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San Jose State University will guarantee admission to students who graduate from the East Side Union High School District in San Jose and meet the university’s minimum admissions requirements under a new partnership that will be announced Friday.
Through a local partnership — the Spartan East Side Promise — officials are trying to increase access to the university to qualified high school graduates from the campus’ surrounding communities.
The program comes as San Jose State and other California State University schools continue to reject record numbers of qualified applicants as the 23-campus system struggles to keep pace with increased enrollment demand.
San Jose State is one of CSU’s five entirely “impacted” universities, meaning that the number of qualified applicants it receives each year across all majors far exceeds the number of available admission spots. Last fall, San Jose received a record 30,586 applications for freshman admission and admitted only 16,891 students.
To secure admission into San Jose State, East Side Union students will need to have a grade of C or higher in A-G coursework, the sequence of 15 courses in English, math, science, foreign language and other core subjects required for admission by CSU and the University of California. Students will also have to meet GPA and SAT or ACT score thresholds. These thresholds will remain frozen for them even if they increase for other applicants if the university becomes more selective because of growing demand.
“We want students and families to see how students can go to college and earn a degree,” San Jose State Interim President Susan Martin said.
The program is a collaborative formed by the university, East Side Union, seven elementary school districts that feed East Side Union, and the Silicon Valley Education Foundation.
“We want students and families to see how students can go to college and earn a degree. This program provides a clear roadmap for success,” San Jose State Interim President Susan Martin said in a statement.
The program also calls for San Jose State to offer support and resources to students, beginning in middle school, to ensure that they’re on the path to college. The efforts include providing presentations on requirements to students and their families; organizing college fairs; and having university recruiters spend more time on high school campuses.
The program “will reinforce all our current efforts to create an environment that encourages our students to strive for college,” said East Side Union Superintendent Chris Funk.
The Spartan East Side Promise is modeled after other local partnerships created in recent years to increase enrollment at CSU campuses of students from their surrounding communities. The Long Beach College Promise, a partnership of Long Beach Unified, Long Beach City College and Long Beach State, offers a free semester of tuition at the city college and guaranteed admission to Long Beach State for students who meet the university’s minimum entrance requirements. Cal State Fullerton and San Diego State University offer similar programs for high school students in their respective communities.
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CarolineSF 8 years ago8 years ago
This promise doesn't make sense. Isn't it already the case that all CSUs guarantee admission to all students legally residing in their "catchment areas" who meet the qualifications, and all East Side Union students would presumably legally reside in the SJSU catchment area? Since it's not disclosed how many of these applicants ("San Jose received a record 30,586 applications for freshman admission and admitted only 16,891 students") were from outside the catchment area, it's not clear … Read More
This promise doesn’t make sense. Isn’t it already the case that all CSUs guarantee admission to all students legally residing in their “catchment areas” who meet the qualifications, and all East Side Union students would presumably legally reside in the SJSU catchment area?
Since it’s not disclosed how many of these applicants (“San Jose received a record 30,586 applications for freshman admission and admitted only 16,891 students”) were from outside the catchment area, it’s not clear if SJSU is no longer making that promise. That should be the lead of the report if so.
I know SJSU gets many applicants from outside the catchment area (we’re in San Francisco, and my son applied and was accepted, though he made another choice; and I know many other SF kids who attend and many more who’ve applied and been accepted). If SJSU, and these other CSUs, no longer have room for all the qualified applicants from their catchment areas, they would no longer be accepting any applicants from outside their catchment areas, correct? (My son also applied to Long Beach and was accepted, FWIW. At that time, reports were that *certain programs* at CSULB were impacted.)
There’s another point that colors this information: “San Jose received a record 30,586 applications for freshman admission and admitted only 16,891 students.” It’s routine for college applicants to apply for several schools, as anyone reading this who’s had a kid apply for college knows. My son applied to six and my daughter to 11, for example. That means the 30,586 applications are often coming from people who also have applications in elsewhere, so it doesn’t actually mean 13,695 rejected applicants were left out in the cold. The college admissions process is much more complicated than that, and the numbers and logic can be really hard for the press to keep up with.
To clear up the confusion, the “impacted” CSUs need to provide information on whether they’re now being forced to reject qualified students *from their catchment areas,* which would be a significant piece of information — and the press needs to report that. Without that information, the reports are muddled.
Over the years, I’ve seen the occasional nonprofit program and other entities, including charter schools, tout these guarantees as a sales pitch for their school or program when the guarantees are meaningless — “all our students have a special guarantee of admission to SFSU if they meet the qualifications” when they’re ALREADY guaranteed admission if they meet the qualifications. Sometimes the press has been overly prone to fall for it and tout these fake guarantees.
So, can you please clarify: Is SJSU now so impacted that it is no longer accepting all qualified students *from its catchment area*? In that case, East Side Union graduates have an edge and will ace out others from elsewhere in the catchment area? Corollary information, in that case, would be that students from outside the catchment area are wasting their time and fees applying to SJSU, correct? That’s important information.
Replies
CarolineSF 8 years ago8 years ago
I'm not seeing the term "catchment area" anymore. I had a college admissions blog in 2008 and 2009, and it was bandied about then. Now the term I'm seeing is "local admission guarantee. " Local Admission Guarantee • The local admission guarantee applies only to impacted campuses, not to impacted majors and programs. • Local CSU-eligible first-time freshman and local upper-division transfer students … Read More
I’m not seeing the term “catchment area” anymore. I had a college admissions blog in 2008 and 2009, and it was bandied about then. Now the term I’m seeing is “local admission guarantee. ”
Local Admission Guarantee
• The local admission guarantee applies only to impacted campuses, not to impacted majors and programs.
• Local CSU-eligible first-time freshman and local upper-division transfer students shall be admitted to a local CSU campus on the basis of established CSU system admission policies.
• “Local” first-time freshmen are defined as those students who graduate from a high school district historically served by a CSU campus in that region.
• “Local” upper-division transfer students are defined as those who transfer from a community college district historically served by a CSU campus in that region.
• The boundaries of a campus’s local region shall contain the entire territory of the school
district or community college district in which the local high school or community
college campus is located.
https://www.calstate.edu/acadres/docs/CSU_Enroll_Mngment_Policy_Practices.pdf