Arthur Wang: New UC Info Center offers transparency in college admissions

College admissions is an anxiety-inducing topic. Just ask the 92,681 freshman applicants who applied to UCLA in the fall.

While 16,059 freshman applicants received the good news last year, in the months leading up to the decision’s release, prospective students were left in the dark in terms of admissions statistics.

But it won’t be this way for long. The UC recently released an “in-house beta” of a new database, the UC Information Center, that provides detailed information on applicants, admits and graduates of UC schools, said UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein. However, if the University does not adequately publicize this invaluable tool, it will be neglected by the public, and the time and money put into it will be squandered.

In light of longtime complaints about the opacity of college admissions, the University of California Office of the President introduced a database called StatFinder in late 2007, but did not extend the initial three-year contract because of the recession, so the website died in 2012. Info Center is a new and improved version of this database.

UCOP needs to make sure all Californians and academic researchers, who rely on such data to analyze higher education and public policy, are adequately informed of Info Center’s existence and extensive utility.

StatFinder was billed in a 2008 presentation as “a tool for transparency and accountability,” marking the first effort of any university system to provide admission statistics in any serious detail. The return of a detailed systemwide database of admissions data and student demographics means that the UC returns to the forefront of the effort to provide admissions transparency and provides a public service to stakeholders and academic researchers who rely on such data to analyze higher education and public policy alike.

What made StatFinder so remarkable was not that it simply put a smorgasbord of charts and numbers up for students, their parents and the curious to see – such information has long been available – but the fact that it allowed for extensive customization and selection of what variables one would like to see plotted.

On StatFinder, anything and everything the prospective student puts on an application, from household income to “first language spoken at home,” could be plotted onto a raw data table – only aggregating when numbers dipped below a double-digit threshold – that displayed relationships, or the lack thereof, between variables. A writer at UC Berkeley’s The Daily Clog thus dubbed StatFinder “the iPhone of admissions data.”

This particular feature made StatFinder invaluable for education scholars, who, in lieu of tediously requesting information from universities directly, benefitted from viewing easy-to-access databases to conduct research and investigate a myriad of issues in higher education, such as the relationship between socioeconomic status and SAT scores, or how geography affects a student’s choice of college – and if these factors are confounded by family income or education levels.

Info Center promises similarly fruitful data for future research, but UCOP needs to make the database and its powerful interactive features clear to the public for traffic to catch on. Unique visitors to StatFinder peaked at around 12,000 in a month, a small fraction of the roughly 125,000 visits the UC’s main website receives during the peak month of May. With proper publicity and outreach to relevant parties, like professors and prospective students, however, Info Center has the potential to prove useful to a larger chunk of the nearly 200,000 students who apply to the UC and to their families.

And students – especially prospective students – may be the people who gain the most from accessing this data. Data about individual high schools, including which students got in, their average SAT scores and their average GPAs, will prove invaluable to students applying to schools. I still recall the moment when I stumbled upon StatFinder four years ago and discovered average GPAs, ethnic backgrounds, income levels and other details, painting an accurate profile of who gets admitted to UC.

Info Center – StatFinder 2.0, I call it – has the capacity to demonstrate transparency in admissions, provide invaluable data for researchers and serve as an example for universities around the country. To prevent it from being put on the chopping block once more, the UC needs to publicize the database to researchers and other higher education stakeholders, as Info Center competes with a long list of UC-funded initiatives.

College admissions has become a costly game in which its players know little about their odds in the decision-making process. With Info Center, this game of chance becomes a game of skill. “Fiat lux” indeed.