The ZIP-Code Route Into UC : GPA Counts, but Where You Live May Be Just as Critical
California’s system of higher education has been celebrated as the nation’s model system, providing equal access to the American dream. But a look at who is admitted to the prestigious University of California campuses shows that ZIP codes may be as critical as grade point averages in determining who gets in and who stays out.
This is how the system works: The top 12.5% of the state’s high school graduates are eligible for the University of California; the top 33.5% are eligible for the state universities; for everyone else there is open access to community colleges with the option, after two years, of transferring into a four-year institution.
California’s goal has been a democratic one of making higher education available to one and all. The reality, however, reveals a system that favors the rich and the few. The list of the feeder high schools that send more than 100 students each to UC reads like a social register. It includes Beverly Hills, Palos Verdes, Santa Monica, Rolling Hills, Palisades and, in the San Fernando Valley, Granada Hills, Birmingham and Taft. With the exception of San Francisco’s Lowell and University high schools, the UC feeders are in predominantly, if not exclusively, white, affluent enclaves. Not surprisingly, the mean family income for freshmen at UC Berkeley last fall was nearly $60,000, well above the national average.
Both the California Master Plan and Education Code are structured in such a way that students not originally eligible for a state university may be able to transfer after two years at a community college. But to the extent that transfer from a community college to UC works at all, it works primarily for the select, the affluent--and principally the white--community college. The top 10 community college feeder campuses to UC for fall, 1986, were mainly in affluent residential communities: Santa Monica (252 transfers), Diablo Valley (241), Santa Barbara (227), Orange Coast (207), Cabrillo (151), El Camino (143), De Anza (139), San Diego Mesa (138), American River (132) and Saddleback (132).
By contrast, consider Fresno City College, which serves large numbers of minority students from a predominantly agricultural region: Only one black and four Latinos (out of a total student body of 13,000) transferred to UC in 1986. Imperial Valley Community College, serving a similar student body, sent only three Latinos to UC campuses out of a freshman class of 1,341 that year. At predominantly black Compton College, only two blacks transferred to a UC campus in 1986.
Statewide, the 106 community colleges in California sent a total of 189 blacks and 485 Latinos to the eight UC campuses, an average of six minority students from each college. Yet approximately 80% of underrepresented minorities who enter college in the state begin their studies in a community college.
While it is surely important to maintain high standards, the goal of a tax-based state educational system should be the development of talents and skills from all socioeconomic groups. Public education by its very nature must reflect the entire population that supports it. What California has, instead, is a perfectly correlated system of family income to educational benefits--that is, the wealthiest are rewarded with access to the University of California; middle-income students end up at the California State University; low-income students begin and end their higher education at community colleges.
One possible solution to the perpetuation of a hereditary elite is to expand eligibility to UC and CSU to the top 12.5% and top 33.5% of students at every high school. There is nothing in state law or the California Master Plan to prevent this more egalitarian approach. Without such a remedy, California will merely continue to favor students from those schools with honor courses, enriched curriculums, well-equipped science laboratories and optimal learning conditions.
Shouldn’t a serious student at an inner-city school who graduates in the top 10% of his or her class have the same access to the benefits of California’s postsecondary system as his or her counterpart in an exclusive private or magnet public school? If not, we should recognize that we are rewarding accidents of birth and that our current system of admissions to the University of California is, in truth, determined by ZIP code.
