UC Berkeley Academic Senate

Junior Admissions at Berkeley: A Balanced Policy for Difficult Times 1


A Report of the Committee on Admissions and Enrollment Berkeley Division, Academic Senate University of California Professor W. Norton Grubb, Chair 1992

Revised, August 1992

This draft has been approved by the Committee on Admissions and Enrollment, but not by the Academic Senate and is not official policy.

The University of California at Berkeley is part of a large system of public higher education, one that many regard as the finest in the world. The entire system includes other institutions of the University of California, the California State Universities, and 107 community colleges, and the Master plan for Higher Education specifies the relationships among the different components. Of particular importance, the Master Plan establishes a responsibility of four-year colleges to accept transfer students from community colleges, to provide another route to the baccalaureate for those students unable or unwilling to enroll initially in UC or CSU. More recent legislation, Senate Bill 121 (enacted in October 1991), states that "a viable and effective student transfer system is one of the fundamental underpinnings of public postsecondary education in California."

At the same time, Berkeley is an institution with its own integrity- with its own ways of doing things, its own academic standards, its own faculty hiring procedures, its own admissions process, and above all its own standards of excellence and its reputation as one of the best universities in the world. Berkeley's obligations to the citizens of California and other institutions of higher education, and its independence and integrity as a university of the highest standing, have always created the need to balance competing goals carefully. Nowhere is this challenge more pronounced than in admissions. In a period when applications to Berkeley have soared and admissions has become increasingly competitive, decisions about who gets in have become increasingly difficult. Since there is an legislative-imposed enrollment limit constraining how many students Berkeley can accept, while the population of California continues to grow and Berkeley's prestige continues to attract more applicants, admissions has become a zero-sum game: the decision to admit more students from some group is automatically a decision to admit fewer from other groups. The result is that the pressures on Berkeley to admit certain students and the complaints about the admissions process are never-ending, reflecting the unfortunate fact that the University can no longer accommodate all those who want to attend.

The various pressures around the admissions of freshmen to Berkeley have been addressed in the policy formulated by the Academic Senate, presented in Freshman Admissions at Berkeley: A Policy for the 1990's and Beyond (also known as the Karabel report). This policy, adopted by the Senate in September 1989, initially implemented in 1990-91 and further refined in 1991-92, represents the Senate's attempt to steer a principled course among the varying and conflicting objectives of freshman admissions.

However, there has never been a Senate policy on the admissions of juniors. In the absence of a clearly-articulated policy, junior admissions has developed in a piecemeal fashion, responding to various pressures but satisfying few of those concerned with the process. Some Berkeley faculty complain about the qualifications of entering juniors, especially those transferring from community colleges; community college advocates complain that Berkeley has admitted too few community college students and has made the transfer process too difficult; advocates for minority students note that relatively few transfer students come from members of historically under-represented groups (African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans); and students who want to transfer from other four-year colleges complain that Berkeley practices effectively preclude them from gaining admission. Evidently, current practices are satisfying no one.

The purpose of this report, then, is to recommend a policy for junior admissions at Berkeley. With increasingly competitive admissions, the procedures and rules of thumb that have grown up over the years need to be replaced with a policy that is more principled. In addition, the process of freshman admissions at Berkeley has been moving toward procedures in which more refined judgments about applicants are made, based on more information about their accomplishments, than was previously the case; it has moved away from the use of simple formulas and mechanical methods of admitting students. Junior admissions too should move in this direction.

To establish a context for this policy, Section I describes trends in junior admissions and presents what is known about the success of students admitted to Berkeley as juniors. In part, this section clarifies the constraints which affect junior admissions: the factors influencing the numbers of junior students admitted are largely beyond the University's control. Therefore the number or junior admissions is unlikely to go up - not because of Berkeley's lack of commitment to junior admissions in general and to community college transfer students in particular, but simply because it does not control the numbers of juniors it can admit.

Section II then presents a series of recommendations governing junior admissions policy, after first outlining a small number of principles that ought to guide admissions in general. These recommendations are intended to steer an appropriate course among the conflicting goals for junior admissions and among the different pressures falling upon Berkeley. Above all, we hope that this policy represents an appropriate balance between the goals which Berkeley must pursue if it is to meet its obligations to the citizens of California and to other institutions of higher education, and at the same time develop and implement the standards of academic excellence that have served the state so well.

