The University of California’s ongoing debate over whether to reinstate the SAT and ACT in undergraduate admissions may be missing a much larger question about how the system sorts students across its nine campuses in the first place.
More than 3,000 UC faculty members have recently signed letters or petitions urging a return to standardized testing, and the Board of Regents could revisit its earlier decision to drop test score requirements. Much of that conversation has centered on a narrow question: do SAT and ACT scores actually help predict which students will thrive academically at UC?
Faculty are split. Some contend that test scores reveal gaps in academic preparation that grade point averages alone don’t capture. Others counter that once a student’s socioeconomic background is factored in, the tests lose much of their predictive value — suggesting they mostly reflect family wealth and access to resources rather than raw ability.
Both arguments matter, but neither addresses a deeper structural issue: how much should the UC system be sorting students into different campuses based on predicted academic performance in the first place?
Picture a typical large public high school. It can’t turn away students who meet basic enrollment requirements. It offers everything from remedial classes to advanced coursework, and a wide mix of students takes those classes according to their interests and readiness.
Now picture two public high schools located in neighborhoods with sharply different income levels. Both receive comparable state funding, but one benefits from significant private donations that give it smaller class sizes and stronger teachers. Unsurprisingly, students there tend to have better outcomes.
The UC system today looks a lot more like that second example than most people realize. Although its ten campuses are technically part of one public university, they function within a clear pecking order.
Take UC Merced and UC Berkeley as an example. Merced actually receives more state funding per student than many other UC campuses. But once you account for private donations and endowment income, Berkeley spends nearly twice as much per student overall.
The disparity shows up in admissions, too. Berkeley’s acceptance rate hovers around 11%, while Merced accepts roughly 95% of applicants. Naturally, students who enter Berkeley tend to arrive with stronger grades and test scores. They’re also more likely to be taught by full-time faculty rather than lecturers. Graduation rates run higher at Berkeley, and so do the starting salaries graduates report after leaving campus.
In other words, the hierarchy baked into the UC system may be deepening — rather than easing — existing social, economic, racial and geographic divides among students.
To be clear, students should meet certain academic standards to enroll in college and to take advanced coursework. But there’s good reason to question whether it makes sense to separate students across entirely different campuses based solely on where they stand academically at age 17 or 18. That kind of stratification carries its own set of consequences, many of them troubling.
California could instead move toward a more integrated approach.
The state already has a modest tool for this: the Eligibility in the Local Context program, which guarantees UC admission somewhere in the system for students who finish in the top 9% of their graduating class at participating high schools. Research shows the program has boosted graduation rates for eligible students who chose a UC campus instead of a Cal State or community college. Even so, most of those students end up at the system’s less selective campuses rather than its flagship schools.
Texas offers a bolder model worth considering. Under its Top Ten Percent Plan, the top-performing students from every public high school in the state earn automatic admission to any Texas public university — including its most prestigious ones. (UT-Austin later narrowed that guarantee to the top 5% of students, but the underlying principle remains.)
That principle is simple but significant: once students clear the bar for admission, the most academically prepared among them shouldn’t automatically be funneled into only the best-funded, most prestigious campuses while everyone else lands elsewhere.
Such a shift wouldn’t come without trade-offs. Campuses would need to adapt to different student populations. Flagship schools might slip in national rankings. Some students could choose to attend elsewhere altogether, and recruiting and retaining top faculty might grow more complicated.
Those trade-offs deserve honest, public discussion. The University of California belongs to the people of a vast and diverse state, and its admissions policies should reflect a deliberate vision of what public higher education is meant to accomplish.
The SAT debate offers a useful opening to ask these bigger questions. As the Board of Regents weighs how to better evaluate California students for admission, it might also ask whether the system has been sorting them too rigidly all along.
Original source: CalMatters
