High School Student From Germany Appeals UC Davis Acceptance Foul-Up

Yuta Sakane, a high school senior at a German-American school in Berlin, really, really wants to attend UC Davis.

His aim has been to go to a college with top-notch programs in each of his two very different passions--agricultural science and art--and the Northern California school seemed like the perfect answer.

So Sakane was thrilled late last month when he received a letter from the campus saying he was accepted for next year’s freshman class. He was so sure UC Davis was the right place that he immediately fired off letters to all four of the other schools that accepted him to decline their offers.

And then came the bad news: Sakane received a follow-up letter from UC Davis last week explaining that he was one of 105 students rejected by UC Davis who, because of a clerical error, was sent a letter of acceptance.

Sakane has lodged an appeal with UC Davis--the only one that university officials know of thus far. Meanwhile, his guidance counselor is both baffled and angry over what he said is the school’s insensitivity.

“I can tell you this, in the circles I travel in, when we make a mistake of that magnitude ... we just go ahead and honor what we’d said we were going to do,” said Herb Blount, head of the guidance department at the John F. Kennedy School in Berlin, the international school that Sakane attends.

UC Davis officials declined to discuss the specifics of Sakane’s case with a reporter, saying only that none of the 105 students involved in the foul-up met the university’s “selection criteria.”

Blount explained that it isn’t as if Sakane, who speaks Japanese, English and German, is an academic slacker. His school requires only 28 hours of classes for seniors, but he is taking 42.

Sakane, a Japanese national whose father works for a restaurant company in Germany, said he mainly is upset for his parents, who were eager for their son to attend the school.

“My parents, they haven’t done anything wrong,” said Sakane, 18. “I can be depressed, but I don’t want to see other people depressed.”

Sakane admits his grade point average, at 3.73, is good but not stellar. Likewise, his SATs totaled 1150 out of a possible 1600. That included an impressive 700 out of 800 in math, but a far less impressive 450 in verbal. This week, Blount spoke with Gary Tudor, UC Davis’ director of undergraduate admissions, on Sakane’s behalf.

The university administrator offered little reason for optimism. Tudor said in an interview that the median combined SAT score of the students accepted for the freshman class was 1230, and the median grade point average was 3.86.

Tudor said he had not yet reviewed Sakane’s appeal, but added that “very few appeals are granted at this late date.”

Fortunately, Sakane said, he still has another option, Penn State, one of the schools where he previously sent a “decline” letter. The school agreed to keep a space open for him.