Getting Together on Prep Courses

Here’s a pop quiz. No peeking at the graphic for the answer.

Question: Do the University of California and California State University require that high school students take the same college prep courses?

Answer: No.

But they are close to resolving that long-standing kink in the college admissions pipeline.

After 15 years of negotiations, the two systems, which together enroll 55,000 of California’s best and brightest teenagers as freshmen each year, have agreed in concept to adopt the same pattern of 15 prep courses.

A committee of faculty from both systems will begin the final negotiations Friday to make sure the course descriptions are identical.

They face a tight deadline.

Although the new course requirements will not take effect until 2003, university officials have promised to give high schools the guidelines for acceptable courses in September so counselors can make sure this fall’s incoming freshmen are on track for college.

It is this crop of high school freshmen who will be expected to have completed the new course requirements when they apply to either university system four years from now.

“This is a gift--long overdue--to high school students of California,” said Allison Jones, a Cal State administrator who has been pushing the issue for longer than he can remember. “It should make the whole process less confusing.”

To reach uniformity, Cal State officials have tentatively agreed to add a second year of history and a second year of laboratory science to their required list of college prep courses. Final approval will come at a Cal State trustees meeting in September.

Reintroducing the Arts

UC officials, in turn, have agreed to begin requiring a yearlong course in the visual or performing arts, such as music, art, theater or dance.

The identical course list should eliminate the shocking discovery by some high school seniors that they fall short of a course required by one university system or the other.

For the most part, the problem has been for students entering one of Cal State’s 22 campuses.

High school counselors have been in the habit of telling college-bound students that if they meet UC’s stricter requirements, they will be set for either system.

But UC has never before required an arts class, and thousands of students who apply to a Cal State campus are missing the required course.

The problem has been so widespread that Cal State officials have been forced to waive the requirement, provided that the student makes up the class during the first year at the university. The alternative was to turn away thousands of otherwise qualified students--a difficult option for a place that takes pride in its accessibility as “the people’s university.”

All that will change in 2003. Cal State will no longer make such exceptions. And with concurring requirements at UC, schools are bracing for an explosion of interest in arts classes--which have shriveled for lack of funding over two decades.

Adding a visual or performing arts class seems like a no-brainer. After all, who could be against requiring university-bound students to broaden their academic preparation with exposure to art, music, theater or dance?

Yet a survey of high school officials brought a mixed reaction to UC’s requiring an arts class. Although most praised the idea of aligning the requirements, some showed a passionate opposition to the arts.

“We very strongly recommend against adding a visual and performing arts eligibility requirement,” wrote an educator from a high school in El Centro. “The [Cal State] system is having a horrific time with this requirement; why should UC do the same?”

A number of high schools in rural areas or poor urban neighborhoods don’t offer art history or many other such enriching classes. Officials at these schools complain that they don’t have the teachers to handle them.

Others worry that high-achieving students will have trouble fitting a year of music or art into their busy schedules--already loaded with Advanced Placement courses and athletics.

Some students, one counselor suggested, will have to forfeit a fourth year of a foreign language class to fulfill the new requirement. Another thought some students would be forced to attend summer school to get this out of the way.

Carla Ferri, UC’s director of admissions, said there should be plenty of room in most students’ regular schedules. She dismissed the concerns as a misunderstanding of what UC officials will accept as an arts class.

As it stands now, UC considers second-year arts courses as legitimate college prep classes, but not necessarily entry-level courses. For instance, UC allows advanced choir to count as an elective in its required 15 college courses. But it does not generally accept beginning choir.

That policy has prompted high school educators to assume that a one-year arts requirement would actually mean a two-year commitment.

But UC faculty agree that although they want these arts courses to include some academic rigor, they will make sure the approved college prep arts courses do not require their own yearlong prerequisite course.

Julie Neilson, a counselor at Garfield High School, said she thinks everything will work as schools restore arts programs. “Like anything that is new, there are people who have problems with it,” she said.

Nasri Murillo, a senior at Garfield, welcomes the new attention to the arts. He loves to sketch--”I draw what I feel”--and hopes to enroll at UC Santa Barbara as an art major next year.

At the same time, he thinks it may change the very nature of the art class he is taking now. “It’s all technique, basically,” he said. “The teacher shows us videos: how to look at stuff and draw it. She doesn’t have posters of Leonardo da Vinci and stuff like that.”

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College Prep Classes

The preparatory courses required to get into California’s two university systems are not the same. But now the University of California and California State University systems plan to align their course requirements to make it less confusing for college-bound students. This fall’s high school freshmen will be the first group expected to meet the new uniform requirements before they enroll in either university in 2003:

*--*

UC-Cal State Uniform Course Cal State UC Course List English 4 units* 4 units 4 units Math 3 units 3 units 3 units U.S. history/government 1 unit 2 units 2 units Laboratory science 1 unit 2 units 2 units Foreign language 2 units 2 units 2 units Visual or performing arts 1 unit 0 units 1 unit Electives 3 units 2 units 1 unit Total 15 units 15 units 15 units

*--*

* A unit is one class that stretches over an entire school year.

Source: California State University, University of California.

Los Angeles Times