The University of California Board of Regents could approve as early as July a new pathway for students to enter the state's flagship university system, after the UC Assembly of the Academic Senate's nod to the Dual Admissions Program (DAP) last month.

Proposed by UC President Richard C. Atkinson in September, DAP would admit students who are not UC-eligible under current rules, but could be if they transfer successfully from a community college.

The new pathway would be open to high school students who are in the top 4%-12.5% of their graduating class. (Seniors in the top 4% can already be admitted through the Eligibility in the Local Context program, which takes effect for the first time with this fall's freshman class.) DAP students would be admitted simultaneously to a community college and a specific UC campus. After completing a set of required courses over two years at a community college, they would transfer to that UC campus. If the regents pass the measure, students could enter under DAP in 2003.

While the Academic Assembly approved the proposal by a near-unanimous vote during its meeting at UCLA last month, many members voiced strong concerns.

Stephen Yeazell, chair of UCLA's Academic Senate, voted for the plan, but "with extraordinarily great misgivings."

"We're creating a complex, expensive and quite possibly ineffective program," Yeazell said. "In a rational world, we would give Eligibility in the Local Context a few years to shake out and find out a little bit more about the students that we're getting in that program."

He added, "We are creating through the last couple of years an increasingly opaque, not just complex, but an opaque admissions process to the University of California, and I am concerned about the long-run public relations cost of that."

Nevertheless, Yeazell said he voted for it, in part, because "it is a gesture of goodwill toward a group of students who may have very strongly thought that the university was not interested in them and did not have space for them."

According to supporters, DAP could help UC meet enrollment goals set with the state and raise community college transfers from 11,500 to roughly 15,300 by 2005.

Early estimates show that 9,000 students may be eligible for DAP, yielding about 1,000 to 3,000 successful transfers, said UC San Francisco Professor Dorothy Perry, who chairs the UC Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS).

The Assembly approved DAP on the condition that the Office of the President identify adequate funding for counseling and support of the plan, which could amount to $5 million in its first year. In addition, the Assembly stipulated that BOARS must review the plan five years after the first students are admitted.

Some faculty expressed concern that DAP students would only want to enroll in the most selective UC campuses.

But DAP allows campuses to reject students if they don't meet transfer requirements, Perry said. A campus would not have to admit a student to a specific major if he or she did not meet the criteria set for that major. That student could then either enroll with a different major or enter the "referral pool" where they can be accepted by another campus, Perry explained.