FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Thursday, April 4, 2002

Media Contacts:
Lavonne Luquis
(510) 987-9194
lavonne.luquis@ucop.edu

Hanan Eisenman
(510) 587-6194
hanan.eisenman@ucop.edu

MEDIA ADVISORY
Subject: Fall 2002 freshman admissions

Admissions to the University of California system grew 4.9 percent for Fall 2002, with 48,369 students offered admission at one or more of its eight undergraduate campuses.

These figures are preliminary and will change as the university extends offers of admission to UC-eligible students who could not be accommodated at the campuses to which they applied. By mid-April, all California students who have met UC's eligibility requirements will be offered admission somewhere in the UC system.

Students accepted by multiple campuses are included in the admissions figures for each campus in the attached tables. However, unless otherwise noted, the systemwide totals in this summary and in the tables are "unduplicated," meaning that each student is counted only once.

Transfer, out-of-state and international student admissions data are not yet available. However, nine out of every 10 admitted freshman students are California residents. A brief summary of the admissions data follows.

• Growth rate in admissions outpaces growth of California's public high school graduating class. For Fall 2002, offers of admission were extended to 48,369 freshmen, compared to 46,130 in Fall 2001. This is more than double the California Department of Education's projected growth rate of 1.9 percent for the public high school graduating class.
  
  
• Comprehensive review is implemented across the UC system. The freshman class of 2002 is the first to be selected through comprehensive review, a process in which each applicant is evaluated using all the information provided on the application. (In previous years, the campuses used a "two-tier" process in which the first 50-75 percent of the freshman class was admitted on the basis of certain academic factors alone.) As expected, comprehensive review had only modest impact on the ethnic composition of UC's admitted class.
  
  
• All major racial and ethnic groups registered systemwide increases. A breakdown follows:
  • American Indian, 7.7 percent;
  • Chicano/Latino, 7.6 percent;
  • African American, 7.4 percent;
  • White, 6.1 percent;
  • Asian American, 5.1 percent.
    
    

  The systemwide count for admitted underrepresented students (African American, American Indian, Chicano/Latino students) increased by nearly 7.6 percent, from 8,580 in Fall 2001 to 9,228 in Fall 2002.
  

• Most campuses register gains. The most significant change in the proportion of admitted students from underrepresented ethnic groups was seen at UC San Diego, where it rose from 11.5 percent to 14.4 percent between Fall 2001 and Fall 2002. There were also notable increases in the numbers of underrepresented students at UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside.
  
  
• Modest growth overall in percentage of underrepresented students. Underrepresented students comprised 19.1 percent of the admitted class, compared to 18.6 percent last year and 18.8 percent in Fall 1997, the last class admitted before Regents' policy SP-1 and Proposition 209 eliminated consideration of race in the admissions process.
  
  
• More transfer students expected this year. In the 2000-01 academic year, 11,196
  students transferred to UC from California Community Colleges; it was a record high and a 3.9 percent increase over the prior year. In Fall 2001, 9,951 community college students enrolled at UC, one of the largest enrollments ever for a single academic term. (Winter and Spring 2002 community college transfer data is yet not available). UC is working hard to maintain the momentum of this growth trend, and hopes to see yet another record set in the coming year.

A complete set of tables is available online at: http://www.ucop.edu/news/studstaff.html

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