According to CalMatters Housing, the University of California is revisiting whether to bring back standardized testing like the SAT and ACT for undergraduate admissions. Over three thousand UC faculty members have signed letters or petitions backing a return to testing, and the Board of Regents may overturn its earlier decision to eliminate these requirements from their application process.
The debate has centered mostly on whether standardized tests actually predict whether students will succeed once they're enrolled at UC. Some professors believe test scores reveal academic preparation that high school grades alone don't capture. Others counter that once you account for students' socioeconomic circumstances, the tests become less meaningful because they essentially measure family resources rather than actual ability.
A law professor at UC Berkeley makes the point that focusing only on whether tests predict success misses a bigger question entirely. Even if standardized tests do help forecast student performance, the real issue is whether a public university system should be sorting and separating students across different campuses based on predicted academic ability.
The professor draws a comparison using high schools as an example. A large public high school typically must accept all qualified students and offers a full range of courses from remedial to advanced, with students choosing based on their needs and interests. The UC system, by contrast, operates more like two well-funded and poorly-funded public schools in segregated neighborhoods, where one school has far more resources and attracts better teachers, leading to better student outcomes.
UC Berkeley and UC Merced serve as the clearest example. While Merced gets more state funding per student, Berkeley receives nearly twice as much per student when you count private donations. Berkeley admits only about eleven percent of applicants while Merced accepts about ninety-five percent. Berkeley students get taught more by full-time faculty, graduate at higher rates, and earn higher starting salaries after college.
California already runs a modest program called Eligibility in the Local Context that guarantees admission to some UC campus for the top nine percent of students at participating high schools, which has helped boost graduation rates. The professor suggests going further by adopting something like Texas's approach, where the top ten percent of students from every high school automatically gain entry to a Texas public university. The idea is that once students are qualified, the highest-performing students shouldn't be concentrated only at the most well-resourced campuses.
What I am seeing locally here in the Bay Area and across the East Bay is that families are increasingly concerned about access and fairness in higher education, especially as costs rise and competition intensifies. Many of my younger neighbors and their children are asking hard questions about whether the UC system is really serving the public mission it was created for, and these conversations about how students get sorted across campuses matter just as much to students' futures as any real estate decision does.
