Friday, January 17, 1997
By Tiffany Lauter
Daily Bruin Contributor
Every fall, thousands of students sort through a truckload of
catalogs, pamphlets and brochures to complete the daunting task of
selecting and applying to college.
For prospective UC students, this scenario will disappear with
the introduction of Pathways, the University of California’s
"paperless admissions process."
This program, located on the World Wide Web (http://
www.ucop.edu/pathways), was first tested at UC Irvine and six
California high schools in 1995. Last November, the system expanded
to 58 high schools across the state.
Dennis Galligani, vice president of Student Academic Services
and member of the program’s task force, predicts this system will
not only assist prospective and current students with information
about undergraduate education, admissions and aid, but will also
ease the workload of the admissions offices.
"It is an immense task to receive 70,000 applications and
distribute them to the appropriate campuses," he said. "Pathways
will streamline this procedure."
Last November, several students were able to participate in this
streamlined process by abandoning their typewriter and bottles of
white-out to apply by computer instead.
"With Pathways, everything was at my fingertips. Without it I
would have had to consult numerous catalogs to get the information
I needed," said Doron Beeri, a senior at Taft High School in
Woodland Hills.
"Some of the great features are the ability to e-mail
(Pathways@ucop.edu) the admissions office with any questions … it
lets you know if you made a mistake and you receive a verification
message that they got your application. You no longer have to worry
if it got lost in the mail," he said.
Pathways is not only a useful tool for perspective applicants,
but also for current students.
According to Carla Ferri, director of undergraduate admissions,
students can utilize the program to locate information regarding
majors, campus life, housing, scholarships and financial aid. The
system is currently unable to process financial aid forms, because
the government is still requiring applicants to fill out their
forms.
"We have sent staff to Washington to convince and coordinate an
on-line electronic application process," Ferri said. "It’s logical,
because we both have common data requirements. It doesn’t make
sense for the student to keep filling out the same
information."
She says that university officials are making advances, and
speculated that on-line financial aid information will be available
in the near future.
While this program is designed to primarily assist undergraduate
students, Ferri speculates that once it is fine tuned it will be
expanded to also include graduate students.
While Pathways could be a helpful tool to applicants, UC Regent
Bill Bagley says he is concerned as to the availability of the new
system.
"Do we know that every student has access?" he asked Galligani
at the Jan. 17 regents meeting. "We do not want to preference, so
as to not discriminate."
"Probably not, we have addressed this issue. We are working hard
to make it available to everyone," responded Galligani.
Galligani added that although some schools do not have the
Pathways software, students may use public libraries to access the
information.