The University of California has admitted an unprecedented number of California students for the fall of 2023, with 88,285 first-year applicants coming from the Golden State alone.
It’s an increase of 3.5% from last year, and part of an ongoing effort to attract more in-state students to the state’s higher education system. This year, California’s budget included a 5% boost for the UC system — part of a multi-year agreement between Gov. Gavin Newsom and the University of California — with the expectation that campuses would use that money to enroll more California students, among other educational objectives.
Across the UC system, that seems to be exactly what happened. Admission rates for Californians increased to nearly 67% this year, compared to 64% in 2022.
The surge was more pronounced at UC Santa Cruz than any other campus. This fall, the school admitted 10,200 more first-year in-state students than the year before, a 44.5% jump. Though final enrollment numbers have not yet been released, Michelle Whittingham, UC Santa Cruz’s associate vice chancellor of enrollment, said the campus expects 4,189 first-year students from California to attend the school this fall and winter, a 733-student increase from last year.
“We are just ecstatic that we’ve been able to strategically expand that access while balancing a focus on quality,” said Whittingham.
Across the nine UC campuses, Latinos accounted for 38% of all Californians admitted as first-year freshmen, the largest proportion of any racial or ethnic group. Over 38,800 Latino, Black, American Indian, and Pacific Islander students were admitted to the UC system, the highest number in the university’s history.
“Admitting more students who reflect the socioeconomic diversity of the state has been a priority for us,” said Jocelyn De Jong, UC Berkeley’s assistant vice chancellor and director of undergraduate enrollment, in a press release. “We know that academic talent can be found in all communities and settings, and we value bringing together a diverse class of students with different experiences and perspectives.”
The figures come in the wake of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, which struck down affirmative action in universities nationwide. In California, considering race in public university admissions has been banned since 1996 — and when the high court decision was still up for debate, the University of California acknowledged that the three-decade-old ban had hurt the university system as a whole.
In an amicus brief filed to the Supreme Court, the university stated that “despite its extensive efforts, UC struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity. The shortfall is especially apparent at UC’s most selective campuses, where African American, Native American, and Latinx students are underrepresented and widely report struggling with feelings of racial isolation.”
Despite that warning, this fall’s data shows 44% of UC’s admitted first-year class — and 37% of its admitted transfer students — are Black, American Indian, Latino or Pacific Islander. Forty-five percent of those admits were first-generation. And 47% came from low-income families.
“We work really hard to ensure that we’re assessing students’ achievements within the context of their opportunities,” said Whittingham. “We take a look at their school context, their geographical context, and the experiences that they have.”
UC also opened its doors to slightly more transfer students, with 153 more admitted this fall compared to last. Of the 27,761 transfer students admitted, 89% of them came from California’s community colleges.
UC Berkeley and UCLA accepted the fewest percentage of transfer applicants — about one in three — while UC Merced accepted the highest, at 76%.
Easing transitions for community college students has been a hot button issue for the state’s higher education system, as lawmakers, colleges and universities grapple with how to best integrate students at two-year schools into the state’s four-year institutions.
Earlier this year, UC proposed a new pathway to do so, but because it uses different strategies than the system already employed by the California State University system, the plan was met with mixed reactions from policymakers.
