In July 1995, the University of California\'s Board of Regents voted to ban consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions and employment—a ban that was extended to all state agencies when the voters of California approved Proposition 209 in November 1996. This paper discusses the...

This brief essay covers the history of admissions at the University of California (UC), including the development of affirmative action programs in the 1960s and, more recently, the heated political battle over the use of race and gender preferences at the University.

What has been the level of public investment in the California higher education system, and how has it performed over the past century? What are the challenges that this system faces in the future and what level of investment is necessary? This paper attempts to provide an historical context to...

Charles Vest gave the first of three Clark Kerr Lectures on the Role of Higher Education in Society on April 19, 2005 on the Berkeley campus. This essay argues that research-intensive public and private universities increasingly have far more similarities than differences in missions,...

This policy brief was prepared for the University of California Academic Senate and provides a general outline of the future role of the Senate's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) in setting universitywide undergraduate admissions policy. BOARS has the prerogative to act as...

Within a quarter century after the end of World War II (1945-1970), largely because of the support and investment it received from the State, the University of California had changed from two modest-size general campuses (Berkeley and Los Angeles) and the medical campus in San Francisco (UCSF),...

A number of national studies point to a trend in which highly selective and elite private and public universities are becoming less accessible to lower-income students. At the same time there have been surprisingly few studies of the actual characteristics and academic experiences of low-income...

The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education made a number of recommendations in the area of admissions. Key was a proposed target of at least 60% of all undergraduate students being at the upper division level at the University of California and what became the California State...

Is public tertiary education really in a crisis, and, if so, what is the crisis about? This paper analyses international aggregated data and examines to what extent there has been a crisis of public tertiary education in OECD countries in the past decade. It first focuses on relative enrolments...

The assertion that there are a limited set of generalizable good educational practices (Chickering & Gamson, 1987) with a common model of preferred active student engagement in learning (Kuh, 2001) is appealing to those responsible for simply stated institutional outcomes and to the faculty who...