California
Education Dialogue
A public policy dialogue produced by Information Renaissance
with support from The William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation,
IBM Corporation and Intel Corporation
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Report of the Working Group on
Student Learning AN IMMEDIATE INTERVENTION TO INCREASE ACCESS Recommendation 10: Increase access to the University of California for students in most educationally disadvantaged schools. We believe that, over the long haul, the recommendations included in this report will lead to a coherent and integrated PreK-University system that will yield very different and far more positive educational outcomes than are currently the case. In particular, the systemic changes we recommend here will both increase the quality of student learning and significantly reduce the glaring gaps in achievement and college participation. However, it is unreasonable to expect these changes to occur immediately. They will require considerable investment of resources, policy deliberation, and time to achieve. At the same time, it is also unreasonable to ask Californians who have been poorly served by the current educational system to wait a decade or more for significantly greater quality and opportunity. Consequently, we add to the recommendations above a significant, but short-term intervention that will demonstrate the State’s commitment to educate all Californians well and open long-shut doors of opportunity to underserved students. Specifically, the University of California should use to the fullest extent the Master Plan’s and University’s Admissions by Exception policy (that allows for 6% of admitted students to be selected from those not meeting the basic eligibility criteria of the University) to admit ineligible students from educationally disadvantaged schools who display academic promise, extraordinary talent, and leadership potential. To accompany this use of Admissions by Exception, the University must ensure that its on-campus academic support programs are sufficient to enable these students to succeed. We believe that this recommendation can and should be implemented immediately in order to engage the University of California directly in addressing the problems of the widespread under-preparation of California’s K-12 students. Importantly, such an intervention falls well within the UC mission, since the central focus of public universities is a commitment to public institutions and solving public problems. Clearly, no public problem is more salient and challenging than increasing educational quality and opportunity in our diverse state.
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