Y'all Come!

How many more can get in?

The legislature would like every Californian who applies to UC to get in, and to get into the UC of their choice. But the capacity isn't there. The LA Times has the latest wrinkle of this story:

The University of California on Tuesday unveiled its first-ever systemwide admission guarantee for qualified transfer student applicants — but access to particular campuses is not assured. To receive the guarantee, community college students would need to complete a newly unified set of general education courses required by both UC and California State University, complete specific coursework needed for UC majors, and earn a minimum GPA. 

Those who are not admitted to their campuses of choice would be offered a spot at UC Santa Cruz, UC Merced or UC Riverside, a UC admissions official told legislators at an Assembly budget hearing Tuesday. The intent is to simplify the transfer path so students clearly understand the requirements and don’t take more courses than needed, UC officials said...

Three-fourths of applicants from state community colleges are admitted to UC, more than half of those enrolled pay no tuition and 89% graduate — a rate slightly higher than those who start as first-year students and significantly higher than the 55% national average, according to UC data. One-third of UC undergraduates are transfer students...

But in the past few years of pandemic turmoil, UC and CSU have struggled with declining transfer applications as community college enrollments have plunged. UC transfer applications have fallen at every campus, declining systemwide to 39,363 for fall 2023 from 46,155 for fall 2021. Even UCLA, the nation’s most applied-to campus, saw a drop to 23,954 from 28,440 during that same period. Last year, UCLA increased the number of transfer applicants offered admission and was ultimately able to enroll more of them for fall 2022...

But not everyone embraced the UC proposal, favoring instead a single transfer pathway that community college students could complete for admission to either UC or CSU. Some have pushed UC to extend an admission guarantee to those who complete a community college associate degree for transfer...

It’s unclear how much difference a systemwide transfer admission guarantee would actually make. Six of the nine UC undergraduate campuses already offer transfer guarantee programs, and most omit certain majors from the program due to the high number of applicants for limited seats. UC Davis, for instance, excludes its new major in data science. UC Irvine omits art, business administration, dance, music, nursing science and all majors in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. The Irvine campus does offer the guarantee for other popular majors, such as biological sciences and psychological sciences...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-28/uc-proposes-first-time-systemwide-g-admission-to-all-qualified-transfer-students.

By the way, whatever happened to UCLA's $80 million recently-acquired Palos Verdes campus? So far, it is unclear how that campus, which had a few hundred students under its prior owner, is going to make a meaningful dent in UCLA's capacity problem. As we noted at the time of its purchase, it is geographically isolated from Westwood, essentially unreachable by public transit, and difficult to access even by car.