Section I TRENDS AND PATTERNS IN JUNIOR ADMISSIONS

	Junior admissions at Berkeley have been determined by a number of trends and pressures, most of which have been (and will continue to be) beyond the control of the University. The highly-constrained environment within which Berkeley operates makes it all the more important to establish a coherent policy, as a way of steering a principled path through these constraints and of treating prospective students fairly. But the constraints also make it almost impossible to respond to the deepest wishes of advocacy groups to increase the numbers of places available to junior applicants, since Berkeley has very little control over the numbers of junior students it admits.

	Table 1 presents the recent trends in junior admissions. In the mid-1970's and the early 1980's, the numbers of new juniors admitted were much higher than they currently are, largely because Berkeley had many fewer applications from eligible freshmen - and therefore room to admit more juniors - and because the dropout rates among freshmen and sophomores were higher, opening up room or new juniors. Since 1986-87, however, the number of total transfer students enrolling has been roughly constant in the range of 2,000 to 2,200. During the same period the number of applicants has increased by almost one quarter, so that a smaller proportion of applicants has been able to come to Berkeley. Like freshman admissions, junior admissions has become increasingly competitive.

	In addition, there has been a marked trend in the composition of new juniors, as the fraction coming from community colleges has increased markedly since the mid-1970's (e.g., from about 40 percent in 1974-75 to 80 percent in 1990-91). This shift - the result of a renewed commitment to community college students - has meant that the number of transfer students from community colleges increased during the 1980's even while the total number of new juniors was roughly constant. Indeed, the admission of community college students has increased to the point where four-fifths of new junior enrollments come from community colleges2 - a substantial preference, and one that individuals trying to transfer from four-year colleges sometimes interpret as limiting their opportunities.3

	One particular hope for junior admissions is that students coming from community colleges can be a source of under-represented minority students - African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Because such a large fraction of minority students (especially Hispanics) in postsecondary education begin in community colleges, transfer into the junior year presents a way both to provide access to baccalaureate degrees among those not initially eligible for the University - the strategy of the Master Plan - and to help fulfill Berkeley's commitment to reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the state. Unfortunately, this hope has not been realized. As Table 2 clarifies, the proportion of new juniors who are from historically under-represented groups has been relatively low.4 In 1990-91, for example, 3.1 percent of new juniors from community colleges were black, 10.8 percent were Hispanic, and 1.2 percent were Native American - while comparable figures among new freshman enrollees in 1990-91 were 5.5 percent, 16.0 percent, and 1.1 percent respectively. The proportions of under-represented minority students are even lower among those transferring from four-year colleges.

	The reasons for these relatively low figures can be found in Table 3.5 A low fraction of applicants come from under-represented groups, and even though their admissions rates are similar to or slightly higher than for white and Asian-American applicants - their enrollment rates are lower. The problem lies not in the admissions process, then, but in the patterns or application to the junior year (and secondarily in enrollments among those who are admitted). In turn, we suspect that the lack of minority applicants is due largely to the inability of minority students to make adequate progress through community colleges, and to accumulate enough credits to be eligible for transfer.6 We hope to continue encouraging minority students in community college to complete their programs of study and to transfer to four-year colleges - and our recommendations include one specifically aimed at strengthening affirmative action for junior admissions (see Recommendation Four below). However, the progress of minority students through community colleges is a problem which Berkeley cannot readily address, and which the admissions process itself cannot improve.

	What about the success of new juniors once they enroll at Berkeley? There appears to be considerable disagreement among the faculty about transfer students, especially those coming from community colleges: some view them as much weaker than "native students", and lacking the prerequisites for study at Berkeley, while others find them fully the equals of native students. Table 4 presents some measures of success, based on the experiences of juniors in fall 1987. Evidently, the grade point average in junior and senior courses is lower for all transfer students than it is for "native" students, and is lowest among those from community colleges. However, the average GPA is still equivalent to a B - evidence, in our view that transfers from community colleges perform quite well at Berkeley.

	When we examine the rates of graduation within four years of becoming a Berkeley junior, about 93 percent or "native" students graduate, compared to 76 percent of community college students and 89 percent of transfers from other four-year colleges.7 However, there are several reasons for the 17 percentage point differential between "native" juniors and those from community colleges. One, from the bottom panel of Table 4, is that graduation rates are relatively low for community college transfer students with GPA's in their freshman and sophomore years below 3.44 and there are substantial numbers of such students admitted, particularly in the College of Natural Resources and in a few departments within Letters and Sciences which accept large numbers of transfer students. In contrast, relatively high proportions of "native" students with such GPA's graduate; evidently, community college students with low GPA's have some problem adjusting to the demands of Berkeley. (On the other hand, community college students with high grades have a graduation rate of 94 percent, just as high as "native" juniors.)

