UC Merced reaches out to Valley seniors

UC Merced has hosted scores of San Joaquin Valley high school seniors this month in what amounts to small pep rallies and pitches to draw applications from the region’s teens.

A room full of seniors from schools in small rural communities such as Dinuba, Parlier, Tranquility and Farmersville heard from campus leaders before getting financial aid and application advice on Friday.

School leaders repeatedly told the students that the $13,262 a semester tuition and fees would not be a roadblock. Charles Nies, vice chancellor for student affairs at UC Merced, said “sticker shock” can prevent students and their parents from pursuing a University of California education.

For students who are the first in their families to go to college, he said, they may not be aware of their options. “They don’t even think of financial aid,” he said Friday.

Any student accepted to a University of California system school can get financial aid to cover their full tuition and registration fees if they come from a household that makes less than $80,000 a year, he said.

Auggie Sanchez, a guidance counselor at Dinuba High, said she accompanied 26 seniors during the event Friday. “They’ll all pretty much qualify,” she said about financial aid.

The students from Dinuba High, a school of about 2,000, were good students with a GPA of 3.0 or higher, she said. Dinuba, at 23,000 residents, is a rural community not unlike Merced.

Sanchez said many students come to her thinking of the “bright lights” of UC Berkeley or UCLA, so she tends to recommend UC Merced as a safety school.

“We kind of have a realistic conversation with that student,” she said. “Our kids do well here.”

From its inception, school officials have said, UC Merced was meant to be a campus that would educate more young people from the central San Joaquin Valley. Those students include many low-income and first-generation college students.

In 2005, when UC Merced opened, about 3 percent of applications to the UC system came from the valley. That rose to 7 percent last year, according to Nies.

All of the UC campuses held similar events this month to drive up applications from districts where the system sees few applications, Nies said. A similar event with Merced and Madera county students took place early in the month.

Students had one-on-one meetings with admissions staff and heard tips on filling out an application, among other services.

All of the fanfare and the personal touch seemed to be working on Jesus Ochoa, a Dinuba High senior. The 17-year-old said he’d been thinking about California Polytechnic State University, but heard some good news from the financial aid staff at UC Merced that may sway him this way.

“Everybody’s been really nice, generous,” he said. “They told me about the grants I might get. … He said I was a really good candidate.”

This story was originally published November 20, 2016 at 3:19 PM with the headline "UC Merced reaches out to Valley seniors."