Freshman admission of GTO students

Below are preliminary data showing the numbers of applicants originally offered a "Guaranteed Transfer Option" (GTO) who have accepted an offer of freshman admission from each University of California undergraduate campus in 2004-05.

More than 1,500 UC-eligible applicants who previously expected to come to UC only through the community college route now have accepted the offer to come to the university as freshmen this year. The response rate is in line with the final 2004-05 state budget, which included a provision of $12 million to allow roughly 1,550 GTO students to enroll at UC as freshmen.

" It is great news that so many additional students will be able to begin their college careers at the University of California, as they originally hoped," said Susan Wilbur, UC director of undergraduate admissions. "This is a very good response rate, particularly given that it is late in the year and many students in the GTO pool had already committed to other institutions."

The response rate also is above the normal response rate for UC's "referral pool." In a typical year, UC-eligible applicants not accepted by the campuses to which they applied are offered freshman admission at another campus with sufficient capacity. Last year, 10 percent of students who received an offer through this referral process accepted it.

This year, the GTO process replaced the referral pool in large part, and in the end, nearly 20 percent of applicants who were originally offered GTO admission ultimately accepted freshman admission to one of eight UC campuses. As a result, a larger proportion of applicants who were not originally admitted as freshmen to their campus of choice nevertheless ended up accepting admission to a campus in the UC system.

Currently, 298 students systemwide have opted to remain in the GTO program and enroll at UC two years from now as juniors, despite the offer of freshman admission to the same campus.

The official campus admission processes for GTO students are now complete. The below numbers may change somewhat as a few final cases are resolved:

Campus

Number of GTO students who accepted the freshman offer

Berkeley

282

219

Davis

741

274

Irvine

1,088

202

UCLA

320

248

Riverside

1,653

38

San Diego

149

78

Santa Barbara

188

78

Santa Cruz

3,371

401

Universitywide

7,792

1,538

(Note: The number of offers and acceptances varies widely because of the differing capacities of the campuses at the time these offers were made. Due to limited capacity, UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Diego were only able to offer freshman admission to those students who had already accepted those campuses' original GTO offers. Some other campuses, to different extents, were able to offer admission to students who had accepted their GTO offer, to those who had declined it, and also to those who had declined GTO offers from other UC campuses. UC Riverside's relatively low acceptance rate reflects the fact that the campus did not offer GTO to any UCR applicants, but ultimately offered freshman admission to all applicants in the GTO pool who had not been offered freshman admission to any other campus. In addition, UC Riverside in April offered referral admission to 1,113 engineering applicants, 176 of whom accepted the freshman offer.)

Some of the freshman admission offers to applicants in the GTO pool were made in April and May, mostly by UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, two campuses that had sufficient capacity to make the offer at that time. Of the 1,538 GTO students who have now accepted a freshman admission offer from UC, 641 came through that first process. The remainder of the freshman admission offers came in August, after the final state budget agreement provided for the freshman enrollment of GTO students who wished to come. Of the 1,538 accepting students, 897 came through this second process.

Students initially were given GTO offers -- offering a place at a UC campus following the successful completion of a community college transfer program -- after the Legislature indicated in the 2003-04 budget that it would not provide funds for 2004-05 enrollment growth and the governor further proposed a 10 percent enrollment reduction. With the final state budget agreement, however, all students in the GTO pool who have maintained their UC eligibility have now been offered a freshman spot at UC in the coming academic year. Students may have received offers of fall, winter, or spring enrollment depending upon the capacity of each campus.

UC estimates that it will enroll in 2004-05 about 500 more students overall than it has received funding to enroll. Therefore, if the number of GTO students enrolling as freshmen does not exactly match the 1,550 estimate in the state budget, the remainder of the funding will be used to help address the over-enrollment problem.

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