He bombed the SAT but now heads the UC Board of Regents. A top priority: widening access
Rich Leib heads the University of California’s powerful Board of Regents. He has started companies, worked for leading state politicians and now runs a business consultancy.
But when he talks about his UC board priorities, he begins with a confession: As a Hamilton High School student in 1974, he bombed the SAT achievement tests, scoring in the bottom 2% for both math and English. He scored in the bottom 50% for the general SAT exam. With his 3.4 high-school GPA, UC Berkeley rejected his application.
He managed to get into UC Santa Barbara and went on to earn a master’s degree in public policy analysis from Claremont Graduate University and a law degree from Loyola Law School.
All of which leads to his message for students today: Don’t give up plans for college because you think others are smarter than you. Persevere.
“I feel like so many people get psyched out. They don’t even apply to a university, because the whole self-confidence thing is really difficult,” he said during a recent interview about his priorities. “But I went anyway to college. There were a lot of people that were super smart. I didn’t do great, but I did fine.”
Leib, 66, has been a cheerleader for public education for more than two decades, serving as a governing board member for the California Community Colleges and Solana Beach School District before joining the UC regents in 2018 as an appointee of then-Gov. Jerry Brown.
Now, as UC board chair, his top priority is to open the doors of higher education to more students of varied backgrounds to reflect California’s vast racial, ethnic, economic and geographical diversity.
Widen access
When UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry Yang presented a report about his campus at last month’s regents meeting, Leib was struck by some statistics. UC Santa Barbara’s admission rate dropped to 27% last year from 83% in 1993 and the average high school GPA soared to 4.28 from 3.48 during that same period.
“That was not a positive … that’s a negative,” Leib said. “Our goal is not to be exclusive; it’s to be inclusive.”
UC was flooded with a record number of applications last year, drawing nearly 132,000 from California residents for firstyear seats. About 85,000 state residents were admitted. But Leib says that’s too few and admission rates are too low — particularly at the system’s most selective campuses.
To make room for more students, Leib said, UC should explore creating a new campus — possibly in the Bakersfield or San Bernardino area. He supports the ongoing expansion of satellite campuses — as UCLA is doing with its recent acquisition of Marymount California University. UC Davis is developing a downtown center, and UC Merced and UC San Diego have opened ones. UC Berkeley is considering a satellite program at Moffett Field, owned by NASA, that would focus on aerospace science and engineering and also has land in Richmond for potential expansion.
Leib said Chula Vista city officials are eager for a UC San Diego satellite campus and have discussed providing land for it. He doesn’t think more online classes are the full answer; research shows many students do better with on-campus experiences.
Leib said parents in his San Diego area have come to him nearly in tears about their children who worked hard to achieve stellar academic records yet still got shut out of every UC campus to which they applied.
“There’s something wrong there,” Leib said. “They feel very disenfranchised. We need to do better.”