UCI Rolls Down by 13.4% for Fall

UC Irvine has admitted 13.4% fewer students this fall, partly because the university hopes to offset enrollment surges of recent years that have strained resources and capacity, officials said.

The university expects 2,938 students in September, compared to 3,334 last year, officials said Friday.

Among racial and ethnic groups, the number of white and Native American enrollees increased, but those in all other groups decreased, most sharply among Asian Americans (18%) and Latinos (10.6%). Precise figures won’t be known until after classes begin in the fall.

While the university purposely decided to admit fewer students to control growth, other factors played a role.

Susan Wilbur, director of admissions, said the drop in Asian Americans intending to enroll reflects the smaller number of students admitted to the biology and computer science programs, both of which have proven popular among this group but are overflowing with students. The Department of Information and Computer Science received 850 applications, but only half were accepted. In biology, 3,500 applications were received for 2,700 spots, she said.

It was unclear why more Latinos are staying away, Wilbur said.

“The students had more choices. As to why they did not come, I don’t know,” said Wilbur, who discounted the possibility that the university’s ban on affirmative action, set to take effect next year, kept students away. “That would be a stretch,” she said.

The overall makeup of the prospective freshmen class won’t change that much from last year, with students of Asian descent accounting for more than half of the undergraduates, followed by whites.

“The campus is pleased with these numbers overall,” Wilbur said. “We were more selective. We improved the quality of the students.” And with fewer new enrollees, she added, “students will get their classes. They won’t have to wait in lines. And they will get housing.”

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Systemwide, the racial and ethnic makeup of the incoming freshman class at the University of California also will remain about the same as last year’s, despite a decrease in applications from “underrepresented minorities”--blacks, Latinos and Native Americans--according to admissions statistics released Friday.

Officials said that was because the acceptance rate among minority students--the percentage of those offered admission who ultimately decided to enroll--was higher than last year. Despite controversy over the planned end of affirmative action in the nine-campus system, 64% of the black students who were admitted agreed to enroll, up from 57% a year ago.

The percentage of Latino students agreeing to enroll rose slightly.

Overall, nearly 25,200 California high school graduates are planning to enroll at the University of California as freshmen in the fall, 5% more than last year, officials announced.

At the same time, UC will have more students from all ethnic groups except Native Americans, with the largest increases registered by white and Asian American students.

Since the UC Board of Regents voted to ban the consideration of race and gender in admissions--a ban that does not take effect for undergraduates until next year--these annual statistics have been closely watched as a measure of whether the affirmative action rollback has scared students away. Officials said Friday’s statistics suggest that did not happen.

“That’s the good news,” said Dennis Galligani, UC’s assistant vice president for student academic affairs. “However, the university still has much work to do to ensure that student diversity continues.”

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Galligani said he was particularly concerned about UC’s most selective campuses--UCLA and UC Berkeley. While computer modeling done by UC Irvine indicates that the campus may be able to maintain a diverse class after the affirmative action ban goes into effect, Galligani said, at UCLA and UC Berkeley “everything suggests that we will see declines” in enrollment of underrepresented minorities.

The systemwide undergraduate admissions statistics released Friday showed marked declines in the number of blacks and Latinos planning to enroll at UCLA. Although 240 black students said last year that they would enroll in a freshman class of about 3,700, only 205 blacks said yes this year--a drop of nearly 15%. Latinos dropped from 728 to 604, or about 17%. Native Americans increased 14%, from 36 last year to 41 this year.

Rae Lee Siporin, UCLA’s director of undergraduate admissions, attributed part of the decrease to the regents’ action and to Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action measure passed by voters last November.

“Students said they didn’t think they were welcome,” Siporin said.

Siporin said one encouraging fact was a leap in the overall academic quality of UCLA’s applicants, producing a typical freshman with a 4.05 high school grade point average and a 1,250 SAT score.

“We saw a 10% increase in the very top tier of applicants that get admitted on academic criteria only,” she said. But although that group included many more whites and Asian Americans, she said, “it did not grow dramatically for the underrepresented students.”