	In addition, students from community colleges tend to come from families with lower incomes, and therefore have fewer resources to sustain them through college; and more of them are older, with family responsibilities. We suspect that these external factors are partly responsible for their lower graduation rates. Finally, it is important to recognize that most of the community college transfer students are those who were originally ineligible for the University. They have managed, through their own efforts, to complete the requisite program of studies and to improve their academic standing. We view the, 76 percent graduation figure positively, as evidence that the majority of community college transfer students do in fact benefit from the University.

	There is, then, room in these figures for the different faculty views of transfer students. It is true that community college transfer students perform somewhat worse than "native" students; but it is also true that the vast majority perform as well as native students and that graduation rates are high. The only consistent warning from these data is that community college students with relatively low GPA's in their freshman and sophomore years - below 3.4 or 3.5 - seem to do much less well than their "native" peers and their peers from other four-year colleges. We conclude that the junior admissions process ought to scrutinize such applicants especially carefully, and admit them only when there are strong arguments in their favor.

	What are likely to be the future trends in the admissions or juniors from two- and four-year colleges? Berkeley is beset on all sides by groups and individuals calling for more admissions at the junior level, from community college advocates seeking to increase the transfer function, to parents wanting their children to get a second crack at getting into Berkeley, to students at other four-year colleges disappointed by their original choices. The most concrete manifestation of the increasing desire to transfer is the increase in junior applications over the past decade, which have increased substantially even though the numbers admitted have stayed roughly the same.

	Unfortunately, there is no reason to think that the numbers of new juniors admitted will increase in the future. The different ways in which Berkeley might enroll more juniors are all highly constrained:
	Overall increases in enrollments at Berkeley could open up more junior spaces. However, there is currently an enrollment limit at Berkeley, both as a result of University-wide decisions about the sizes of different campuses and because of an agreement with the City or Berkeley not to increase enrollments. No one anticipates that this enrollment limit will be lifted.
	Shifting enrollments to include more upper-division students and fewer lower-division students could also open up more spaces for juniors. Indeed, the University as a whole is under a legislative requirement to keep lower-division enrollments at 40 percent of total undergraduates, with upper-division students comprising the remaining 60 percent. Berkeley was not meeting the 60/40 requirement during the mid-1980's, and shifts in the direction of this ratio did indeed create openings for more junior enrollments. However, Berkeley is now just at (or even slightly over) the 60/40 target,8 and therefore no further increases in junior admissions can be anticipated from expanding the numbers of upper-division students.
	From time to time, advocates for community colleges argue the 60/40 split should be changed to 70/30 or some even higher ratio, or even that the University should become an upper-division institution. Quite apart from the fact that this would require a major legislative change, such changes would encounter enormous political resistance from those parents and prospective students who want to attend a four-year university as freshmen. The applications for freshman admissions have increased so dramatically, and so far beyond Berkeley's ability to accept all eligible applicants, that any reductions in freshman admissions would generate strident opposition. From an institutional standpoint, reducing the numbers of lower-division students might dissipate the atmosphere of a residential college and the community of undergraduates which Berkeley tries to foster. From the faculty perspective, teaching lower-division students remains important for many of the faculty9 and the need to devise four-year programs of study for different majors and to specify general education requirements -- rather than having these programs and requirements largely determined by other institutions -- is absolutely central to the University's teaching mission. Increasing the current 60/4O ratio is therefore an idea that could only weaken the University.
	When freshmen and sophomores drop out, this creates more spaces for new juniors. However, through a combination of improved counseling and tutoring, and more selective admissions, the dropout rates at Berkeley have fallen during the 1970's and 198O's. This does, of course, create fewer places for juniors from community colleges and other four-year colleges, but no reasonable person could be in favor of the higher dropout rates of the past. Indeed, if freshman admissions continues to become increasingly selective, we anticipate that dropout rates will continue to fall, further reducing places available to new juniors.

	We conclude, then, that the numbers of junior admissions is unlikely to increase - not because of Berkeley's lack of commitment to transfer students, and to community college students in particular, but simply because enrollments at Berkeley are highly constrained. Therefore the recommendations we offer in the next section are aimed not at increasing the numbers of junior admitted, but at improving the information to prospective applicants, smoothing the admissions process, guaranteeing greater equity among applicants, and opening up to applicants certain options (including particular majors) that have been largely closed. Under current constraints, this is all a junior admissions policy can do.

