Wednesday, 4/30/97 Number of LAUSD grads enrolling at UCs declines Poor UCLA outreach, bad counseling cited as possible causes
By J. Sharon Yee
Daily Bruin Contributor
Melissa Martinez did not go to Franklin High School in Los Angeles like she was supposed to.
Instead, Martinez, a second-year international economics student, went to Alverno High School, a private Catholic high school in Pasadena.
Her experiences with college preparation seem to differ greatly from those at the public high schools in the neighborhood she lives in.
While many of Martinez' classmates went to private colleges like Stanford and Vassar, she said students at her friends' public schools "didn't seem to get the attention they needed."
"It was harder to get appointments with the counselors or have close relationships with their teachers," at Franklin, she said.
According to statistics provided by the Academic Planning and Budget Office, 51 percent, or 12, 273, of UCLA undergraduate students come from Los Angeles County.
Community leaders have expressed concern that UCLA is underserving the high school graduates of urban L.A.
Recently, city commissioners have called for a plan to address the decline in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) graduates entering the UC system.
Statistics from the California High School Performance Reports presented last Tuesday by the State Department of Education indicated that only 63.5 percent of LAUSD students graduate from high school.
Martinez saw this situation in her neighborhood. She explains how the people around her, students included, seemed surprised when she told them she was going to study at UCLA.
"I don't think anyone's told them that you apply for admission to college right out of high school, much less attend right after graduation," she said. "I think they are more geared to community colleges."
Approximately 7.3 percent of the 142,516 senior high school students enrolled in the district go on to attend UC schools.
In comparison, 89.3 percent of Orange County students graduate from high school, and 9.9 percent go on to attend UCs.
Generally, the University of California is supposed to attract the top 12.5 percent of students in their graduating class, said Kay Ochi, the college counselor at Fairfax High School in mid-city L.A.
The four-year completion rate for Fairfax is at 42.3 percent, well under the district average, with 7.3 percent of graduates continuing on to UCs.
Despite such low percentages, however, the counselors at Fairfax "never discourage students and let them apply wherever they want to," Ochi said.
Though considered to be the top choices of Fairfax students, schools such as UCLA and UC Berkeley still seem relatively inaccessible to most students, and counselors often encourage them to pick second and third choices, she said.
A major hindrance for many students is a lack of English skills, as many are non-native speakers.
Verbal scores on the SAT tend to suffer because of this, and thus makes it more difficult for them to be competitive with other students in the state, Ochi concluded.
Like Martinez, Julie Garza didn't go to school in her neighborhood. Garza, a UCLA second-year business and economics student, attended elementary school in L.A., but her family moved away in junior high.
Originally slated for Franklin High School, she instead went to John F. Kennedy High School in the San Fernando Valley.
Nonetheless, some of her best friends attended Franklin, and after graduation, her family moved back to the area she grew up in.
Growing up in a "pretty bad neighborhood," Garza said, "it was less expected of us to go to college, and UCLA in particular." Though she received encouragement from her family to pursue a college education, many of her friends did not.
"In schools, there were certain people who encouraged you, but a lot of the encouragement didn't come from home," she said. "Mainly because (families) don't really understand the point of school, why someone would want it so badly."
In addition, she continued, the support at her high school was not easily accessible.
"I had to search out college counselors," Garza said, "If you don't look like college material, (counselors) won't give you the right classes to prepare you for college admission."
Garza also felt that it was more expected of Kennedy students that they would go to college.
She says that because expectations were not as high, "It seems like Franklin made a bigger deal of students' college admissions," often posting up lists of which students were accepted into which schools, something that was not done at Kennedy.
A college counselor at an Eastside school who asked to remain nameless expressed concern and discussed possible reasons why students from Los Angeles seem to be underrepresented at UCLA, faulting both the university and LAUSD.
"College admissions are getting more and more competitive each year and with average combined SAT scores of 1,000, a lot of students (at this high school) are not qualified to go," she said.
However, she also attributed low admittance and enrollment rates to the lack of involvement from UCLA itself.
"UCLA is not doing a lot of recruitment, especially of minorities," she said, "They used to have an outreach person here at least once a week for eight hours a day, but now we're lucky to have them come three or four times a year."
She attributed this to the budget cuts in the outreach programs at the university, but also suggested that Proposition 209 might have had some influence as well.
Some of the other reasons included common ones - the university being too big to accommodate the needs of students, the phenomenon of many qualified students opting to go to colleges out of state, and financial aid packages being too small.
LAUSD board member David Tokofsky agreed that outreach from the university is lacking.
"Does UCLA hold a weekend retreat for inner city kids? No. Does it offer a summer training institute for our Advanced Placement teachers? No," he said.
Several UCLA organizations do sponsor outreach, such as the Community Based Learning Program and the Renaissance Program, which brings LAUSD students to campus to meet undergraduates.
Other UCLA students admitted they did not attend Los Angeles city high schools, choosing to enroll at private or magnet schools instead. Diana Rivas, a first-year mathematics student, is one example.
Though Rivas attended Garfield High School, located on the Eastside, she was part of a magnet program specially designed for college-bound students.
Magnet-program students tend to feel isolated from the rest of the students in their class and are therefore unaware of what kinds of goals their peers have about things like college, Rivas said.
"Students in the magnet program tend to have higher aspirations than those not in it," she added.
John Marshall High School is an example of a school where, despite encouragement from faculty, statistics reveal that only 55.3 percent of ninth-graders graduate.
Audrey Smith, a college counselor at Marshall, discussed the advantages to having a very extensive college center at the school, which includes computers, pamphlets, books and, occasionally, speakers from universities.
She also emphasized the importance of letting ninth-graders know the importance of pursuing a college education.
Twila Wilkin, a senior studying cognitive science, graduated from Marshall four years ago and, like 33 percent of students in Los Angeles county, attended a local community college after graduation.
"Marshall was one of the few high schools in the area that offered AP classes, which indirectly helped me prepare for my college education," she said.
"But in terms of direct encouragement, most of that came from the parents and families of the students," she said.
"The resources were there if you needed them, but they were not promoted very well," she added.
Wilkin explained that one of the main reasons for not immediately coming to UCLA was because, as an undeclared student, "(I) didn't have $5,000 a year to spend not knowing what I was going to do."
Previous Daily Bruin Stories:
, April 8, 1997
'I'm going to college', November 4, 1996