Katie Lynch, a senior at Torrance High School, has a 4.3 GPA, runs cross country and plays softball and soccer.She is also a member of the California Scholarship Federation and the National Honor Society and president of Human Relations, a community service club that focuses on a variety of campaigns, like raising money for UNICEF and pediatric cancer patients and sending mail to soldiers serving in Iraq.
Still, she was unsure of her chances as she filled out college applications.
“I wasn’t overly confident applying to anywhere,” Lynch said. “Everyone I talked to didn’t know what to expect this year.”
The sheer size of the 2009 graduating high school class, along with budget cuts at college campuses nationwide, are adding even more doubt to an already unpredictable process.
This year, of UCLA’s 55,676 applicants, more than three-fourths were rejected on March 18, though 90 percent of them were considered eligible, by UC standards.
A relatively small handful of those rejected students, like Lynch, will choose to appeal their admissions decisions, and an even smaller portion of those students may be admitted as undergraduates.
Last year, 1,497 students filed appeals, out of which 70 cases, or less than 5 percent, were then admitted as undergraduates, said Vu Tran, director of undergraduate admissions.
Tran said the number of appeals fluctuate from year to year, but reversals are rare and generally restricted to “very, very unusual situations.”
“The reality is that 90 percent of our applicants are UC eligible, so they are very strong students already. … We received 55,676 applicants this year. Of this number, there were 26,314 with a 4.0 GPA or above.”
Tran said GPAs are just one example of how strong UCLA’s applicant pools are. Accordingly, students who appeal must go beyond reiterating their strengths as a student to provide new and compelling information not included in their original applications.
High grades in senior year are not taken into consideration.
Even appeals showing misreported grades or missing test scores generally don’t make enough of a difference because the pools are already so competitive.
Tran said some students are able to show new awards they have won, such as in the Academic Decathlon, which takes place in April, or in statewide or nationwide competitions that took place after UC applications were due.
Personal circumstances are considered on a case-by-case basis, such as when students are forced to remain in the Los Angeles area for health-related reasons. Even then, Undergraduate Admissions has to consider the levels of treatment available to students.
“Students also assume that moving away from home is a financial burden,” Tran said. “Even though we are sympathetic and understanding, if we use that situation as a basis for appeal, we would have to use that consideration for all students.”
Lynch said she is aware of the small number of appeals that are granted each year.
“I’m not holding on to it, but hopefully something will happen with that,” she said. “So many random people got in this year ““ not that I think I deserve it more, I just don’t know what they’re looking for.”
In her appeal, Lynch explains that she was seriously ill during her freshman year and missed 50 days of school, after shattering her collarbone in a dirt-biking accident, then catching pneumonia.
“I feel as though I spent the entire first semester of my sophomore year catching up on the months that I had missed as a freshman,” she wrote in her appeal. “The rest of my high school experience was unaffected and I feel as though I was able to demonstrate a much more accurate representation of my academic potential.”
Lynch also listed six community events she has planned this year, from organizing Red Ribbon Week to draw attention to drug and alcohol abuse, to organizing a day-long carnival for 115 pediatric patients with special needs.
She is also submitting two letters of recommendation ““ the maximum allowed ““ both from teachers who are UCLA alumni. Tran said about half of the students appealing send in letters, and that letters reiterating a student’s strengths are in and of themselves not necessarily going to affect the decision. More effective are letters that confirm the primary reason affecting a student’s application.
Though Lynch was also accepted into Boston College, Boston University and UC Irvine and was also chosen as a Regents Scholar at UC Santa Barbara, she plans to stay in Los Angeles. Her brother is a first-year here, and she wants to be part of a “community kind of school” with the kind of spirit she saw when visiting UCLA and a certain private school across town.
Lynch may have to wait three weeks before she hears back about the status of her appeal, which could be after May 1, when most universities require commitments from incoming freshmen.
“I feel like it’s my last chance to get into my first-choice school, and I don’t want to regret not doing it,” she said. “I don’t want to get my hopes up, but I feel like I really should just try.”
E-mail Kuo at akuo@media.ucla.edu.