Section II PRINCIPLES AND RECOMMENDATIONS

	Since the demand for admissions to Berkeley in the junior year will continue to outstrip the places available, an admissions policy should allocate these positions in such a way as to do justice to the multiple goals of junior admissions. One way to develop such a policy is to articulate the principles which should govern admissions. Some principles applicable to junior admissions have already been articulated by the Academic Senate in the process of developing a policy for freshman admissions, and we repeat several of them here: 10

	Principle One: As an institution of international renown and as one of the nation's leading research universities, Berkeley has an obligation to admit students with exceptionally distinguished academic records. In the context of junior admissions, this means that an applicant's academic record during freshman and sophomore years will continue to be a crucial element in admissions.
	Principle Two: As a taxpayer-supported public university, Berkeley must strive to serve all of California's people. In practice, this means in part that Berkeley should strive to include students from California's various racial and ethnic communities. In part, this principle also implies that Californians who have a substantial rationale for attending Berkeley should not be discouraged from applying, as is now sometimes the case with individuals who initially attend four-year colleges.
	Principle Three: Berkeley should actively seek diversity -- socioeconomic, cultural, ethnic, racial, and geographic -- in its student body. The justification for diversity - as a way of creating a stimulating intellectual and cultural environment in which students teach one another, and as a way of educating the leadership of a pluralist state - is similar for both junior and freshman admissions.
	Principle Four: Berkeley will absolutely not tolerate quotas or ceilings on the admissions or enrollment of any racial, ethnic, religious, or gender groups. The intention of this principle, of course, is to assure that the admissions process considers all applicants on their merits, rather than allocating certain numbers of openings to particular groups; it is part of the process of shifting Berkeley toward admissions procedures which consider applicants and their full records more carefully.
	In the context of junior admissions, this distaste for arbitrary quotas or targets has an important corollary: The junior admissions process should not establish any quotas on admissions from any one type of institution or from any specific institution. Again, the purpose of this principle is to assure that junior applicants can be considered on their merits, within an admissions process which is more informed and exercises more judgment about who should be admitted.
	Principle Five: Berkeley should accept only those students who have a reasonable chance of persisting to graduation. While interpretations differ about what a "reasonable chance" means, this principle implies that only under special circumstances should the junior admissions process admit students with low probabilities of graduating - like the students with relatively low grade point averages identified in Table 4 above.
	Principle Six: The admissions process should include a human element and must not be based on grades and test scores alone. The intention is to consider a broader range of indicators of likely success and contribution to the University community than grades and test score can capture. The procedures we envision - including those outlined in Recommendations One and Four below - would apply this principle to junior admissions.
	Principle Seven: The admissions criteria and practices of the College of Letters and Science as well as those of the Professional Schools should continue to be described in detail and to be made fully available to the public. Indeed, part of the purpose of this report is to clarify junior admissions policy to those outside the University, in contrast to the previous situation in which junior admissions was a more ad hoc process, not always easy to understand. In addition, we anticipate that the implementation of this report and the development of procedures to be used by the Office of Undergraduate Admissions (OUA) will be similarly open processes.
	These seven principles are drawn from those previously developed by the Committee of Admissions and Enrollment to cover freshman admissions. However, one additional principle, not applicable to freshman admissions, is absolutely crucial to junior admissions: Criteria for junior admissions should continue to be set by individual colleges and divisions, and prerequisites for entrance into specific majors should continue to be set by departments. By construction, individuals who come to Berkeley from other institutions at the start of their junior year are entering the university in the midst of a four-year program. The different departments and colleges, which establish the course requirements for graduation in specific majors, often specify programs of study that require more than two years. They may require certain lower-division courses in the major field (for example, introductory economics or physics) and may established related prerequisites (often in mathematics or one of the sciences). Completion of such requirements may be crucial to successful completion or upper-division requirements; strong performance in lower-division courses may be a good predictor of success in upper-division requirements. No group other than the individual departments and colleges is in a position to specify what such prerequisites should be, or what standards of performance should be expected of lower-division courses, without compromising the standards of excellence at this University (see Principle One above). Therefore departments and colleges must continue to specify the requirements for their majors, which should then apply equally to transfer students and to "native" juniors.

