Low acceptance rates prompt UC action
December 16, 2015
This year’s Diamond Bar High School seniors are in a particularly good position to be applying for a University of California school. The nine UC schools are accepting 5,000 extra in-state undergraduate applicants for the 2016-2017 year.
This is an attempt by the UC school system to mitigate the situation of more out-of-state students flooding its colleges, a highly criticized issue amongst Californian families. The UC system is currently undergoing a state of financial difficulty, and admitting more out-of-state students is helping to alleviate this challenge. According to the San Jose Mercury News, nonresident students pay around $23,000 more each in annual tuition than in-state students. UC President Janet Napolitano has responded with a plan to increase the number of in-state undergraduates over the next few years.
Following the new enrollments of 2016, Napolitano’s plan is for the universities to accept an additional 2,500 students for each of the two subsequent years, aiming for a total of 10,000 additional in-state students by the 2018-19 academic year.
Although the universities will still continue to accept an ever-increasing number of out-of-state applicants, the growth will be slowed by the plan to integrate more in-state students.
The new resident students will not be distributed equally throughout the nine colleges; factors such as housing capacity and number of available courses will determine the number of additional in-state undergraduates that will attend each school.
To accommodate this influx of undergraduate students, UC Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Nathan Brostrom has announced that close to 500 new staff members will be hired over the next two years. The school system also expects to expand its campuses by approximately 919,000 square feet by 2020, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.
A $25 million grant has been allotted to the university by state legislature to aid the placement of additional students for the 2016-17 school year.
As this does not cover the full cost, the UC school system has created a budget plan to provide the additional $25 million required to finance the operation.
Over the next two years, the university plans to solicit allotments from the state government to fund the admittance of students until 2018, by which time all 10,000 new students will have been integrated.
