In the wake of the recent college admission scandal, Democratic assembly members in California are sponsoring a legislative package that would bring an end to legacy admissions and gradually phase out the use of standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT in admissions decisions.
Several state lawmakers unveiled the package to propose college admissions reform and oversight in the state capitol this past Friday, according to a March 28 press release on the website of Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco.
“For every student admitted through bribery, there was an honest and talented student that was rejected,” said Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, one of the lawmakers supporting the package.
“This legislative package of college admissions reforms will ensure that there are adequate checks and balances to catch fraudsters, but more importantly to protect the sanctity of the admissions process,” he added.
One of the bills in the legislative package sponsored by Ting would prohibit “any California college or university from granting preferential admissions to applicants related to the institution’s donors or alumni, or risk exclusion from the Cal Grant program.”
The Cal Grant is a state-funded student financial aid program administered by the California Student Aid Commission. It is currently the largest source of state-funded student financial aid in California and an important source of revenue for public and private universities alike.
The legislative package, if passed, would also begin the process of phasing out standardized tests by requesting that the California State University and University of California systems “conduct a study of the usefulness, effectiveness and need for the SAT and ACT to determine student admissions.” The SAT and ACT, administered by the nonprofit organizations College Board and ACT Inc., respectively, are two of most widely used standardized tests for college admissions.
Other proposals in the package would require additional administrators to approve all special admissions, require some college admissions consultants to register with the secretary of state’s office, and request that the state auditor review risks of fraud in California’s public universities admissions processes, especially where the admissions of student athletes and other special admissions are concerned.
The legislative package comes in the wake of a massive college admissions cheating scandal, where federal prosecutors revealed that wealthy parents bribed college admissions officers at top-tier universities in order to secure the admission of their children. In some cases the parents, working through college consultant William Singer, paid to have standardized tests taken on their children’s behalf.
The fallout from the investigation doesn’t appear to have stopped Ivy League universities and other prestigious institutions of higher learning from publishing their admission rates, a practice which may have been a contributing factor in motivating parents and students to cheat. Several elite universities, including some of those named in court papers, announced record low admission rates along with record high application rates, according to a report by the New York Times.
Yale’s admission rate fell from 6.31% to 5.91% last year, or 2,178 students out of a record high pool of 36,843. The University of Southern California boasted an admission rate of 11%, a record low, out of 66,000 freshman applications.
Stanford University, also named in the investigation, said last year that it would no longer release admissions data to the public.
Troy Worden is a recent graduate in English and philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was president of the Berkeley College Republicans in 2017.
