UCLA Officials Deny Trading Admissions for Donations

Addressing allegations of admissions favors at UCLA, campus officials told a legislative committee Friday that the controversial practice of keeping tabs on VIP applicants is an “important customer service” offered to donors and others but has never resulted in a direct quid pro quo of an undergraduate admission for money.

In their first public forum, UCLA officials decried as “odious” any suggestion that “greedy” benefactors expect favors. But they also acknowledged that some members of the public may be disappointed to learn that giving special interest to applicants with ties to donors and other prominent people is just “the way of doing business.”

“I guess it’s like finding that your idol has feet of clay,” said UC Regent Judy Levin, president of the UCLA Alumni Assn. “To have the community look at us askance and say, ‘Oh, you do things the rest of the world does?’ Of course we do. We have to, but we try to do it in as open and minimal way as possible.”

Members of the state Senate Select Committee on Higher Education seemed unconvinced by UCLA’s statements that the special tracking resulted in only a few students getting admitted who would have otherwise been turned down.

“I don’t think that held any water with me,” Sen. Hilda Solis (D-El Monte) said after the four-hour hearing at UCLA. “I think it’s probably larger, and they just don’t want to give us the information.”

And Committee Chairman Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) challenged UCLA’s contention that there had never been a quid pro quo, calling the school’s overall handling of VIP admission requests part of a “culture of favoritism.”

Friday’s hearing is the first of two called by Hayden in the wake of reports by The Times that donors, politicians and other prominent supporters made more than 1,300 undergraduate admissions’ requests for relatives, friends and the children of business partners through the school’s development and university relations offices since 1980.

A months-long Times investigation found that more than 200 students were let in after having been first rejected or being coded for rejection, and an additional 75 were admitted ahead of hundreds of others with better academic records.

At Friday’s hearing, UCLA reiterated that calls from influential people were responsible for only a “handful” of students being admitted. But they disclosed that Chancellor Charles E. Young, who did not attend, directed the admission of “less than a dozen” VIP students although they were not UC-eligible, meaning that they did not place in the top 12.5% of their high school class.

Otherwise, the reports say, many of the VIP students got in on their own merit, just as many were denied despite the interest shown by a prominent person. And at Friday’s hearing, UCLA officials emphasized that the number of all VIP applicants that they tracked was minuscule, only 0.5% of all applicants.

But their reports added detail about a backdoor system in which the admissions office, development staff and the system’s Sacramento lobbyist worked in concert to keep influential requesters informed about what was happening to students flagged as “special interest applicants.”

Sometimes, campus officials would hold back denial letters to students so they could prepare “delicate and sensitive responses” to the requester first, the reports show. This working arrangement was such that the admissions staff gave school fund-raisers access to computer “status screens” to look up grade-point averages, test scores and other confidential information on their own.

UCLA officials said that, as a “courtesy,” the admissions staff would give VIP students a second look.

“In the course of any additional reviews, it is likely that some applications may have been given favorable consideration, either as a result of additional information being furnished or as a result of special attention being drawn to the application,” the reports said. “It is also possible that the interest expressed by some prominent individuals influenced decisions in a few cases.”

John Kobara, UCLA’s associate vice chancellor for university relations, said that such reviews were not done to raise money from donors.

“Is it a fund-raising tool? No, it is not. . . . ,” he said. “If we stopped doing it right now, would it negatively affect fund raising? No, fund raising wouldn’t go down.”

But Hayden and Sen. Quentin L. Kopp (I-San Francisco) disputed Kobara’s claim that there has been no quid pro quo. “I’m sure very few people come to you with checks and say, ‘I’ll give you this check if you let my daughter in. . . . People don’t think that way,” Hayden said. “But the claim that you’ve never done a favor for a donor doesn’t make any sense to us.”

Kopp said UCLA officials are aware that prominent people who made the requests use “magic words” to “convey an extra special demand” when writing or calling about a specific applicant. The phrases include “important to me” and “look into this,” he said.

At one point, Levin said that Hayden was “intruding” on a university matter before the regents had a chance to address it at their May meeting. Hayden, whose committee holds its second hearing on admissions favors in Sacramento on Monday, responded by saying that UCLA officials and supporters may have been blinded by their intense school pride.

“Love and loyalty can go so far that certain inequities aren’t noticed and then it is always up to the outsider” to point them out, he said.