Montero says UCLA is not changing its admissions policy to increase its Black enrollment. “Our [faculty admissions] committee for some time has been thinking about a move to a more holistic approach,” she says.
Steven R. Goodman, an independent college admissions consultant, says the change is indeed directed at admitting more Black students, but university officials won’t make such a controversial acknowledgment.
UCLA is joining a host of universities across the nation — including the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — that have moved to a more holistic admissions model, Goodman says.
“It has enabled them to recruit more students who otherwise wouldn’t have applied,” he says. “And holistic admissions is a terrific idea if the university is trying to extend its applicant pool.”
Hunt says the key to the reform process will be its implementation.
“If they actually move into the direction of implementing something close to UC-Berkeley’s system, then they are going to have to retrain a lot of the admissions staff,” he says. “They are going to have to set up a new protocol on how they handle applications. This will be a major change of how they’ve been doing admissions at UCLA since the late 1980s. It is not one of those things that you can just turn around and do. The outcome will depend upon details and also a commitment to the principles that sort of undergirds this move.”
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
