February 22, 2022

Students walk past Sather Gate on the UC Berkeley campus. (Ben Margot / Associated Press) Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Tuesday, Feb. 22. I’m once again Justin Ray. A conflict between UC Berkeley and its neighbors is threatening enrollment for new students. Here is a deep dive, but as Teresa Watanabe recently explained succinctly: “UC Berkeley announced that if a court order stands, it would be forced to slash its incoming fall 2022 class by one-third, or 3,050 seats for first-year and transfer students. The news — just a month before the campus was set to release admission decisions — set 150,000 applicants and their families on edge.” The university’s projected reduction is in response to a ruling issued last August. Back then, an Alameda County Superior Court judge ordered an enrollment freeze and upheld a Berkeley neighborhood group’s lawsuit that challenged the environmental impact of the university’s expansion plan. Neighbors are upset by the impact of enrollment growth on traffic, noise, housing prices and the natural environment. There are many sides to the debate, but one I want to explore is a recent development that is partially fueling the demand for UC enrollment. ACT & SAT are MIA More high school students are meeting UC eligibility requirements due to the UC Board of Regents decision to drop the use of the SAT and ACT for admissions decisions through 2024. The board argued that the tests exacerbated disparities involving race and income. Since the tests were dropped, applications have skyrocketed. I remember taking the ACT and SATs on Saturdays between 2006 and 2007. It was nerve-wracking, thinking my whole future depended on how I performed at 8 a.m. in this uncomfortable environment, surrounded by strangers. It was frustrating, because I knew my family couldn’t afford all the fancy courses you could take to better prepare for the tests. You may be familiar with this struggle, but what you may not know is why we had those tests in the first place. Oddly enough, they were made to make education more fair. The College Board developed the SAT almost 100 years ago in order to identify promising students regardless of their backgrounds. Back then, many students that made it into elite New England schools came from elite families who lived close by, according to the Wall Street Journal. But colleges wanted to cast a wider net. “It was a test that was built in the ‘30s, to try to find Einstein behind a plow out there,” economist Anthony Carnevale told USA Today. But over time, this changed. Critics now say the SAT and ACT are heavily influenced by race, income and parental education levels. More than 1,000 colleges and universities have already decided to drop the testing requirement, which had become virtually impossible to maintain during the pandemic. Now, students from many different backgrounds ⁠— especially those from families with lower incomes ⁠— are more able to obtain higher education. But there’s an aspect of the situation at UC Berkeley that many might have missed. The enrollment cap will impose “immediate, significant, and burdensome changes to the UC Berkeley admissions process that could only be achieved at this point by delaying sending acceptance letters,” UC said. The university added that low-income, underrepresented students would be disproportionately affected because they would have less time to obtain adequate financial assistance. I personally fear that this enrollment cap threatens the same groups of students who wouldn’t have gotten a chance in the past.