Picture Beginning to Emerge of Admissions At UC In the Post-Affirmative Action Era

Notice: A Publication of the Academic Senate, University of California, vol. 20, No.7

May 1996

Picture Beginning to Emerge of Admissions At UC In the Post-Affirmative Action Era

Last month the Office of the President released the final draft of its Guide lines for implementation of University Policy on Undergraduate Admissions-the regulations that will govern University of California admissions in the post-affirmative action era. President Atkinson may issue these guidelines as early as this month, thus making them policy, after which the other shoe will drop on admissions regulations: campuses will use the universitywide guidelines as a framework within which they will construct their own individual policies.

This campus work is going on now to some extent, as the general shape of the universitywide guidelines has been clear since December, when a first draft of them was issued. Nevertheless, most campuses face a host of decisions about what their new undergraduate admissions policies will be. This is so not only because of affirmative action considerations, but because of a more general change in the nature of admissions at the University of California.

The Regents approval of item SP-l in July 1995 did several things apart from forbidding the use of race, gender, or ethnicity in admissions. It stipulated that between 50 and 75 percent of any entering class must be admitted solely on the basis of "academic achievement," whereas previously the range had been from 40 to 60 percent; it mandated the creation of a task force for the enhancement of outreach to disadvantaged students; and it affirmed a UC commitment to "diversity," though it noted this was to be achieved "through the preparation and empowerment of all students in this state rather than through a system of artificial preferences."

As a means of implementing these stipulations, President Jack Peltason formed a Task Force on Undergraduate Admissions Criteria in September of 1995. In writing its report, this group effectively drafted the universitywide guidelines that are about to become policy. (The task force was a true collaborative panel: chaired by Arnold Leiman, head of the Senate's Academic Council, and Dennis Galligani, UCOP's assistant vice president for student academic services, it had on it 16 administrators, 2 students and 11 faculty; of the latter, four were members of BOARS, the Senate's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools.)

The task force decided that the University needed to employ a greater number of academic admissions criteria than it does at present; these are the criteria that will be used to admit the 50 to 75 percent of each class admitted solely on the basis of "academic achievement." Meanwhile, UC's so-called "supplemental" criteria were directly altered by the elimination of race and gender as factors, but the task force also saw fit to make other alterations to these criteria. It is these supplemental criteria that will be used in conjunction with the academic criteria to admit the remaining 25 to 50 percent of each entering class.

Changes in Academic Criteria

At present, only four factors may be taken into account at UC in assessing a student's academic achievement: grade point-average in required courses, standardized test scores, the number of courses completed beyond the minimum needed, and the number of accelerated or "honors" courses taken. Under the new guidelines, however, campuses will be allowed to consider all of these factors and five more besides: the quality of the senior year program, the quality of academic performance relative to the educational opportunities available in a given high school, outstanding performance in one or more subject areas, completion of special projects in an academic field, and "recent, marked improvement in academic performance." In short, "academic achievement" may now mean specialized achievement, achievement later in high school, and achievement relative to programs offered in the high school. What's the rationale for the change?

"It gives us more ability to sift through the background of the individual," says Carla Ferri, UC's director of undergraduate admissions. Bob Laird, the director of undergraduate admissions at UC Berkeley, points out that his campus gets a tremendous number of applicants with high GPAs and standardized test scores. Additional criteria, such as those proposed, will make it easier to make judgments about students who might be hard to distinguish on the basis of grades and test scores alone.

Credit for Late Achievement

With respect to the credit that will be allowed for "late-achievement" in high school, Stanley Williamson, the chair of BOARS, points out that there is a real phenomenon of "senior-itis" in high schools, whereby students do the necessary college prep work only through their junior year and coast in their senior year. The result, he says, is that "when they come to UC, they're rusty in their first year." Adding admissions credit for later achievement, Williamson says, is aimed at inducing college-bound students to do meaningful work as seniors, thus making them better prepared as college freshmen.

Of the new academic criteria, only one, relating to opportunities available at the high school, stands to have an effect on ethnic diversity, but not as much as might be thought at first glance; the admissions task force noted that "a sizable fraction of underrepresented UC admits come from high schools that are neither 'disadvantaged' nor predominately minority schools."

The signal change in the supple mental criteria is, of course, the removal of race or gender as factors in admissions. Beyond this, however, the task force decided that "special interests and skills" such as a "demonstrated interest in and exploration of other cultures or proficiencies in other languages" might earn a student admissions credit; it al lowed the completion of "special projects," either inside or outside the school, as an admissions factor; and it further defined the nature of "disadvantage." Five disadvantage criteria were mentioned previously: "disabilities, personal difficulties, low family income, refugee status and veteran status." Several more will now join these, including a "difficult personal or family situation," a "need to work," or being in "a first generation to attend college."

