During last week’s University of California Board of Regents meeting, a discussion on changing the current UC high school curriculum requirement in order to increase minority student enrollment shed light on a deeply rooted problem in California’s K-12 education system.
The UC has a set of classes each high school student must take to be eligible for admission called the A-G requirements.
At the regents meeting UC President Robert Dynes suggested, with support from the board, abandoning some of those requirements that are not offered by traditionally underperforming and minority high schools.
While it is unfortunate that some high school students are ineligible to attend the UC simply because they grew up in a district with poor schools, it is not the responsibility of the university to lower its admissions standards to accommodate these students.
This is by no means a final decision, and many decisions about admissions are left up to the systemwide academic senate, but this also comes in the wake of harsh public criticism about declining minority enrollment in several UC schools.
This proposal must be withdrawn as an option for addressing the issue of low minority enrollment, as it is at best a temporary fix and more likely a danger to public education in California.
The UC should not be offering a Band-Aid at all ““ this problem needs more than just a surface-level cover-up.
Instead, state lawmakers need to address the problem by implementing and funding programs that ensure every high school in California provides the classes students need to be UC eligible.
The state legislature, year after year, threatens budget cuts to California’s K-12 and higher education. This year, because of a budget compromise, many school districts could lose all of their discretionary budgets.
Continually underfunding schools and revoking promised funding is not a way to ensure adequate staffing and courses for high schools and could prevent schools that do not offer A-G courses from adopting them.
The UC should not be forced to lower its admissions standards when in reality it is the responsibility of the state to prioritize and fund K-12 education so all students meet the university’s rigorous academic standards for admittance.
The high school curriculum requirements currently used by the UC system should be seen as a benchmark for high school students to strive for ““ lowering the requirements would put less pressure on the public education system to improve.
In fact, lowering the requirements would send the message to public schools that such classes are no longer as important as they once were, which in turn threatens the enrollment and support of these classes at high schools that do provide them.
Most importantly, relaxing such requirements would reinforce the deficient state of high schools that do not offer such courses, as they would no longer have the incentive to add such classes to enhance their offered curriculum.
The proposal to decrease certain requirements therefore not only fails to fix but also reinforces the fundamental problem of high schools failing to provide students the opportunity to take classes that better prepare them for higher education.