Fiscal woes impact admissions

In order to ease the impact of recent and anticipated budget cuts, the Chancellor’s Enrollment Advisory Committee is looking closely at a variety of options dealing with admissions, including declining the rate of transfer students admitted into the university in favor of more out-of-state and international students.

Each year, the committee puts together suggestions for the chancellor regarding what type of students should be admitted into UCLA. The committee is discussing these matters in detail and will submit their final suggestions next month. The chancellor will evaluate their suggestions and make final admission decisions in January.

This year, the committee, which is comprised of administration and student leaders, will make suggestions facing decline in state funding.

The committee is looking into admitting fewer students in the university, either at the freshman level or transfer student level and accepting only transfers from community colleges instead of four-year colleges.

When the governor signed the state budget in September, it indicated that UCLA would not receive extra funding, although the university experienced increased costs in areas ranging from utility bills to employee benefits.

This was essentially a budget cut for UCLA, said Steve Olson, vice-chancellor of finance, budget, and capital programs.

Earlier this month, UCLA faced another unexpected $6 million budget cut. Additionally, the governor has called the legislature back for a special session and has proposed a package, which if passed, will result in another $11 million budget cut. The legislators have until Nov. 30 to come up with a budget solution.

“This is really getting very serious and I think it’s a prelude for what is likely to be a very, very bad year in state funding for next year,” Olson said.

The chancellor’s advisory committee is taking the budget cuts into serious account and is looking into possibly reducing the number of students admitted into the university.

In 1999, UCLA was asked to increase enrollment by 4,000 students by the 2010-11 school year. Through a variety of measures, including offering more summer school opportunities to re-assessing the number of units each class is worth, UCLA met the goal last year. The university was to receive additional funding to accommodate for the increase in students, but the state did not pay due to the cuts last year, said Scott Waugh, acting executive vice-chancellor and provost and chair of the advisory committee.

Based on the lack of funding, Olson said UCLA is currently over-enrolled by 1,475 students, The committee is discussing whether to cut enrollment.

Waugh said that with or without the budget cuts, the committee would have to answer the question of what type of student body they want to have.

“Because this is a year where there have been budget cuts and (may) be additional budget cuts, we have to be very careful with those kinds of judgments and the type of advice we give to the chancellor,” Waugh said. “What we want to do is get the right mix of students to benefit us.”

One of the issues important to this decision is diversity. The committee is determining whether reducing the number of admits will reduce the overall composition of that year’s class.

Another avenue of helping the university ease the budget cut implications involves potentially increasing the number of out-of-state and international students.

“We get that money directly and that brings in money we can use, so there’s some advantage of bringing in non-resident students or a larger number of non-resident students,” Waugh said. “We certainly would not be in the position to say we will take non-resident students at the expense of diversity.”

Also, several different suggestions have been made by committee members regarding how to deal with transfer admission. One entails allowing transfer students from only community colleges and not from four-year colleges. Waugh said the committee is discussing the effects of such a decision because UCLA has an obligation to give access to higher education to everyone.

“That would be one of the ways of reducing the numbers (of student’s admitted) without hurting that kind of pipeline we have constructed with the community colleges,” Waugh said, stressing that the committee has not made a decision about this issue yet.

Another suggestion the committee is looking into regarding transfer students is to potentially decline transfer admission and increase non-resident admission in order to bring in more money for the school due to higher tuition costs, said Norah Sarsour, the undergraduate representative for the advisory committee.

The committee is discussing the implications of having a California public university turn away Californians in favor of non-resident students.

Waugh said that the university will uphold its obligation to Californians, but noted that students outside of California also want to attend UCLA.

“We are also a national and international university, where people are interested in coming here.” Waugh said. “We actually want to attract talent to California as well as educate Californians themselves.”

Sarsour said that she understands the complexity of the situation because the university is in a tight position with the budget cuts, but she said does not feel cutting transfer students is the best solution.

“UCLA is a public institution, an institution of California, so its obligation is to the taxpayers of the state,” Sarsour said.

Jeremiah Garcia, the academic affairs commissioner for the Undergraduate Students Association Council, said he believes that limiting enrollment for transfers will hit lower socio-economic and communities of color hard. The university has undertaken efforts to help these communities have a greater presence at UCLA and this would undermine those efforts.

“I would hate to see all that work not be successful because of budget cuts,” Garcia said. Currently, about 40 percent of those who graduate from UCLA are transfer students, said Waugh.