By Benjamin Parke

Daily Bruin Reporter

An admissions plan UC President Richard Atkinson proposed last year is encountering a few shoals it will have to navigate – particularly at UCLA – before its implementation.

Partly as a way of meeting the demand for higher education in the state – partly as a way of increasing the diversity of the UC student body – Atkinson’s proposal is now under consideration by faculty organizations.

The idea was to provide another way to offer UC admission to public high school graduates who didn’t make the cut in either of two other possible ways: being in the top 12.5 percent of their class statewide, or being in the top 4 percent of their own high school.

The latter method, as proposed by Gov. Gray Davis, was recently adopted as a way of admitting students from low-performing high schools.

Atkinson has proposed capturing the remaining top 12.5 percent of public high school graduates school-by-school.

Those students would receive an offer of admission to a specific UC campus, contingent upon completing a course of study at a California community college.

UC already admits transfer students from the California community college system, but not with such an offer right out of high school. It is the very strength of UCLA’s transfer programs that is posing a hurdle for the proposal at this campus.

“There’s a bunch of complexities which flow from the fact that UCLA runs the biggest and most successful transfer program in the system,” said Stephen Yeazell, chair of the UCLA division of the Academic Senate – the faculty body that shares governance with the university.

UC Spokesman Terry Lightfoot said the president’s office is taking that into consideration.

“Clearly we would try to take advantage of those existing structures,” Lightfoot said.

Currently, the campus enrolls 2,800 junior-level transfer students each year. It also has the distinction of admitting transfer students by major, requiring applicants to meet the criteria for the course of study they choose.

As an example of something he said needs to be worked out in the proposal, Yeazell posed a situation in which an applicant is granted provisional admission to UCLA for the business and economics major – which is highly impacted and requires a high GPA.

Suppose, Yeazell said, that the student did pretty well in community college studies, but not enough for the major’s requirement.

“Should, or can that student be redirected?” asked Yeazell, who forwarded similar UCLA faculty concerns to Michael Cowan, chair of the UC Academic Council and faculty representative to the Board of Regents.

In announcing his proposal in September, Atkinson had asked Cowan to obtain faculty input from all the campuses. Those responses led to a series of changes in the proposal.

The UC Academic Council has endorsed the concept in principle, Cowan said. He added it would possibly be taken up by the UC Academic Assembly in May.

Atkinson cited several reasons for introducing his proposal, such as accommodating Tidal Wave II enrollment growth – the expected 60,000 additional students by 2010 – and improving relations with California community colleges.

“Most importantly, it will send a clear signal to students all over the state, from urban and rural schools, from all ethnic groups and all socio-economic groups, that they have a clear path to a UC degree,” Atkinson said in a statement announcing his initiative.

According to his office, preliminary calculations indicate that 34 to 36 percent of students eligible for dual admissions would be underrepresented minorities.

Regent Ward Connerly has not come to a conclusion as to the merits of the proposal, but said it would conform to SP-1 and Proposition 209 based on what he’s seen so far. Those two policies ended affirmative action on the university and state levels, respectively.

“As long as it’s race-blind, it would comply,” Connerly said.

He did question whether dual admissions would adversely affect the quality of the student body, widening access while lowering standards.

Connerly said he wasn’t sure what Atkinson’s intent is, but said policies designed to increase minority enrollment can be “sugar-coated” with other stated aims.

He wondered whether the purpose of this policy is to make the university more accessible to African American and Latino students who aren’t academically prepared.

“If they were equally competent, we wouldn’t be going through this, would we?” said Connerly.

Yeazell acknowledged the significance of the proposal’s affect on diversity.

“Were it not for 209 and SP-1, this would not be a proposal that would have the kind of steam behind it that it does,” said Yeazell.

The response from UCLA faculty stressed that UC estimates of minorities in the dual admissions pool were “very preliminary.” Yeazell said a full analysis would require a list of the targeted students in every California public high school.

“There’s a kind of chicken-and-the-egg problem here,” said Yeazell, adding that the high schools won’t produce those lists until there is a reason to do so.

UC Faculty Representative Cowan said the number seems fairly small. The figures he has seen indicate that 2,000 applications from underrepresented minorities could be expected each year, and the numbers enrolling would be even smaller.

The proposal has to be seen in the context of all of the university’s outreach efforts, Cowan said. Dual admissions might be thought of as a “shorter-term strategy.”

“I think this would be one more tool in a whole range of tools to create a more diverse student body,” Cowan said.

PLAN WOULD SUPPLEMENT OTHER PATHS TO UC In addition to the top 12.5 percent of California public high school graduates as a whole, UC now recruits from the top 4 percent from each of those schools. Dual admissions would expand that to 12.5 percent -- the new pool of students being routed through California Community Colleges. SOURCE: UC Office of the President Original graphic by VICTOR CHEN/Daily Bruin Web adaptation by JUSTIN HONG and TIM MIU