In a system-wide movement that could change the University of
California’s admissions process, a group of UC professors
Friday proposed expanding a holistic approach to all 10
campuses.
Holistic admissions are already used at UC Berkeley and are in
the process of being established at UCLA.
The professors presented their proposal at a conference at UC
Berkeley that centered around Proposition 209 and equal
opportunities in education. The proposal would put more emphasis on
an applicant’s personal background, in addition to
considering academic qualifications.
Proposition 209, passed ten years ago, is a measure which
prohibits public institutions from the use of race or gender as a
factor in public hiring or admissions.
“There’s a lot more to picking good students than
simply looking at their grades and their test scores,” said
Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu, co-director of the Chief
Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity,
which sponsored the symposium.
Because of their emphasis on personal circumstances and ability
to overcome adversity, holistic admissions have been touted by some
educators as a way to increase numbers of underrepresented
minorities.
The professors said low-income students have a disadvantage in
terms of academic eligibility since they were less able to afford
education assistance programs, such as SAT preparation classes.
UC Berkeley adopted holistic admissions several years ago, and
has since seen their numbers of admitted minority students
climb.
But some students said just because an admissions process works
at one university does not mean that it will be as successful
across all the UC campuses.
“Berkeley put in a lot of time and money making sure it
would work under their campus. Their numbers (of minority admits)
are great, but if you put it indiscriminately to other campuses, I
don’t know how it would work out,” said Tina Park,
external vice president of UCLA’s Undergraduate Students
Association Council.
Written by four UC professors, the proposal would break the
UC’s admissions process down into two groups ““ one in
which admission would automatically be given to the top 5 or 6
percent of high school graduates based on grades, and another that
would select students based on holistic review.
All students would still have to have at least a 2.6 grade point
average to be eligible for admission.
Though factors to be considered under holistic admissions could
include socio-economic determinants such as whether a student has
overcome personal hardships, the report did not lay out explicit
plans as to how these students would be selected.
Park said though the holistic approach has been fairly
successful at UC Berkeley, it is not a complete step to
nondiscrimination in the admissions process.
“It’s a better option than what we have now, but it
seems like a bad solution to a bigger problem. It’s not the
step to equity we want to see in our admissions process,”
Park said.
But for a system-wide change to occur, the UC Board of Regents
must first approve any changes.
UC President Robert Dynes said though the ideas brought forward
by the professors will be taken into consideration, he cautioned
against overturning the current admissions process
“It is a set of provocative, but not earth-shattering,
ideas by a lot of smart people,” Dynes told the San Francisco
Chronicle.
Lucero Chavez, the undergraduate representative on the
undergraduate admissions workgroup, said when the holistic approach
is applied to UCLA she doesn’t expect much change.
For it to be applied to the rest of the UC, Chavez said, seems
to be a “solution to a problem that’s not going to be
effective.”