	As a practical matter, the prerequisites for admissions and for majors are sometimes handled in two distinct procedures. Junior applicants can now apply to five different colleges - the College of Engineering, the College of Environmental Design, the College of Chemistry, the College of Natural Resources, and the Haas School of Business - and to one of five divisions (social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences, humanities, and special programs) within the College of Letters and Sciences. Each of these colleges and divisions in conjunction with the Office of Undergraduate Admissions establishes its own junior admissions standards. Then, specific departments within Letters and Sciences (e.g., economics, English, or physics) establish prerequisites for these majors, to which students apply at the end of their junior year. Junior admission to Berkeley in one of the colleges and divisions requires knowledge of the appropriate requirements; subsequent admission into particular majors within Letters and Sciences requires completion of the prerequisites for the majors.

	To be sure, the principle that colleges, divisions and departments should continue to set admissions standards and prerequisites will perpetuate one difficulty among junior applicants: applicants must find out about the requirements of particular divisions and colleges, rather than being admitted to Berkeley as a colleges (as is true for freshmen applicants to the College of Letters and Sciences and of Natural Resources). There are ways to minimize the burden of finding out about such requirements, which we present in Recommendation Seven below. But we see no way to avoid this principle without compromising the academic integrity of undergraduate education at Berkeley.

	At the same time, this principle does not imply that departments and colleges should have complete freedom to establish prerequisites. Some departments and colleges have established prerequisites and admissions standards that violate certain of these principles but without sufficient justification in furthering academic excellence, and so several of our recommendations - especially Recommendations Five and Six - are intended to limit the ability of departments and colleges to set requirements in unreasonable ways.

	With these principles in mind we can now present a series of recommendations.

	Recommendation One: Admissions to the junior year at Berkeley should be reserved for applicants who can articulate substantial reasons for transferring to this institution. That is, transfer into the junior year should not be open to all who fancy that they would like a degree from Berkeley, but only to those who for various reasons cannot accomplish their academic goals at the institutions they initially attended. Among the strongest reasons for transfer to Berkeley are:
	Initial enrollment in a community college, which by definition doesn't grant baccalaureate degrees. Indeed, providing opportunities for transfer to community college students should continue to be one of the highest priorities of Berkeley's junior admissions process, as one of Berkeley's responsibilities within the California system of higher education.11 Many of our subsequent recommendations especially Recommendations Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven are also designed to facilitate transfer from community colleges.
	Initial enrollment in a four-year college that does not provide a major a student wants to pursue, or that does not provide the particular emphasis within the major that the applicant seeks.12 In this case there should be evidence that an applicant's original college does not offer the major to which the individual is applying. These individuals might have initially enrolled at a another UC campus, at a CSU campus, or at a private California institution; or they might be California residents who initially attended an out-of-state institution.

	Other strong reasons for wanting to transfer to Berkeley in the junior year include the following:
	Changed financial and family circumstances which make attendance at Berkeley warranted.13 For example, some Californians who begin college in out-of-state institutions find that family finances change and preclude their continuing to attend expensive private institutions; in other cases, family catastrophes make it important to relocate in the Bay Area. If Berkeley is to serve "all of California's people", it is important not to preclude such individuals from applying for junior admissions.
	Other evidence of substantial incompatibility with an individual's initial four-year college. While this category is purposely vague, the admissions process should recognize that students may change their mind about the college that is best for them, and may therefore find themselves in a college which is too small, too rural, too homogeneous, or too unsupportive of their intellectual proclivities or their ethnic backgrounds. In such cases, the admissions process should look for a well-argued reason - something much more than a simple preference - why transfer to Berkeley is justified. The intent of the first recommendation is to bring junior admissions policy into line with Berkeley's responsibilities to other institutions in the California system of higher education - community colleges in particular, but also public four-year colleges which lack certain majors and emphases available at Berkeley. In addition, this recommendation allows some flexibility for applicants who have found themselves in the wrong institutions to apply for transfer, consistent with the goal of serving "all of California's people."

	Recommendation Two: Students eligible for junior admissions should have completed 60 semester credits (or 90 quarter credits) in lower division courses, rather than 56 (or 84) as has previously been the case. This recommendation is intended to eliminate a minor discrepancy between the conception of a junior at Berkeley, which requires 60 semester credits, and the prior requirements for junior admissions.

	Recommendation Three: "Community college students" should be defined as those who have received at least 30 of their 60 lower division semester credits (or 45 of their quarter credits) in community college, and whose last institution before applying to Berkeley is a community college. This provision is intended to eliminate the problem, reported by some community colleges of students from four-year colleges enrolling for a few credits at a community college in order to get preference in transferring to Berkeley.14 This kind of subterfuge is an unwieldy way for individuals with legitimate reasons for transferring to Berkeley to be considered for junior admissions. More seriously, it misstates who community college students are, and in a competitive admissions process it may preclude some legitimate community college students from transferring. Because the junior admissions process we propose gives strong preference to community college students, it is critical that applicants granted this preference be true community college students.

