BY MADDY FURDEK
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In the midst of the Class of 2016’s college acceptance season, it seemed as if fewer and fewer of my peers were receiving acceptance letters to University of California schools than in prior years. While I was surprised by the negative outcome of many of my friends’ painstakingly perfect applications to UC’s, I took them with a grain of salt, since I did not apply to any UC schools.
That was accurate, until I read a NYT article about the statewide outrage over the heightened percentage of out-of-state students accepted to UCs. Although I personally remained unaffected by these decisions, I found myself outraged by the fact that our state decided to opt out of offering California high schoolers the home-field advantage.
Instead, they went to where the money was at, hiking prices for out-of-state students and rejecting the thousands of California applicants who should be able to rely on a UC acceptance.
About 60% of the 103,117 California applicants were offered admission to at least one of UC’s nine campuses, according to university figures. This is a record low acceptance rate, down from about 63% of the 99,955 applicants last year.
These declining percentages have dropped since 1999 when 79% of in-state applicants were accepted.
You might wonder why so many Californians are so determined to stay in their home state, and the answer is quite simple: It’s cheaper.
Across the board, tuition has risen. Out-of-state tuition is at an all-time high, and my peers and I found ourselves trapped – unable to afford schools elsewhere, yet rejected from our own state universities.
I said I wasn’t affected by the UC’s decision to admit more out-of-state students, and while that is true, I did feel the pain of outrageous out-of-state tuition being demanded by almost every university outside of California.
My dream school since birth had been University of Wisconsin, and while I begged my teachers for obnoxiously flattering letters of recommendation and promised the dean of admissions in my essay that I would sacrifice my first-born child if they’d offer me admission, it wasn’t enough for the university to throw a meager dollar of financial aid in my direction.
Unable to pay the sky-high $50,000 price tag on a year’s tuition at Wisconsin, I was forced to stay in-state, dreams dashed. While I am ultimately incredibly excited to attend college at the CSU I was accepted to, I feel for my peers, as well as the thousands of other California seniors who thought their options would be diverse and ended up being left with a scarce choice range. If our state won’t offer us priority acceptance, what does that leave us with?
Students’ chances at admission into their dream school shouldn’t be hindered by the school’s lust for out-of-state costs.
When students from all over the country open their acceptance emails to the prestigious UC schools and celebrate, I hope they think about the thousands of California students who were rejected simply because they would’ve walked away with a smaller number of loans to the university due to their in-state status.
