UCSB sees record application surge

BY ERIC LINDBERG
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

UC Santa Barbara received a record 55,871 applications for admission in the coming year with a 15 percent increase among freshmen applicants representing the largest surge the university has ever seen.
University officials credited the jump to an overall increase in college applications, a focused marketing campaign and UCSB’s growing academic reputation.

“I think we’ve been laying the groundwork for a lot of years,” Admissions Director Christine VanGieson said. “Our faculty, staff and students have all been trying to tell the story of UCSB and what a good university it is.”
The university plans to admit about 4,200 first-year students and 1,400 transfers for next fall, meaning about 10 percent of those who applied will eventually end up attending classes on the campus.
While UCSB will send out acceptance letters to around 20,000 applicants — in mid-March for freshmen and about a month later for transfers — VanGieson said only about 20 percent will take the university up on its offer.
“Sometimes we’ve been a little stronger than we anticipated, but we have some great people in institutional research, so we’re usually in the ballpark,” she said.
About 14 percent of the current freshman applicants are in the top 4 percent of their high school class, according to statistics released by the university. Their average GPA remained static at 3.71 — 31 percent have a GPA of 4.0 or higher.
“Academic performance in high school is probably the most important thing,” VanGieson said.
Although academic history weighs heavily in ranking potential students, she said independent application readers also closely evaluate extracurricular activities and background information.
“We do try to look at it all together,” she said. “We’re trying to look at the context of a student’s achievement.”
For example, those applying as the first generation in their family to attend a university will be evaluated differently than those from a family with an established collegiate history. Data show a slight upturn in the number of first-generation applicants this year.
The application pool also shows about a 3 percent increase in the number of black, Hispanic and American Indian applicants. While it is a goal of the university to increase diversity on campus, admissions officials are not allowed to use racial or ethnic data during the admissions process.
Despite the overall leap in applicants, VanGieson said a cap on growth prevents the university from expanding to accept more students.
“There are certainly an awful lot of good students we will have to turn away from this application pool,” she said. “…It is hard, particularly when I meet them or talk to them or meet their parents. You’re turning away some students who had their hearts set on coming here.”
Those students are encouraged to take the transfer route, heading to a community college for two years before reapplying to UCSB.
“In most years we’ve been able to accept most, if not all, eligible transfer students,” VanGieson said.
In giving a broader view of how the application statistics reflect on UCSB’s academic reputation, Executive Vice Chancellor Gene Lucas said the university is constantly striving to attract high-profile professors, which in turn sparks interest among potential applicants.
“We’ve always had a hiring philosophy of hiring good and better people into the faculty,” he said. “You start to see that in terms of awards and path-breaking research and newspaper articles.
“It’s been a long process, but I think we’re starting to reap the fruits of our labor.”