	Recommendation Four: The junior admissions process, like the freshman admissions process should strive to increase the diversity of students on the Berkeley campus.15 This is particularly the case since the numbers of community college transfer applicants from minority groups has been relatively small. The current process used for freshman admissions is too complex to use for junior admissions, since there are too many divisions and colleges with individual admissions requirements. However, the junior admission process could still use a simplified version of the "matrix" approach now being used for freshman admissions, where applicants receive both a score based on their academic records (as specified by individual departments and colleges) and a diversity score. Then students high on both scores are admitted, as are students with high scores on one and moderate scores on the other. Such a matrix procedure has the advantage of allowing those responsible for admissions to see clearly the trade-offs between academic strength and diversity, and it allows the Office of Undergraduate Admissions to concentrate its energies on those applicants about whom there is the most uncertainty. The details of such a matrix procedure should be developed by the Office of Undergraduate Admission in consultation with the A&E Committee.

	Recommendation Five: Departments and colleges may establish their own prerequisites for admission to their majors. However, these prerequisites should be the same for native students and for those applying from other institutions. For students applying for transfer from other institutions, the prerequisites should be stated in such a way that applicants can meet these requirements at other institutions of higher education.16 Occasionally departments and colleges have required that students take specific courses taught only at Berkeley, or only at a limited number of community colleges, before being admitted to the junior year. This effectively precludes students from transferring into these majors. When departments and colleges refuse through their requirements to accept junior admits, they preclude students with legitimate reasons for transferring from access to particular fields of study; and they also place greater burdens on other departments and colleges to accept more junior students, in order to meet the 60/40 division of students required by the state Legislature. We therefore recommend that all prerequisites be stated in terms that are sufficiently general that applicants can complete them at a variety of other institutions. We stress that this recommendation does not ask departments and colleges to give up control of the course content of prerequisites. As now happens, departments and colleges can continue to scrutinize the syllabi and other materials of courses at other institutions that are offered to satisfy prerequisites, and accept or reject specific courses depending on their content and rigor. In addition, when departments and colleges change their prerequisites, they should provide sufficient advanced warning about such changes, to give potential transfer students enough time to adapt to such changes. Specifically, any changes should go into effect in the second academic year after they are proposed. This allows potential applicants to learn about such changes and respond to them before they apply for junior admission.17 The Admissions and Enrollment Committee has been concerned with the fact that some departments and colleges admit very few students from other two- and four-year colleges. A few do so by stating prerequisites in such a way that only "native" students can meet them, which should be remedied by the previous recommendation; but others seem to have perpetuated low numbers of transfer students without giving their policy much thought. Of course, some departments and colleges - particularly those with difficult technical prerequisites, in the sciences and engineering especially - may face significant numbers of applicants who lack the essential prerequisites, so that low numbers of transfer students do not automatically mean that something is awry. Nonetheless, when some departments and colleges admit very few transfer students, they restrict access to certain fields of study at Berkeley and perpetuate the perception that Berkeley is "closed" to junior applicants. Furthermore, this practice places burdens on other departments and colleges to accept more than their share of juniors, since the University as a whole must meet the 60/40 split imposed by the Legislature. To remedy this situation, the Committee proposes the following:

