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Thursday, August 31, 2017

Rehash

Apparently, we are in a dull news period. So the news media seem to be rehashing earlier news related to UC. From (respectively), the Washington Post and USA Today:

After black-clad antifa members violently attacked conservative protesters in Berkeley on Sunday, the city’s mayor asked the University of California at Berkeley to cancel a conservative student group’s plan to host alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in September.

The university says it isn’t backing down.

“We have neither the legal right or desire to interfere with or cancel their invitations based on the perspectives and beliefs of the speakers,” said university spokesman Dan Mogulof.

Mayor Jesse Arreguin said bringing Yiannopoulos to campus for “Berkeley Free Speech Week,” which is hosted by a conservative campus newspaper called the Berkeley Patriot, could create the potential for violent protesters “to create mayhem.”

“I don’t want Berkeley being used as a punching bag,” Arreguin told the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Berkeley Patriot also invited former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and conservative provocateur Ann Coulter to speak during the week, scheduled for Sept. 24-27.* Mogulof said the university is not able to confirm the speakers until administrators receive a finalized list from the student group this week...
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*Note that different news accounts give different dates.
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Full story at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/30/berkeleys-mayor-asked-uc-berkeley-to-cancel-milo-yiannopoulos-the-university-said-no/
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This year, two public California universities handled relatively large incoming freshman class applicants very differently, shedding light on the challenges and possibilities that arise when more students want in than expected.

On one hand, there’s the University of California-Irvine, which rescinded 499 applications due to transcript issues and poor senior year grades. On Aug. 2, the UC Irvine chancellor reversed 290 students’ admissions decisions, re-admitting those with missing transcripts, leaving the fate of the remaining 209 students hanging in the balance.

At the same time, over the summer, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo projected it would have its largest freshman class ever, at 5,000 to 5,200, according to the San Luis Obispo Tribune. Yet Cal Poly rescinded the acceptances of just 227 students, some for failing to complete coursework.

Why did these two universities accept unusually large incoming freshman classes, and get larger than anticipated acceptances?

“We term that a good problem, to have more students than you need (rather) than too few. However, it’s a problem,” says higher education expert Tom Green of American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

Green says he has witnessed some instances of more students than expected saying “yes” in past years — but not to this level. “That’s probably happened, over 23 years, three or four times, and they were typically small numbers over — not hundreds, but maybe 10 to 20 to 30. All of those presented challenges,” he tells USA TODAY College. “I think what was unusual in the Irvine and the SLO case were the numbers. The big numbers over, that’s what’s a little more unusual.”

Universities typically use several metrics of interest to gauge student intentions, Green says, but there was an X factor this year: an earlier application for financial aid.

Usually, Green says, low-income students tend to apply to college relatively late in the cycle, “when they have a better idea of what they can afford in the fall.”

But, he says, “Now that we have the earlier FAFSA filing date in October, those low-income students are getting answers from universities in December or January, so, months before they would have gotten it in the past.” Knowing sooner about financial aid gives students a better picture, earlier on, of whether they can accept an offer.

Source: http://college.usatoday.com/2017/08/30/how-two-public-california-universities-handled-a-surprising-influx-of-freshmen/

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