UC adds resident students, diversity; Merced campus expects little change

More students from California and more from ethnic minority groups have been offered admission to a University of California campus for the next academic year, according to numbers released Monday.

The UC system said it offered 15 percent more invitations to California high school seniors, an announcement that comes soon after a state audit criticized the university for admitting out-of-state and foreign students allegedly at the expense of qualified Californians, who pay lower in-state tuition.

According to the UC announcement Monday, the number of California resident freshmen admitted across the system for the fall increased 8,488 students for a total of 66,123 admission offers, a 14.7 percent increase compared with the same time last year. Numbers for individual campuses were not available Monday, but UC Merced’s student body already has a high portion of Californians.

“We aren’t expecting significant changes in the breakdown of our student population,” UC Merced spokeswoman Brenda Ortiz said. “Based on preliminary data, UC Merced is continuing its trend of attracting the largest percentage of first-generation, low-income and underrepresented students within the UC system.”

Of the total undergraduate population of 6,237 students at UC Merced, less than 1 percent are from out of state or from a foreign country. This year, of the 22,632 applicants, more than 1,200 applied from abroad and 445 applied from out-of-state.

UC Merced looks to have 2,100 incoming undergraduates in the fall.

The systemwide increase in offers puts the campuses on pace to enroll an additional 5,000 California undergraduates in 2016, officials said. The system will look to add 5,000 more during the following two years.

UC President Janet Napolitano said the system has intensified efforts to boost the enrollment of Californians. “Our commitment to California and California students has never wavered, even through the worst financial downturn since the Great Depression,” she said Monday in a statement. “Now, with additional state funding, we are able to bring in even more California students.”

The percentage of nonresidents to be newly enrolled at UCLA and UC Berkeley this fall will remain capped for the second consecutive year, officials said, and UC San Diego will hold the number of nonresidents it enrolls at the same level as 2015. Those campuses are the most popular with out-of-state students.

The UC system has been criticized by some for sending administrators to China, India and other destinations to recruit higher-paying nonresident students.

Officials said nonresident tuition is a part of maintaining the system’s fiscal stability. In recent years the state cut educational funding to the tune of about one-third of the system’s core educational budget, officials said.

Extra tuition dollars from nonresidents total roughly $800 million annually – or the cost of educating 80,000 California resident students – and have helped fill the gap caused by the state cuts, officials said in a news release.

The latest admission figures also show an increase in the number and percentage of California freshmen from historically underrepresented groups, which make up 37.2 percent of all California freshmen admitted for the fall.

The number of Latinos increased to 32 percent of the total number of admitted students, up from 28.8 percent last year. Offers to African American students jumped 32 percent over last year.

The number of newly admitted California freshmen who will be first-generation college students rose to 42.8 percent, and students from low-income families increased to 37.4 percent of the total number of admissions.

Those demographics have always been a target of UC Merced’s goals. About 13 percent of the school’s undergraduates are white.

Again this year, UC Merced leads the system in the percentage of applicants who come from low-income households (60 percent) and whose parents didn’t receive a four-year degree (66 percent).

This story was originally published April 4, 2016 at 6:05 PM with the headline "UC adds resident students, diversity; Merced campus expects little change."