	Recommendation Six: The Admissions Coordination Board and the Admissions and Enrollment Committee should identify those departments and colleges that appear to have low numbers of transfer students, and confer with them about the reasons for low numbers and about the remedies, if appropriate. The purpose of this recommendation is to even out the numbers of junior admissions among departments and colleges. It reflects the obligation of Berkeley to accept students from the rest of the system of higher education in California, and the conclusion of this Committee that this obligation should fall on all departments and colleges more evenly than has been the case. The process for examining various departments and colleges should include the provosts, who have responsibility for establishing overall enrollments and faculty resources, as well as the Senate Committee on Admissions and Enrollment. We stress that this process should be a cooperative and collegial one, since the reasons of some departments and colleges for admitting few junior students may be appropriate. The Committee also anticipates that this recommendation will, over time, reduce the number of juniors admitted with weak academic records who then tend not to graduate. Currently, come departments and colleges accept a relatively higher fraction of their applicants, including some students with GPA's as low as 2.4. By reducing the numbers of students admitted by these departments and colleges, and increasing those accepted by others with higher standards, it should be possible to substitute students with stronger academic records for those with marginal performance who are the most likely to drop out (as Table 4 above shows). This recommendation is not a prescription for some departments and colleges to lower their standards for junior admission. We anticipate that publicizing the availability of more admissions in certain departments and colleges will increase their applicants. In addition, under certain conditions (as stated in Recommendation One) departments and colleges may find that they can consider more students from four-year colleges as well as community college students, enlarging their pool of well-qualified applicants. The Admissions and Enrollment Committee is also concerned by the fact that it is harder to transfer into majors with substantial technical prerequisites, including the sciences, engineering, and mathematics. The fraction of applicants who have not completed prerequisites is higher in subjects with substantial technical requirements than in those with few or non-technical prerequisites. This is particularly a problem for community college students in those colleges where sophisticated lower-division courses - calculus-based physics, for example, or advanced math, or particular biology courses - are not offered, or are offered only rarely. While there is no way to relax such prerequisites without compromising the integrity of department standards, it is worth clarifying that there are several alternative ways to complete prerequisites: community college students can take them through concurrent enrollment at a CSU campus, at another UC campus, at UC Berkeley through the Extension program, or at Berkeley after being admitted to the College of Letters and Sciences as a junior but before being admitted to a specific major. While there may not be a perfect substitute for community colleges offering prerequisites, there is still sufficient flexibility that students who want to gain access to majors with substantial technical requirements have several ways to do so.

	Recommendation Seven: UC Berkeley should take several steps to improve the information about junior admissions and to simplify the admissions process. There are substantial complaints about the complexity of the admissions process. Some of this complexity is unavoidable, since junior admissions will continue to be based on departmental and college standards and therefore requires application to individual departments and colleges with varying requirements. However, some of the current confusion can be alleviated by clarifying and simplifying certain aspects of the admissions process. In particular, the A&E Committee recommends that Berkeley undertake the following:
	a. The Office of Undergraduate Admissions (OUA) should provide a single, clear document about the procedures and requirements for junior admissions, distinguishing carefully among requirements for eligibility to UC Berkeley, requirements for admission to specific departments and colleges, and the breadth requirements which can be fulfilled by the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum (IGETC). Despite the efforts of University personnel, there is still confusion about the different kinds of requirements, confusion that might be reduced by a single authoritative publication.
	b. OUA should provide information, for each year, about the junior admissions targets, numbers of applications, numbers of admissions, and minimum GPA for each department, to clarify to prospective applicants and counselors in both community colleges and four-year colleges the variation among departments and colleges in difficulty of admissions.
	c. Information about junior admissions should clarify that students can apply for a second-choice college (and even a third choice). There now seems to be confusion about this among the community colleges.
	d. The University should consolidate the different administrative functions related to junior admissions in one division within the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Currently, these functions are distributed among several offices: personnel in the Office of Relations with Schools develop articulation agreements with community colleges and update departmental requirements; personnel in Academic Preparation and Articulation operate a Transfer Center which provides special assistance to minority students who want to transfer; admissions officers in OUA carry out the admissions process; and several departments and colleges also perform their own outreach for transfer students. There seems to be substantial confusion in community colleges about who does what, and it appears that communication among the different offices at Berkeley with responsibilities for different aspects or junior admissions is less than ideal. Consolidation of these different offices in one unit would provide a kind of "one-stop shopping" for prospective applicants, for counselors in community colleges and other four-year colleges, and for Berkeley departments and colleges setting their junior admissions standards, and should improve services to prospective junior transfer students.

	At the same time that Berkeley should clarify and simplify the junior admissions process, the University should not take on certain functions which are properly the responsibility of community colleges and other four-year colleges. These institutions, and not Berkeley, bear the principal burden for accurate and up-to-date transfer counseling, for providing the lower-division courses that are prerequisites for transfer, and for increasing the numbers of minority students who complete sufficient transferable units so they can be eligible for transfer.

	Recommendation Eight: These changes should take place for the junior admissions process in 1993-94 (that is, for admission in fall 1994), in order to provide sufficient lead time for prospective applicants to plan accordingly.


Section III CONCLUSIONS

	In our recommendations, we have intended to address the various goals of the junior admissions process: to meet the obligations of Berkeley within the entire system of public higher education in California, as expressed in the Master Plan and Senate Bill 121; to provide strong preferences for community college transfer students while still allowing room for transfer students from four-year colleges with legitimate claims to attend Berkeley; to encourage the application and enrollment of historically under-represented minority students; and to maintain the admissions standards and the prerequisites for specific majors that are crucial to maintaining high intellectual standards, without closing off certain majors to transfer students. Since these goals sometimes conflict with each other, it is impossible to pursue one to the exclusion of others; advocates of any one - of higher standards for admission, for example, or of community college transfer, or of minority students - may remain displeased because their own cause has not dominated all others. Quite intentionally, our policy attempts a balance among these claims.