The lists of supplemental and academic criteria represent a kind of menu from which campuses may pick and choose, but not go beyond. An item that is selected by a campus will then, in all likelihood, have to be given a sharper definition, after which it may need to be assigned a "weight" relative to other items. Take, for example, the supple mental criterion of an "exploration of other cultures." If this is to be used, does taking part in, say, Irish dancing qualify a student for credit? If so, how about square dancing? Whatever is allowed, what weight should be given to this kind of experience? At Berkeley, Director Laird says, the faculty committee that makes undergraduate admissions policy is now at the stage of selecting the criteria that will be used, but it has yet to begin the process of defining or weighting.

Shift to 'Holistic' Reviews

The analysis of admissions brought about by the Regents vote seems to have acted as a catalyst for a more general admissions change, though it is one that UC seemed ready to make anyway: a move away from a "formula-based" approach, toward the kind of "holistic" review procedure that has long been used by many top-quality public and private institutions. To be sure, some campuses may not move very far to ward such a system, but the new, expanded list of admissions criteria provides a push in this direction.

The move to this procedure is perhaps most notable at Berkeley, which, like all UC campuses except UCLA, employs an "academic index score" as a means of assigning an academic rank to students applying for admission. (It is arrived at by multiplying GPA by 1,000 and adding this number to the sum of the student's standardized test scores.) Employment of the measure is about to change at UCB.

"The [Berkeley admissions] commit tee has determined that it no longer wants to use the index," Director Laird says, but instead will use a more comprehensive review of the students' back ground." Grades and test scores will still carry great weight in assessing a student's academic fitness, he says, but all academic factors-including selections from the new criteria-will be a part of the assessment in the future.

Laird acknowledges that this kind of assessment "may appear to be more subjective" but adds that a firm set of institutional values and a rigorous "norming" procedure can guard against the possibility of unfair decisions. He notes that in Berkeley's recent admissions process, 8,000 applications were read in a second-phase admissions cycle, each of them twice. Admissions policy was that any discrepancy among readers greater than one point on a five-point scale would trigger a third reading. So close were the assessments, however, that fewer than 10 percent of the applications required such a reading.

When a broad review of academic fitness is coupled to a comprehensive review of a student's non-academic credentials, the result is what has been termed a "holistic" admissions process.

UCLA has for several years eschewed use of an academic index in favor of a more comprehensive assessment of student academic achievement. UCLA admissions director Rae Lee Siporin is now beginning to think, how ever, that a greater movement toward holistic admissions might be good for her campus. Currently, she points out, every student who is not admitted through academics alone gets a holistic review-of academic and non-academic factors.

"My ideal would be that we look at everybody holistically," she says, noting that admissions officers learn a great deal by looking at, for example, applicant essays, something that is not done for those admitted on academics alone.

Predicting Effects on Diversity

The Regents passage of SP-1 may end up having an effect on UC's general admissions practices, but it was aimed at eliminating the use of race, gender and ethnicity as factors in admissions. All UC admissions experts who have tried to predict the effect of this change have essentially come to the same conclusion: among regularly admitted students, enrollments of underrepresented minorities will be reduced in the system as a whole, though by how much is unclear.

To be sure, SP-1 stands to have little effect on such campuses as Santa Cruz Santa Barbara and Riverside, which essentially admit all eligible applicants. The primary effects will be at Berkeley and Los Angeles. Critics of the forecasted systemwide drop in minority enrollments say that such a prediction is based on an unknown: how many minority students who are refused admissions at UCB or UCLA will decline ad mission to another UC campus. The effect on the big campuses seems less hard to predict, however. At UCLA, Siporin says, "you will see significant changes in race and ethnicity."

When the task force on undergraduate admissions grappled with the question of how diversity might be maintained without the use of racial preferences, it looked at a number of scenarios in which race might be mapped to other factors. Indeed, in simulations it ran, UC San Diego found that it could theoretically preserve its ethnic diversity by altering the weights given to such supple mental factors as low income.

In the time since the task force re port was completed, however, the UC Regents have made it clear that they do not want UC to be devising "surrogates for race," in the words of Regent Ward Connerly. Given this, the University seems to have abandoned the idea of engineering diversity by any means in admissions. This essentially leaves the University with one "tool" for maintaining diversity: outreach programs in K-12, which UC is now trying to strengthen through the work of another task force.

Carl Gutierrez-Jones,

Department of English

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu