UC Berkeley admissions under fire
Connections, wealth aided underqualified, audit finds
A year after a college scandal rattled the nation’s confidence in the fairness of admissions, California’s independent auditor has found that UC Berkeley — which largely escaped damage in the federal probe — improperly admitted dozens of underqualified, often wealthy students based on insider connections over six years.
The auditor’s review, released Tuesday, also raises questions about the legitimacy of hundreds of other admissions at Berkeley and three other UC campuses.
The scathing audit offered examples of UC admissions officials giving preference to less
qualified students on the basis of a donation by their family, or to family of staff members of the university. Many were improperly admitted as athletes. It criticized the office of former UC President Janet Napolitano as well as UC Berkeley administrators for allowing problems with admissions to persist even after the wellpublicized “Varsity Blues” scandal erupted last year.
“Shhhh. You have to keep it a secret, but good news is coming [the applicant’s] way,” a former UC Berkeley admissions director wrote to a former associate dean of students who had asked that an applicant who received the evaluators’ worst rating be reconsidered.
That case was among 64 improper admissions confirmed across four UC campuses between 2013 and 2018, including 22 applicants admitted as athletes who weren’t athletes, the audit found. In one case, an unidentified UC regent sent an “inappropriate letter of support” directly to the UC Berkeley chancellor on behalf of a student with only a 26% chance of winning a spot off the wait list, despite a policy prohibiting such efforts to influence. The applicant was admitted.
All but nine cases were at UC Berkeley. Thirteen of the cases there were athletes. All were admitted between 2016 and 2018 based on their connections, even though they were less qualified than students who were rejected.
The audit found that 17 applicants were accepted specifically because of connections to donors or potential donors, and were referred by employees in UC Berkeley’s fundraising office. Admissions staff regularly conferred with the fundraising office about who should be admitted from a highly competitive wait list, the audit found.
“In some cases, the campus appeared to admit the applicants in exchange for donations to the athletic department,” the report said, noting that after a UC Berkeley coach helped admit an applicant who had played just one year of a high school sport — and not very well — the applicant’s family donated “several thousand dollars to the team.” Coaches soon removed the student, who never competed.
“We are committed to getting to the bottom of this,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ announced in a letter posted on the campus website that called the findings “highly disturbing allegations of improper conduct in our undergraduate admissions work.”
Christ said the university will investigate the auditor’s findings, and that UC policy prohibits making admissions decisions based on ties to donors or staff. Violations, she said, “can result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination.” She said the campus added additional controls under a new undergraduate admissions director hired in January 2019. For example, she said, “no individual person (including the admissions director) can determine the final outcome of a student application.”
Students admitted improperly could have their admission revoked, a UC spokeswoman said.
The sixmonth state audit initially looked at the potential for fraud at three campuses — UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Diego — that account for about 60,000 freshman admissions a year, or nearly twothirds of all undergraduates accepted. But auditor Elaine Howle’s team unearthed troubling emails that also indicated problems at UC Santa Barbara, where auditors found four improper athletics admissions.
Cheating is probably far more extensive than the 64 confirmed cases, Howle said, because of circumstantial evidence that another 400 applicants unfairly got in as athletic recruits. Auditors found recruits with “limited or nonexistent athletic qualifications.” Some were related to staff or a prominent donor. And some dropped off their teams’ rosters after one year. In one case, auditors found no evidence that the recruit had ever played the sport.
“A public university system has to have the integrity and trust so that all students can have a fair opportunity,” Howle said, noting that most of the improper admits were white, and more than half had annual incomes of at least $150,000. “As a public university system, they need to hold themselves to a higher standard.”
The audit findings “are what we always suspected,” said Assemblywoman Tasha Boerner Horvath, DEncinitas (San Diego County), who requested the audit. “This goes far beyond what the FBI identified in the Varsity Blues scandal.”
In the Varsity Blues scandal last year, dozens of wealthy parents, including famous actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, paid a bogus college admissions counselor, William “Rick” Singer, about $25 million between 2011 and 2018 to illegally get their children into elite colleges including UCLA. Singer bribed college officials and coaches on the parents’ behalf, or hired fake applicants to take SAT tests for their kids. Singer has cooperated with federal investigators and pleaded guilty, as have many parents.
Since the admissions scandal broke in March 2019, UC has audited itself twice, examining how it greenlights more than 100,000 freshmen a year across nine undergraduate campuses, although far fewer actually enroll.
Howle’s report faulted UC’s Office of the President for the system’s weaknesses.
Napolitano, president during the audit years, retired this summer. On Tuesday, UC’s new president, Michael Drake, said the university “will swiftly address the concerns the state auditor raised. Furthermore, individuals involved in improper activities will be disciplined appropriately.”
In a statement, Drake said he has “zero tolerance in the matters of compromised integrity.” He said UC will review the findings, coordinate with campuses, and map out fixes in a public and accountable manner. “Our entire organization is committed to a level playing field for every applicant.”
In UC’s first internal admissions report, released in July 2019, UC’s own auditors found 11 vulnerabilities that left it open to fraud. Its second audit, released in March, examined how well UC followed its own admissions rules from 2016 through 2019, and found problems on several unnamed campuses.
UC said it had addressed many of the problems found in its own audits.
Among the new audit’s recommendations, campuses should:
Verify athletic talents and review donation records before admitting student athletes.
Establish criteria for admitting applicants determined to be less qualified than others they reject. Beginning with the admissions cycle for academic year 202122, the president’s office should oversee UC Berkeley’s admissions process for at least three admissions cycles.
By March, the president’s office should require all campuses to establish proficiency standards for application reviewers and regularly audit campuses’ admissions processes.