UC Admissions to Weigh ‘Personal Achievement’

Living up to their reputation as “the public ivies,” UCLA and UC Berkeley have moved a step closer to emulating Ivy League admissions policies by putting a new emphasis on personal achievement as they shape next year’s freshman class.

Excellent grades and test scores will still be the most important factors, but they alone won’t be enough to guarantee a seat. Many students will need something extra: a precocious display of leadership, an exceptional talent, a compelling tale of triumph over adversity.

The policy adopted last week applies to all University of California campuses, but will have the greatest impact on the two most competitive ones, UCLA and Berkeley.

In trying to measure the intangible worth of thousands of applicants, the huge public California schools confront challenges not faced by much smaller private institutions that have the luxury of getting to know prospective students through interviews and letters of recommendation.

Although individual campuses have flexibility in applying the new guidelines, some will try to rank students on the basis of widely varying attributes: musical or athletic prodigies versus others who have excelled academically despite poor schools or financial hardships.

In the process, some experts warn, the UC campuses may have to prove in court that the new system is not a way to slip race-based preferences back into admissions.

Until now, the University of California’s eight undergraduate campuses reserved at least 50% of the slots in each year’s freshman class for those who excelled in academics alone.

In perhaps the most significant change in admissions policy in six years, the UC regents replaced that requirement with a “comprehensive review” of applicants’ personal, as well as academic, achievements.

Officials expect the broader emphasis to make little difference at the less competitive campuses, and to have no impact at all at UC Riverside and UC Santa Cruz, which can accommodate all applicants who meet the university’s basic eligibility requirements.

But it will play a significant role in determining which students are admitted to UCLA and Berkeley.

“We will be assigning a personal achievement rank to every student,” said Tom Lifka, UCLA’s assistant vice chancellor for student academic services. “Some of the kids who are in the very top academically, if they have low personal achievement scores, are not going to get in.”

They would have plenty of company. Last year, UCLA rejected about 29,000 of its nearly 40,000 applicants--a number that is almost certain to rise this year. UC Berkeley rejects an even higher proportion of applicants.

So how can students position themselves among the chosen few?

With the new policy taking effect immediately, it’s a little late for this year’s college-bound seniors, rushing to complete applications by the Nov. 30 deadline. At most, those who have not mailed their applications may be able to rethink what they say in their essay.

People Long Unhappy With UC Admissions

Even some supporters of the policy have questioned why it was rushed into place. In reply, UC officials say the likelihood of a shift has been communicated for months to counselors, parents and prospective students. And it was badly needed, they say.

“For some time, quite a few people have been perturbed about the way we were conducting our admissions,” said UC President Richard C. Atkinson. “They didn’t think it was fair to base so much on grades and test scores, and thought we should move forward and get in the mode comparable to the way every other competitive university does things.”

Applicants with a year or more to go may be able to learn from the experience of applicants to Ivy League colleges, experts say.

Those schools are less interested in well-rounded students than well-rounded freshman classes. They look for students with an array of interests and perspectives that will enrich one another’s educations.

As a result, they have been less dazzled in recent years with the sort of well-rounded student who complemented good grades with, say, making a varsity team, working on the school yearbook, taking a minor role in a school play or being active in campus clubs.

Instead, they lean toward “angular” students, ones who focus on a single activity and pursue it passionately.

“It allows you to tell a better story if you are a championship wrestler or a chess player who attends international tournaments,” said Seppy Basili, vice president of Kaplan Inc., an education and test-prep company. It’s less compelling, he said, if the student merely dabbles in half a dozen activities.

The lesson, counselors say, is that students in the highest academic bracket might benefit more from winning a music competition or statewide debating contest than from taking one more Advanced Placement class.

But critics warn that a policy that shifts emphasis to subjective personal achievement may put the university on shaky legal ground.

“There is a pretty good likelihood of a lawsuit,” said Sharon Browne, an attorney with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation. “They have created a subjective standard, as opposed to an objective standard.”

Browne believes an implicit goal of the new policy is to boost the chances for enrollment of African American, Latino and other underrepresented minority students.

University officials deny that, and the regents amended the policy to specify that it would not slip racial considerations into the admissions process.

Since race-based affirmative action was banned in 1995, universities have struggled to balance their need to accept the best students with their mandate to make certain that their student body reflect the increasingly diverse population of the state.

In recent years, admissions offices have begun to give extra weight to those who excelled academically despite crushing poverty, low-performing schools and language barriers. Most of those students were from minority groups.

Not surprisingly, the policy of awarding extra points for “life challenges” causes the greatest concern among middle-class families that don’t face such hardships.

Of the state’s leading public institutions, UC Berkeley has the most experience with a holistic review, which it has been applying in the selection of half of its freshman classes since 1998.

UCLA admissions personnel also have been doing some comprehensive reviews, but they have relied more heavily on academic measures and didn’t bother to read the essays of the top students they admitted.

Other UC campuses, in San Diego, Santa Barbara, Irvine and Davis, have less experience with comprehensive reviews. Each campus has considerable latitude to formulate its own plan.

Atkinson said that’s one of the system’s advantages. “We have probably as much variation at each campus in the way they institute admissions as at any other eight campuses around the country.”

Picking freshmen in this way is much closer to art than science, admissions deans say. It is also tremendously labor intensive, often requiring the help of alumni to conduct interviews and committees to debate an applicant’s merits.

Fred Hargadon, Princeton’s admissions dean, said his school’s application tries to have a “conversation” with prospective students through short essay questions.

“We’re looking for some students who may have a well-developed talent already, and others who may be able and interested but have no idea what it is they want to study yet,” Hargadon said.

At Dartmouth College, the process involves “trying to get a sense of the whole person, anything that can help us distinguish one bright, high-achieving student who will do well from the next,” said Associate Admissions Dean Dan Parish.

Sometimes the needs of the college play an important part. A special talent such as playing the violin, for instance, may impress an admissions officer when the campus orchestra is trying to fill a string section that has open chairs.

Bruce Poch, admissions dean at Pomona College, said it is difficult to pick one extremely bright and able student over another. The factors, he said, are subjective, fluid and impossible to quantify with any kind of point system.

But UC officials must wrestle with thousands more applications than their counterparts at private colleges and universities.

UCLA’s 140 admissions officers and volunteers cannot keep track of an expected 43,000 applicants without a point system, Lifka said.

Students Get Academic, ‘Life Challenge’ Rank

Each student will receive an academic ranking, he said, a personal achievement ranking and an assessment for “life challenges,” such as those that a student from a low-income family or one that doesn’t speak English might face.

The combination of all three rankings will be factored into every decision, he said. To manage such a massive task, each file will be read once--not twice, as has been done in the past. Lifka estimated that officials will spend eight to 10 minutes on each applicant’s file.

All this must be done by mid-March to make sure letters of acceptance go out on time.

With so many applicants--about 75,000 expected this year--UC officials say they cannot conduct face-to-face interviews--a common practice by their private counterparts.

Nor has UC asked for letters of recommendation, partly because high school counselors and teachers lobby fiercely not to write them.

Recognizing the need to know more about each candidate for admission, UC Berkeley this year will send out secondary questionnaires and ask for letters of recommendation for borderline applicants, said Calvin Moore, head of the Berkeley faculty’s admissions committee.

“It’s part of a more coherent way of looking at these applicants,” Moore said. “‘If you look just at academics, it’s as if you’ve closed one eye. Now we are using both eyes, looking at the entire file.”