Non-Californians need not apply. That’s the message the University of California system sent last week, when it proposed to limit out-of-state residents to just 20 percent of student slots at its flagship schools. At UC campuses with higher rates of out-of-state students—at Berkeley, for example, nearly a quarter of students hail from somewhere other than California—out-of-state enrollment will be capped at their current highs.
The proposal strikes The Scrapbook as reasonable enough. After all, part of the heavy tax burden borne by Californians goes to fund their prestigious university system—it’s kind of unfair that so many prized slots go to Ohioans, Oregonians, Floridians, and sundry other nonresidents when those would-be students have perfectly adequate public options back home. To put it in Trumpian terms: California First!
Yet there’s a wrinkle. For while the UC system wants to build a big, beautiful wall to keep out excess Midwesterners, New Englanders, Southerners, and their ilk, it is also proud to do what it can to make its campuses havens for undocumented immigrants. Back at the end of November, University of California president (and former secretary of homeland security) Janet Napolitano announced the university system will keep at arm’s length federal agencies that enforce immigration laws. And, of course, “undocumented students will be considered for admission under the same criteria” as anyone else. In other words, the UC system is happy to accommodate students who are in the country illegally, while at the same time limiting Americans from other states access to their system.
With its newly proposed quotas on applicants from the lesser 49, the UC system seems to be saying enough with all the non-Californians already. Unless they’re illegal immigrants, that is. ¨
