Some California universities are anticipating a diverse fall class
Pandemic altered evaluations of grades, extracurricular activities
After an unprecedented year and a surge in applicants, some of California’s more selective universities say they are expecting a more diverse freshman class this fall without the barrier of SAT or ACT scores.
March and April are when students across the state and country typically learn admissions decisions from their prospective colleges and universities. But the pandemic upended the admissions process, often eliminating standardized test requirements and generating an avalanche of applications that threatened to overwhelm admission systems.
Admissions officers were forced to figure out how to evaluate grades on high school courses taken online during the pandemic, and how to evaluate extracurricular activities in a senior year when students weren’t in school.
But the changes may result in benefits as admission officers reviewed students who never would have qualified — or applied — in any other year.
“We saw an increase in the quality of our applicant pool this year,” said Brandon Tuck, the director of admissions on the Cal Poly Pomona campus, one of the state’s more selective schools.
Without relying on an SAT or ACT score to admit students, Tuck said the process for admissions officers has been a more rewarding job experience than in the past. Unlike past years, admissions officers weren’t forced to cut off students who had interesting life experiences and backgrounds, or even high grades, just because they didn’t meet the SAT score requirements.
While most University of California campuses followed a more “holistic” process of evaluating students before the pandemic, at the 23-campus California State University the lack of SAT/ACT scores changed the admissions process for those campuses where the test had been a cutoff for who was considered for admissions.
For many students, taking the SAT or ACT in schools and testing centers proved impossible with shelter-in-place orders in effect. Thousands of universities chose to drop or make the exams optional.
The focus on everything else — grades, extracurricular activities, personal essays — gave many students, particularly women and students from underrepresented groups, the opportunity to apply to colleges that they never would have considered before.
While it’s all tough to predict, college officials say they expect some of these students will be offered admission and enroll.
Across the UC’s nine undergraduate campuses, the number of applications from underrepresented racial groups rose significantly, but their proportion of the overall application pool did not. Latinos comprised 38% of UC applicants for a second year in a row and Blacks increased slightly from 6% to 7% over last year.
Universities’ decisions to offer test-optional admissions “made an impact on me saying I wanted to apply to more schools,” said Alexis Ayala, a senior at Coliseum College Prep in Oakland who has a weighted 4.54 GPA and an unweighted 3.95 GPA but didn’t score well on the PSAT practice test.
Ayala, who identifies as low income and Latino, applied to 11 universities, including University of California, Berkeley, UCLA and the University of Southern California — all of which have accepted him into their 2021 freshman classes. Acceptances have been going out to students for weeks.
“The writing and essays helped me,” he said.
The SAT and ACT have long been criticized for being biased against low-income and some underrepresented students while higher-income students could pay for expensive test preparation and tutoring which could help raise their scores.
Last May, the UC Board of Regents made the historic decision to become the largest public institution to not require the SAT and ACT when making admission decisions. (A Superior Court order later stopped the UC system from even considering optional test scores.) The 23-campus California State University system followed with a decision last April to temporarily suspend SAT and ACT admission requirements for fall 2021 and, in January, for the fall 2022 class.
UC Berkeley saw a 27% spike in freshman applications, to 112,820. However, the campus expects the size of its new freshman class to remain about the same as it was last fall — 6,200, limited by funding and space.
Although the increase in enrollments mean this was “an unusual year” for deciding which applicants to accept, the process did not drastically change, said Abby L. Jones, UC Berkeley’s deputy director of undergraduate admissions. It already had instituted a system of looking at multiple aspects of a student’s background, not just test scores and grades.
However, reviewing applications without standardized testing and possibly one semester without traditional grades “really forced us to dig into the information that we did have,” she added.
Some private universities also saw a surge in applications but not all could tie the increase to their decision to go test optional this year. Many said they always had the option of going beyond students’ test scores in considering their applications.
At the University of Southern California, 70,971 first-year students sought admission this year but only 8,804 got offers, a 7% record increase from 2019 and a 20% increase from last year. The freshmen class includes more Latinos — 18% of admits — and Black students — 8%, according to USC.
Across the CSU system, applications dropped about 3%, but a few campuses saw significant growth.
At Cal Poly Pomona, the 8% increase in applications brought in students who didn’t apply when the SAT was required, including many Latino, Native American and female students in college STEM classes.
One important feature on the UC application this year was the extra space at the bottom of required personal insight statement essays. This year students could include explanations of how “extraordinary circumstances related to Covid-19” impacted them and their education.
Kimberly Pascual, a graduating senior from Skyline High in Oakland, said she’s confident it was her essays that put her over the top for admission to the five UC and six of the seven CSU campuses she applied to.
Pascual, who identifies as Southeast Asian, has a 4.3 GPA and has three years of internships.
Pascual said she doesn’t test tell well and was relieved not to have to take the SAT. “But also, there were so many more students applying that it made everything more nerve-wracking because I knew it would be more weight on my essays and extracurriculars.”
At least for one of California’s most selective colleges, deciding admissions is forever changed, said Tuck, Cal Poly Pomona’s admission director. “This is what we want to do going forward. We don’t want to go back. We want to look at the entire student when we look at our admissions process. We don’t want to boil it down to just two data points. Yes, it’s more work, but it’s rewarding, and we feel good about it.”