Audit scrutinizes UC admissions practices
LOS ANGELES — The University of California allowed “inappropriate factors” to influence admissions decisions, with four campuses admitting 64 applicants based on criteria such as family donations or their relationships to campus staff, according to a state audit released Tuesday.
The audit, which scrutinized admissions practices from the 2013-14 through 2018-19 academic years at UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara, found the majority of the admitted students were white and at least half had annual family incomes of $150,000 or more. Among them, 22 applicants were admitted as athletes despite having demonstrated little athletic talent, the audit said.
UC Berkeley came under particular fire, with auditors finding the campus admitted 42 applicants based on their connections to donors and staff while denying admission to others who were more qualified.
“By admitting 64 noncompetitive applicants, the university undermined the fairness and integrity of its admissions process and deprived more qualified students of the opportunity for admission,” state Auditor Elaine
M. Howle wrote in a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders.
UC President Michael V. Drake, in an Aug. 27 response to the draft audit, said, “I have zero tolerance on matters of integrity, and will do everything I can to ensure inappropriate admissions do not happen on any of our campuses.”
He said the university “will take prompt action to address issues raised in the State Auditor’s draft report.” He noted that many of the recommendations are similar to those in UC internal audits over the past year that have been largely implemented.
The audit marks the second state effort in the last four years to scrutinize UC’s admissions process, following a 2016 review of the impact of growing nonresident student enrollment on California applicants. The intense state interest in who gets a UC seat underscores the enormous demand for access to the nation’s most prestigious public research university system — particularly at the flagship campuses. UCLA, which draws the most applications of any university in the nation, admitted just 15,643 of 108,837 freshman applicants for fall 2020. Overall, UC campuses admitted 149,461 students from among 215,162 applicants.
The state audit found far more instances of questionable admissions than the two cases UC auditors uncovered in the system’s own internal review of its nine undergraduate campuses, ordered last year by then-UC President Janet Napolitano in the wake of the national college admissions scandal.
The scandal, which has roiled colleges and sparked widespread public outrage, involved federal charges that business executives, two Hollywood actresses and a legendary fashion designer used fraud, bribes and lies to get their children into elite universities, including USC, Yale and Stanford. In the UC system, UC Berkeley and UCLA were ensnared.
The two-part UC review included a systemwide overview of controls in place to guard against admissions fraud and a deeper dive into actual campus admissions practices. Of the two cases of possible impropriety that were discovered, one involved a student admitted as a recruited athlete who did not subsequently appear on the team roster and the other involved the way one campus administered its appeals process for admissions decisions. UC auditors referred both cases to the individual campuses for investigation, did not identify the universities in the report and did not provide additional details.
The internal review resulted in several recommendations aimed at better policing potential fraud and conflicts of interest in admitting students. A UC spokeswoman said all campuses have implemented the required reforms, which include stronger verification of claims on students’ applications, reviews of potential links between donors and applicants, and stricter scrutiny of those admitted for special talents, such as athletes and artists.