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Admissions must be clarified for public

BY ROBERT C. DYNES

As you may know, several newspaper stories recently have questioned why some high-SAT-scoring students have been denied admission to UC Berkeley while some lower-SAT-scoring applicants have been admitted.

There are several good reasons underpinning that finding, and they have largely to do with those high-SAT students being from out of state, or applying in highly competitive engineering majors or having low high school grades. But I want to make a couple of broader points, because this issue goes to the heart of the University of California’s historical responsibility to educate California’s very best students and to draw them from all walks of life — to serve both high quality and broad access.

First of all, it is important for the public to be able to question what we do at the university. Public institutions are accountable to the people, and I think we owe it to the public to make our processes as clear and understandable as possible.

I also believe that this current issue taps into some very real feelings among the public that we can’t ignore — those held by parents of good students in good schools who have worked hard, done everything they were told, and still been turned away from their first-choice campuses. We need to be sensitive to that. We need to be receptive to criticism, we need to look seriously at ourselves, and when we identify problems in our processes, we need to fix them.

But we also need to do a better job of helping people understand how these decisions get made in the first place. We at UC need to work on the clarity of our admissions procedures from the public’s vantage point. And if we do that — if we help people understand the process better — some of this furor that has come from comparing students’ SAT scores may die down. And rightfully so: Merit and promise come from much more than an SAT score. Creativity, imagination, motivation and just plain work ethic have to account for something.

We also need to build understanding in California that UC is not a hierarchy — it’s not a tiered system with a lone flagship and several lesser campuses. It is a true system of distinguished universities, six of them members of the Association of American Universities. In that kind of system, there is no bright line in admissions — we don’t just rank students from the top and allocate them out to the campuses. Indeed, every campus draws students from the full range of the eligibility pool, looking at the variety of qualifications they present.

I think that is the right approach if each of our campuses is to continue fulfilling the University of California’s historical obligations — and if we are to provide the best possible educational experience for the students attending each one of those campuses.

Dynes is president of the University of California. This piece was excerpted from a speech on college access issues he delivered Oct. 23. The full text of the speech can be found at www.universityofcalifornia.edu/president/speeches/102303diversity.pdf.