Several Budget and Legislative Restraints on Freshman Admissions to the UC System

Several Budget and Legislative Restrictions that Restrain Freshmen Admissions to the UC System

There are too many, and numerically arbitrary, conditions on UC admissions imposed by the legislature, which act to constrain UC freshman and transfer admissions, and UC budgets.  Let’s list them briefly to start, then refer to more detailed discussions on the web.

1.        In-state freshmen admissions were increased by 5,000 system-wide in 2016-17, and will be increased by another 2,500 over each of the next two years.

2.        Out-of-state students pay $27,000 more a year in tuition, and help fund the tuition waivers for modest income in-state students, and expand our campus faculty and classrooms.

3.       The legislature has fixed out-of-state admissions at 18% at UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UC Riverside, and UC Merced.  Since UCLA (22.8%), UC Berkeley (24.4%), UC San Diego (22.9%), and UC Irvine (18.9%) exceed that ratio, they will be fixed at the 2017-2018 enrollment.  If campuses fail to meet these restrictions, the system loses $18.5 million.

4.       The in-state-freshman to in-state-transfer admission ratio has been fixed to an arbitrary (magical?) ratio of no more than 2:1, despite already being at 2.3:1, and never having obtained the 2:1 ratio.  The system loses $50 million if this is not achieved.

 

Since the State of California funding of the overall UC budget has declined to only 22%, and the funding of undergraduate education may be only about 50%, with students contributing the rest from tuition, the use of out-of-state tuition funding and the desire to meet the budget restoring ratios in condition (3) and (4), there has been downward pressure on in-state student admissions, exactly what the legislature did not intend.

 

“Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice” (with magical ratios), modified from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion, and quoted in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

 

Any economist would have graduated the reward system toward achieving the goals, and not use all-or-nothing.  Any analysis would have shown that the restrictions could backfire on in-state-freshman enrollment.  Any experienced legislature would have built in yearly reviews to see if the goals were even achievable, and what their effect on campus funding would be on the quality of education for all four years of an undergraduate’s career.  The stated review period is an irrelevant five years.

 

I have had not had experience as a UCI administrator.  I thank the Chair of the UCI Academic Senate, Prof. Emeritus William H. Parker of Physics and Astronomy, for explaining all of this to me.  Any mistakes in this article are mine alone.

 

The transfer student ratio is examined in detail in an article by Jacob Jackson in the PPIC (Public Policy Institute of California) Higher Education Center, June 1, 2017.  “Since 2011, freshman applicants have increased by 31%, while transfer applications have declined by 1%.”

 

The UC enrollment is covered by Teresa Watanabe in the Los Angeles Times on July 6, 2017, and in many other articles.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
This entry was posted in UC Admissions, UC Irvine. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply