Students vying for a spot at the University of California next fall are brainier, more diverse and less well-to-do than in the last couple of years, according to new data showing a record number of applicants to the prestigious public school.
Even as UC charges students more money while offering fewer courses, the number of undergraduate applicants rose by 7,328 students over last year, a nearly 6 percent increase, with transfers making up two-thirds of the boost.
In all, a record 134,029 hopefuls have applied to UC: 100,320 for a freshman spot, and 33,709 asking to transfer in.
Despite student interest, California's financial crisis could mean a smaller freshman class next fall than in the current year - which is already smaller than last year's.
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Those applying to any of UC's nine undergraduate campuses for next fall have slightly higher grade-point averages than in the past two years, with the average among current applicants at 3.69, a higher A-minus than last year's, 3.67, and the year before, 3.66.
Students applying to UC Berkeley were the brainiest of them all, with an overall grade-point average of 3.85 - just below straight A's.
UC applicants' SAT scores were up, too, averaging 1,731 out of a possible 2,400. Scores rose two years in a row at every campus, with Berkeley again attracting the top scorers. They averaged 1,841.
Eighty-two percent of freshmen applicants were from California, while the rest were from out of state or from other countries. Among transfer applicants, 87 percent were from California.
The report offered ethnic breakouts only for applicants from California.
Among those freshman applicants, the data show a plunge of nearly 10 percent in the "white/other" category to 25,180 students - but Wilbur said it may be because the federal government no longer lets colleges offer "other" on applications. That decline coincided with a 64 percent rise in students declining to check any ethnic box at all.
At the same time, more than 31 percent of applicants came from "underrepresented ethnic groups" - black, Latino and American Indian students. That's up 30 percent from last year, and 28 percent from the year before. Applications from black students alone climbed more than 9 percent since last year, to 4,736 - a nearly 16 percent rise over two years.
News of the growing interest among those groups comes a day after researchers at the Education Trust in Washington, D.C., released a study showing that flagship public universities, including UC Berkeley, enroll few black, Latino and American Indian students. Just 17 percent of UC Berkeley students were from those groups, it found.
Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/15/BA791BICMU.DTLYesterday, I posted
another SF Chron article about a study showing that UC admission of black/latino/Native American students is among the lowest in the US.
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