UC San Diego Shoots Itself in the Foot

The #3 U. of California college now admits it went nuts in its admissions policy during the Racial Reckoning, with consequences I pointed out back in 2023.

UC San Diego’s ominous Dr. Seuss library

The faculty senate of the University of California at San Diego in beautiful La Jolla, long the third most prestigious UC college after Berkeley and UCLA and famous for all the Nobel laureates who teach there, published a report last week, written in conjunction with its reluctant staff, confirming much of what I wrote on April 5, 2023 in my Taki’s Magazine column about UC San Diego’s bizarre new admissions policy, which the editors cleverly entitled “Low-Grade Fever.”

More than even most prestigious colleges in the 2020s, UC San Diego has shot itself in the foot, letting in hundreds of students who’d have trouble making change.

Granted, UCSD’s 1960s modernist architecture and its eucalyptus groves are not enthralling, but the huge campus is a couple of blocks from the Torrey Pines Gliderport and Black’s Beach.

Thirty-one months ago, I wrote:

… an Orange County man named Steve Miller recently pointed out that UC San Diego (traditionally, the third most prestigious UC school) clearly switched from spring 2020 to spring 2022 to placing a big thumb on the scale to benefit applicants from heavily Hispanic schools and discriminating against kids from heavily Asian schools.

I took a look at UC’s website of admissions data by race and high school for all the public schools in huge Los Angeles County (population: 10 million). I sorted the high schools into two groups: upscale and downscale. I defined “upscale” as high schools where the majority of applications to UC San Diego come from Asians and whites and “downscale” as ones where most applicants are Hispanics and blacks.

Yes, I realize it sounds crass to define “good schools” so bluntly, but, fundamentally, that’s what everybody means. (Note that Los Angeles County is expensive, so its Asian and white kids are pretty smart.)

Back in spring 2020 (the Before Times), UCSD accepted 36.2 percent of applicants from upscale Los Angeles County public schools compared to 32.5 percent from downscale public schools. Obviously, students at upscale public schools are better on average than at downscale public schools, so it only makes sense that a higher percentage made the cut at UCSD.

But in 2022, only 22.3 percent of applications from the better public high schools were being accepted by UCSD compared with 29.5 percent from the worse schools, the reverse of what most every other college in America did before the confused 2020s.

For example, Arcadia HS typically leads Los Angeles County public schools in National Merit Scholarship semifinalists, with Arcadia educating 660 over the past 28 years.

Arcadia was a pleasant but nondescript suburban municipality east of Pasadena where my cousins lived. In the late 20th century, Chinese millionaires decided to take over Arcadia and transform the school district into their Confucian dream for getting their kids into prestigious California public colleges. Arcadia HS is now more than two-thirds Asian.

Note that upper-middle-class white parents tend to resignedly assume that, what with all the affirmative action in the University of California, they’ll just have to shell out a quarter of a million bucks to send their kid to some moderately well-known private college in Pennsylvania. I mean, what else are they going to do? Publicly complain about the state constitution being violated? Oh, dear, that sounds kind of racist…

On the other hand, Chinese immigrant parents generally assume that while they’ve only been paying taxes in America for a few years, their kids deserve a taxpayer-subsidized education at UC San Diego in exquisite La Jolla.

So, in 2020, 366 Arcadia HS seniors (309 of them Asian) applied to UCSD, and 128 got in (35 percent). In 2022, 388 applied but only 50 were accepted (13 percent).

In contrast, consider a couple of all-Hispanic high schools depicted in late-1980s Lou Diamond Phillips movies: Garfield HS, where cholo Angel takes calculus from Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver, and San Fernando HS, where Ritchie Valens meets Donna in La Bamba.

Garfield had 33 out of 106 applicants (31 percent) accepted in 2020, but 45 out of 96 (47 percent) in 2022. San Fernando saw 16 out of 47 (34 percent) admitted in 2020, but 43 out of 72 last year (60 percent).

Overall, in the spring of 2020, 2,878 students from majority Asian and white L.A. County public schools were accepted by UCSD. This dropped to 2,199 in 2022 (down 24 percent).

In contrast, 1,601 applicants from majority black and Hispanic schools were accepted in 2020, but that exploded to 5,130 last spring (up 215 percent)….

And how many of this sudden surge of students from lousy schools who got in solely due to banning the SAT are going to flunk out of UCSD? Or is UCSD intending to drastically lower its standards? Or does it not have a plan at all because it’s racist to understand how the world works?

Well, it turned out UCSD didn’t have a plan.

And now much of the faculty is sore about it:

Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions

Final Report

November 6, 2025

Executive summary

Over the past five years, UC San Diego has experienced a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering first-year students -- particularly in mathematics, but also in writing and language skills. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly thirtyfold, reaching roughly one in eight members of the entering cohort.

In the appendix, there are sample questions from a test given to the remedial Math 2 students, along with what percentage got them right. Since you probably aren’t a UC San Diego student, I’ll leave it up to you to subtract the percentage right from 100% to figure out how many got wrong “7 + 2 = ? + 6:

Why this fiasco?

• This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education,

Switching to schooling over Zoom during the pandemic wasn’t too bad for students from the laptop class, but was particularly hard on students from the lower half of society, who evidently benefit from going five days per week to an organized place where middle class grown-ups talk at them. So, 2022 was a particularly bad year for UCSD to go hog wild over admitting more students from lousier public high schools at the expense of students from the better public high schools and private schools.

• the elimination of standardized testing

As I wrote in 2023:

Meanwhile, George Floyd’s death had driven elites insane.

So, in November 2021, the politically appointed regents of the giant University of California system rejected the advice of the faculty senate’s task force experts [in the STTF report] and banned college entrance exams. In the name of racial equity, the ten UC campuses (including Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego) weren’t just going “test optional” (in which applicants with bad scores can refuse to submit them), they were permanently banning all applicants from sending in test scores.

The regents’ decision spat upon the report of UC social science professors who had statistically determined that the use of the SAT or ACT college admission tests was crucial to choosing a qualified freshman class.

Remarkably, test scores turned out to be an even more accurate predictor of college grade point average than is high school GPA.

And, contrary to conventional wisdom, the accuracy of the SAT at predicting graduation rates and final college grades was even better for nonwhites than for whites.

Back to the UCSD report:

• grade inflation

During covid and the racial reckoning, high schools tended to ease grading standards. So high school GPA’s predictive validity predictably worsened.

• and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools.

UC San Diego really wanted to qualify for extra federal funds as a “Hispanic-Serving Institution” by making the feds’ racial quota for being 25% Hispanic.

I’d suggest another reason is that UCSD has …

Paywall here.