	In the end, UC Berkeley must have the flexibility to determine its own admissions process. It must be able to admit students in a way that is not only fair to the various applicants and respectful of the varying goals for junior admissions, but also that creates the kind of university and the kind of campus all of us want - one that is intellectually and culturally vital, dedicated to the highest standards of learning. This is an institution worth applying to - and an institution worth preserving.


	1 In the preparation of this document, Associate Vice Chancellor Pat Hayashi, Bob Laird, Andre Bell (director of the Office of Undergraduate Admissions), and Pam Bumett (associate director) were unfailingly helpful. Tom Cesa of the Office of Student Research did an outstanding job of providing the data used. 2 At least. these individuals are counted as coming from community colleges because the last college they attended before applying was a community college. As we explain below, some of these may be "bogus" community college students - individuals from four-year colleges who have enrolled briefly in a community college to gain preferential treatment rather than bona fide community college students. 3 Some new juniors - for example, foreign students or re-entry students - do not come from either community colleges or four-year colleges, and for others there is no information about their prior college. Of those transfer students who came from either two- or four year colleges, 90.7 percent came from community colleges in 1990-91. Only 9.3 percent of these students - or 8.0 percent of all new juniors - came from other four-year colleges. 4 In this table, percentages are computed by using the total of all applicants, including foreign students, as the denominator. 5 In this table, the total of the applicants from two- and four-year colleges is less than the total number of applicants in Table 1, which includes certain other applicants excluded from Table 3 because they are unimportant for contrasting the experiences of students from the major sources of transfer applicants. 6 See, for example, W. Norton Grubb, "Dropouts, Spells of Time, and Credits in Postsecondary Vocational Education: Evidence from Longitudinal Surveys", Economics of Education Review, January 1989; and W. Norton Grubb, "The Decline of Community College Transfer Rates: Evidence from National Longitudinal Surveys", Journal of Higher Education, March/April 1991. 7 These figures are different from the more familiar statistics showing that graduation rates are similar among "native" student and community college transfer students. The conventional statistics compare five-year graduation rates of "native" students with the three-year graduation rates of transfer students. But the first group includes "native" students dropping out in their freshman and sophomore year - when most dropouts occur - while the community college comparison group by construction eliminates such dropouts. When we compared transfer students with native students who have made it to their junior year, as in Table 4, the results are obviously different. 8 Upper-division undergraduates as a fraction of all undergraduates were 55.2% in 1985-86, 58.6% in l987-88, 58.8% in 1989-90, and 60.9% in 1990-91. 9 There appears to us to be a relatively even division between faculty who enjoy teaching lower-division students and those who prefer teaching more advanced students. There is, in any event, no consensus among the faculty about any changes from the current 40/60 split. 10 These principles are taken from Freshman Admissions at Berkeley: A Policy for the l990s and Beyond, Report by the Committee on Admissions and Enrollment, Berkeley Division, Academic Senate, University of California, May 19, 1989 (usually referred to as the Karabel report). Careful readers of that document will notice that we have omitted several principles-the fifth recognizing accomplishment in areas like art, athletics, and music; the sixth, recognizing admission of out-of-state students; and the ninth, stating a co-equal role for faculty and administration in setting admissions policy. These strike us as issues that are unproblematic, or simply unnecessary in the context of junior admissions. 11 This recommendation is consistent with the intent of SB121, which gives priority to transfers from community colleges. 12 This recommendation is consistent with the intent of SB121, which specifies priority for applicants who "have a degree or credential objective that is not generally offered at other public institutions of higher learning within California.'' 13 Again this is consistent with SB121, which encourages priority for applicants "for whom the distance involved in attending another institution would create financial or other hardships." 14 The A&E Committee has been unable to ascertain how numerous such "bogus" community college students are, though there is a general perception among counselors and admissions officers that four-year students wanting to transfer to Berkeley are knowledgeable about this method for doing so. 15 This recommendation is consistent with the intent of SB121 to give preference to historically underrepresented groups. 16 This recommendation is consistent with SB121, which stresses in several places that "native" and transfer students be treated equitably. 17 This recommendation is also consistent with a similar requirement in SB121. Please send any comments or questions regarding this web site to our Web Site Administrator (acad_sen@berkeley.edu). 11-Mar-98