Regents Tighten UC Admissions Standards : Education: The board acts to slow enrollment growth and thereby cut costs. The system hopes to save $35 million next year.

University of California officials Thursday announced a tightening of freshman admissions standards as a way to slow enrollment growth and cut costs.

The changes in required grades and test scores would eliminate about 4,500 students from the estimated 35,750 California high school graduates who now are eligible for UC entrance annually, said Dennis Galligani, UC assistant vice president for student academic services. About 21,000 freshmen enrolled last year, and that figure will grow in the near future, although at a slower rate because of the tougher admissions rules, he added.

The new standards go into effect for applicants for entrance in the fall of 1992.

UC officials described the changes as modest. But some UC Regents, who were meeting at UC Irvine, and student leaders questioned the plan’s effect on minorities.

Helen Henry, the UC Riverside biochemistry professor who headed the systemwide faculty group that came up with the new rules, insisted the changes are “small enough not to affect the ethnic composition (of the student body) in any significant way.”

But Bill Kysella, vice president of the UC Student Assn., contended that “even a change as small as this one . . . could have serious repercussions on the diversity of UC’s entering class.”

Because a 40% UC fee increase slated for the fall is expected to cause some drop in enrollment, the new eligibility rules may be “overkill tactics,” Kysella said.

By instituting the new rules and other enrollment-cutting measures, the regents hope to save $35 million next year as part of an effort to bring the budget down to $2.2 billion, said UC spokesman Ron Kolb.

The new standards will not change the policy ensuring entrance to any California applicant with a 3.3 grade-point average in the high school courses required by the university, regardless of their standardized test scores. Only students with GPAs below 3.3 will be affected.

For example, under the complicated sliding formula for admission, a student with a 3.0 GPA in the UC-required high school courses now needs a score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test of 1080 out of a possible 1600. Under the new rules, a student with a 3.0 GPA will need an SAT total of 1170.

An applicant with an 1100 SAT now needs a 2.99 GPA grade but will need a 3.028 GPA next year.

UC traditionally admits a small number of students based on test scores alone. In those cases, the minimum SAT score will rise from 1100 to 1300.

The new standards are for admission into the UC system, not for a student’s campus or major of first choice. In practice, the most popular schools, like UCLA and UC Berkeley, have much higher thresholds.

The tougher formula was developed and approved by the Faculty Senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) at the request of the regents, who were seeking ways to cope with the severe state budget crunch. The rules were presented at the regents’ meeting Thursday, but no formal vote was required.

Along with cuts in graduate programs and the fee increase, the move is expected to hold overall UC enrollment at the current 165,000 over the next four years, about 5,500 fewer than had been anticipated.

Under state policy, UC is supposed to admit students from the top academic 12.5% of high school graduates statewide. In recent years, UC had been taking students from the top 14.3%. Thursday’s announcement was to start enforcing the 12.5% policy again with specific GPAs and test scores.

In other action, the BOARS group decided not to add a fourth year of mathematics, presumably calculus, to the UC-required high school courses. Henry, the panel’s head, said that improving basic math skills is more important than forcing students into calculus.

But Regent Jeremiah Hallisey, the strongest proponent of the extra math, criticized the decision, saying it would lower the number of students going into needed technical and scientific careers.

“I’ve heard 500 times that this is the most prestigious institution in the world. But we don’t have the political courage to set some standards,” Hallisey said.

Last year, the regents moved to require high school students starting with 1994 applicants to take a second year of social science and a second year of lab science, on top of four years of English, three of math, two of a foreign language.

At the lunch break of Thursday’s session, about 100 students from most of the nine UC campuses held a rally outside the meeting room to protest the 40% fee increase the regents enacted in February. The hike raises fees to $2,273 for state residents, not including room, board and activity charges.

Regent William Bagley told the protesters that he sympathized with them but that the budget situation in Sacramento was to blame. In response, Jose Solorio, a UC Irvine student leader, said the regents violated previous promises that fees would not increase by more than 10% in a year.