Center for Studies in Higher Education

In 2020, the Regents of the University of California voted to stop considering SAT scores (or ACT scores) in undergraduate admissions. A group of UC faculty have recently signed open letters calling on the Regents to reverse this decision.UC’s renewed debate on the SAT follows decisions from a number of Ivy League institutions to return to requiring standardized test scores, after going “test optional” during the pandemic. UC, however, is a public institution, with a different mission from that of the Ivy League private universities. As the “About UC” page on the ucop.edu website describes it, “The University of California began more than 150 years ago with a simple but revolutionary idea: that college should be available to everyone. That same spirit still guides us today…We’re an engine of social and economic mobility for hundreds of thousands of students, and our research and innovation powers health care for all Californians.” As the Regents and other stakeholders consider the question of whether to bring back the SAT, they will need to do so in light of the UC’s unique role in the state.This document attempts to address a number of factual and interpretive issues about the role of SAT scores in college admissions, in general and specifically at the University of California. It takes the form of a series of frequently asked questions and answers. It may be updated as new questions arise or new evidence comes to light.

Food insecurity is widespread among college students in the United States. CalFresh food benefits, known federally as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, can help students inCalifornia pay for food, but may not reach all eligible students. This data point provides estimates of CalFresh participation rates among California community college (CCC), California State University(CSU), and University of California (UC) students in California. It updates numbers from our last data point, which focused on CalFresh enrollment during the 2022–23 school year for CCC and UC students.This is the first data point in this series to include CSU students. 

American colleges and universities are highly stratified by pre-college academic achievement, family background, and institutional resources. We study the meritocratic consensus in American higher education: colleges that high-testing students (who are generally also from high-income families) attend spend dramatically more on instruction than do those that enroll lower-testing students. Stratification by test scores has been largely stable since the 1960s, but the stratification of instructional resources has risen sharply since 1970 at both private and public institutions. Non-academic admissions criteria like athletics, legacy, and affirmative action are second-order in determining the allocation of students to universities. Potential economic justifications for the positive association of instructional expenditures with student prior achievement – q-complementarity between achievement and resources, convex social returns to high human capital, and incentives to invest in learning prior to college – have little empirical support. Resource stratification across universities has not increased in the past decade, largely due to increased public funding of universities that enroll lower-testing students through financial aid programs like California’s CalGrant, but stratification within institutions is now rising swiftly. JEL Codes: I23, I24, N32, Z13