What is UC San Diego up to?

Aaron Sibarium’s article in the Washington Free Beacon on how the UCLA Medical School has gone rogue in its DEI mania in accepting obvious incompetents should focus attention on the similar ploys of University of California at San Diego in its undergrad admissions.

I've been complaining since 2013 about brand name colleges not expanding their enrollment. For example, Stanford has an 8 square mile campus in perhaps the best location in America, the heart of the Silicon Valley. So I can't kvetch about UC San Diego's current surge to add 20,000 more undergrads between 2013 and 2033. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported in 2023:

The campus currently has about 43,000 students, up from 29,517 in fall 2013. Chancellor Pradeep Khosla says enrollment could reach 50,000 in about a decade.

UCSD has almost two square miles, 1152 acres, in its main campus in exquisite La Jolla on the cliffs above a famous nudist beach, so it has plenty of room. In contrast, UCLA currently has 48,000 students, undergrad and grad, on its tightly packed 419 acre campus.

One downside of expanding the student body is that it almost inevitably will lessen UCSD’s student metrics on USN&WR rankings. That’s why most elite colleges have been extremely slow about expanding. So good for UCSD.

That said, it’s nuts for UC San Diego to simultaneously wage its current vendetta against undergraduate applicants from primarily white and Asian public high schools in the name of expanding Hispanic enrollment, which I documented in 2023. Increased Hispanics will happen naturally due to UCSD becoming bigger and therefore less elite. So what’s the rush in its purge of white and Asian applicants?

But UCSD recently downgraded applicants from the better public high schools. For example, Arcadia H.S. east of Los Angeles has averaged about two dozen National Merit Scholars per year in recent decades. But the percentage of Arcadia applicants accepted by UCSD dropped from 35% in 2020 to 13% in 2022. In contrast, the percentage of applicants from all Hispanic San Fernando HS increased over the same span from 34% to 60%.

This kind of radical change wasn’t seen in UCLA and Berkeley undergraduate admissions. My guess is that UCSD has switched from evaluating high school GPA to evaluating mostly high school rank, so that Asians and whites no longer benefit from taking more Advanced Placement tests, for which UC awards an extra point of GPA (i.e., an A in an AP class is worth 5.0 instead of 4.0). But there are other possible tricks being pursued in La Jolla.

I encourage investigative journalists like Sibarium to get to the bottom of what’s up at UCSD.