By Noah Grand
Daily Bruin Reporter
All nine UC campuses are inaccessible, unaffordable and
inadmissable for low and median income students, according to a
study released Monday.
But 90 percent of California’s public universities are
accessible, even for low-income students, the report stated.
The Lumina Foundation for Education, a non-profit organization
trying to raise access to higher education, compared statistics
from 2,887 two- and four-year colleges and universities across the
country, looking for patterns among states, according to study
co-author Derek Price.
“One of our objectives in a report like this is to raise
awareness to get stakeholders to agree on common facts,”
Price said.
The study determined which schools were accessible based on two
criteria. A university must regularly admit students with average
academic criteria to be considered admissible, and college expenses
— including room and board, tuition and books — must compare
favorably with available federal, state and university aid to be
considered affordable.
Because the UC only accepts the top 12.5 percent of graduating
California high school seniors and expects larger family
contributions to pay for a student’s education, all UC
campuses fail to meet either criterion, Price said.
All UC campuses were also classified by the study as
unaffordable for students whose families make less than $62,500,
while almost every California State University and California
Community College was affordable.
The study’s conclusion about the UC’s affordability
is incorrect, said UC spokesman Charles McFadden.
“It is simply not true to say that for qualified students
that UC is either inaccessible or unaffordable,” McFadden
said.
The UC’s tuition fees have not increased in the last seven
years, he said, adding that the UC is more affordable than
comparable public universities across the nation.
The study, however, did not directly compare individual
universities.
The UC expects students to borrow more money and expects a
larger family contribution to a student’s education than
other California public universities, Price said.
McFadden contested these claims, saying 23 percent of freshmen
entering the UC in 1999 had parents with under $30,000 in income
per year.
He also said that 59 percent of UC undergraduates received some
form of financial support in the 1999-2000 school year.
The state Master Plan for higher education, which requires that
the UC only accept the top 12.5 percent of California’s high
school seniors, also prevents all UC schools from meeting the
study’s admissability criterion.
The study defines an “admissable” college as one
open to students whose test scores and grades place them between
the 25th and 75th percentile of that state’s graduating high
school seniors.