University of California officials announced today that a new Web site would provide public access to a wide range of admissions data from the system’s 10 campuses and give visitors the tools to create their own tables with the information.
System officials said the new site, dubbed UC StatFinder, would allow the parents of prospective students to find out such information as how many people from their community had been admitted to a University of California campus. Legislators would be able to monitor the racial and geographic diversity of students admitted to the university, officials said, and high-school counselors could get data on the average number of honors courses taken by students at their schools who were admitted to the system.
“As a public trust, the university has a unique responsibility to be open about its admissions process and its outcomes,” Susan Wilbur, the university’s director of undergraduate admissions, said in prepared remarks. “UC StatFinder helps us live up to that responsibility by providing an unprecedented amount of data.”
Beginning today, the university is making available undergraduate-admissions data from the fall of 1995, the fall of 2000, and the fall of 2005.
In two months, undergraduate-admissions data from 1994 to 2006 will be online. By then, the university also plans to have added some statistics from other universities for comparison.
By the middle of next year, the university said, the StatFinder site will include data about enrolled students’ performance, including retention and graduation rates, average time to degree, grade-point averages, and majors.
John J. Moores, a university regent, had strongly pressed the system to make admissions data more readily available. In the past, he has been critical of the university’s “comprehensive review” admissions policy, which took effect in 2002 and calls for admissions officers to judge applicants on nonacademic factors, such as special talents or experiences with adversity, in addition to weighing grades, test scores, and other academic qualifications.
In 2003, when he was chairman of the university’s Board of Regents, Mr. Moores conducted an analysis of undergraduate admissions at the Berkeley campus. His 159-page report concluded that the campus’s admissions process might be overlooking too many applicants with high standardized-test scores. —Sara Hebel
