Not as Many Apply to UCSB

On the heels of the University of California’s announcement that it would be cutting freshman enrollment for the 2009-10 school year by 2,300 students, UCSB officials on Friday, January 23, announced that the school received 54,758 applications for enrollment this coming fall.

Friday’s statement said UCSB’s target enrollment in fall 2009 is 4,100 freshmen and 1,700 transfer students.

The UC-wide enrollment cuts – an attempt to address concerns about the state budget crisis and over-enrollment at certain campuses – will result in a 6.6 percent cut to the number of freshmen accepted to UCSB. (That’s a considerably smaller cut than the 12 percent reductions in the freshman classes at UC Irvine and UC San Diego.) The result will be 275 fewer admissions to UCSB than last year.

UC campuses will this year be accepting 500 more transfer students than last year. That would seem to bode well for the 10,085 transfer students who also applied to enroll at UCSB- up 1,239 from last year.

Overall the number of applications to UC campuses rose by 2.9 percent – making the total number of UC applicants a record high of 98,002. The office of UC President Mark Yudof blamed the decrease of 2,352 freshman applicants to UCSB in part on the “challenging economic climate.” (Why the lousy economy would affect UCSB applications and not the UC campuses as whole was not addressed by Yudof’s office.) “[UC knows] that students recognize the academic excellence of UC Santa Barbara and its programs, which is why we have seen applications more than double over the past decade. We always try to look at more than one year at a time and we have 6,000 more applicants this year that we did two years ago,” said Christine Van Gieson, UCSB admissions director, who also praised the spike in the number of transfer student applications as the result of cooperation between UCSB and community colleges throughout the state.

The statement also included various other factoids about UC and UCSB enrollment. Among them:

UCSB was the fourth most popular UC campus, with just under half of those applying to UC included UCSB among the campuses they wanted to attend.

Roughly nine out of every ten students who applied to UCSB was a California resident.

Approximately one-third of UCSB applicants have a grade point average (GPA) of 4.0 or higher. The average GPA of applicants was 3.71 – the same as it was for applicants to enroll in the 2008-09 school year.

The average SAT score of applying students was 1,739 out of a possible 2,400, with the average score for the math, reading, and writing portions of the test being 596, 569, and 575 respectively.

About 27 percent of applicants, or 12,143 people, were “members of underrepresented minority groups,” including African American, American Indian, and Chicano and Latino ethnicities. That’s up 187 from last year.

Of applying transfer students, 89.4 percent are students at California community colleges.