooded the University of California this year and more students than ever will be rejected from their first-choice campus, including thousands with perfect high schools grades who aimed for UC Berkeley and UCLA.

High school seniors apparently anticipated that trend and applications to the traditionally less popular of the eight undergraduate UC campuses--Riverside, Santa Cruz and Davis--have jumped by as much as one-third over last year.

As a result, UC Riverside will end its application period for fall enrollment on Monday, about three months earlier than last year. All the other campuses had deadlines at the end of November, compared to the leisurely spring and summer deadlines some of them had only a few years ago.

“It’s getting pretty crowded,” said Ed Apodaca, the UC system’s director of admissions and outreach services.

For the next 15 years, officials say, population pressures and the continuing lure of low tuition threaten the credo that the UC system should find a spot for every California high school senior who ranks academically within the top 12.5 % of his peers statewide. The only way out, they explain, is for costly expansion of existing campuses and the possible building of a new UC, most likely in the Fresno area, within 15 years.

“Up till now, the UC system never turned away a qualified student. But it may not be able to make those claims in the future,” said Ray Colvig, a spokesman for UC Berkeley.

UC Irvine, for example, turned down the applications of about 1,000 students meeting UC admission standards, admissions director James Dunning said, but all of them were offered “options.”

Some were offered admission to a different major (field of study) than the one applied for; others were offered admission in the spring and winter academic quarters, and the rest were guaranteed admission if they enrolled for a semester or two in a local community college.

“For the past two years now we’ve been screening above and beyond UC requirements,” Dunning said.

While previously the university had decided admissions almost solely on grades and test scores, since 1986 UCI officers have considered extra-curricular activities and community work, and they take a closer look at application essays, Dunning said.

UC officials anticipate nearly 50,000 students--2.5 % more than last year and 36% more than in 1980--will apply for freshman admittance to at least one UC campus this year. Those increases run counter to an overall decline in the college-age population and in the percentage of high school graduates going to any college, according to a new study by the California Postsecondary Education Commission.

“It’s a shock. We thought it had peaked last year,” said Rae Lee Siporin, UCLA’s admissions director, referring to the more than 24,000 applications for freshman admission her office received this past autumn, an increase of 6.5 % from the year before. The first round of acceptance letters were mailed last week.

UCLA will offer freshman acceptance to about 10,000 students and expects that about 4,200 will enroll, Siporin said. That 42% enrollment rate among those accepted is very high compared to most other public and private colleges because UCLA, like UC Berkeley, is the first choice for so many applicants, she added. So rejection at UCLA provokes anger, tears and threats of lawsuits, even if a student gets into a less popular UC campus.

“This creates a lot of pressure, an enormous amount of unhappy feelings and ill will,” Siporin said. “After all, certainly every Mummy and Daddy thinks their baby is terrific.”

At UC Berkeley, considered the most prestigious of the UC schools, the rejection of applicants with perfect 4.0 high school grade-point averages is now part of that institution’s mystique. For example, 3,570 students competed for the 990 freshman engineering spots last year and nearly 700 applicants with 4.0s were rejected, according to Apodaca. In Berkeley’s less-competitive non-engineering areas, about 3,000 students with 4.0s did not get in, he said.

“It is very hard to tell someone who is a 4.0, a valedictorian and class president that anyone else could possibly be more qualified,” Apodaca said.

The main reasons for the UC application boom, officials explained, is the system’s excellent reputation and the relatively low fees students pay. UC fees now average $1,492 a year for a state resident, not including food and housing. Annual tuition at private American universities averaged more than $8,000 last year, according to the U.S. Department of Education. For example, undergraduate tuition at Stanford University is $11,880.

“You can’t discount the effect of Black Monday,” UCLA’s Siporin said, referring to the stock market collapse on October. “All economic indicators are that people are spending less and private education is tremendously expensive. So people are even more looking at public institutions.”

Another cause has been the sharp drop, albeit somewhat reversed last year, in enrollment at two-year community colleges. For academic and social reasons, more and more students want to enter UC as freshmen, not transfer in as juniors.

From 1977 to 1986, the percentage of recent graduates from California high schools who enrolled in at a UC campus rose from 5.2% to 7.9%; meanwhile, the percentage who went to community colleges dropped from 43.3% to 36.3%.

The Cal State system, which is supposed to take the top academic third of students, saw its share rise from 8% to 10.2% and has room for more students. Qualified students can still apply to fall admission at the 19 Cal State campuses, except for most majors at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and San Diego State and some majors that are overcrowded already at Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Northridge and Cal Poly Pomona, officials said.

In an attempt to strengthen the community colleges and Cal State campuses, legislative proposals now being reviewed in Sacramento might force UC to cut back freshmen and sophomore enrollment. A compromise proposal by the Commission for the Review of the Master Plan for Higher Education calls for UC to limit its freshman and sophomore enrollment to 40% of its undergraduate student body by 1996. Lower classmen now make up about 46% of undergraduates.

Meanwhile, the drop in the college-age population in the last decade has been offset in California by the increasing interest in UC by recent immigrants, particularly Asians. To be eligible for UC, an applicant must have a 3.3 high school grade average or no lower than a 2.78 and good scores in entrance tests. Asian-Americans in California do so well in high school that an astounding 32.8% of them are UC eligible, compared to the 14.1% for all groups statewide and about 5% and 4.5% for Latinos and blacks, according to a new study by the Postsecondary Education Commission.

Some Asians allege that the UC system fears domination by Asian students and is limiting their admissions, a charge UC denies. That issue, along with others involving undergraduate admissions, are to be discussed at the Feb. 18 meeting of the UC Regents in San Francisco.

Under a policy begun in 1986, students can apply simultaneously to as many UC campuses as they wish and choose from among the ones that accept them. This year, the average student applied to more than two campuses. However, if a UC eligible student applies to only the most popular campuses and gets rejected from them, he will be offered admittance at a less crowded campus, most likely UC Riverside or Santa Cruz, this year or promised transfer from a community college in two years, officials explain.

More and more students are deciding not to take their chances with being put in such a last-minute pool and are applying to so-called safety UC schools. Freshman applications are up 32% at UC Riverside this year, up 23% at UC Davis and up 15.4% at UC Irvine after big increases the year before, according to UC figures. At the same time, recruiting and word of mouth about the strengths of those campuses, particularly the smaller size of lecture classes, are also boosting their popularity.

For example, a survey showed that only 2% of UC Riverside’s freshmen two years ago said the school had been their first choice, according to Fred Zuker, the campus’s associate vice chancellor for enrollment management. That rose to 9% last year as more students come to realize that they probably will have more contact with professors than they would at UC Berkeley or UCLA, Zuker said.

Overall, UC freshmen enrollment has been expanded from 19,962 in 1980 to 23,452 this year, pretty well keeping up with demand of qualified applicants. But the growth was most strong at Riverside, Santa Cruz, Irvine and Davis--not the most popular schools.