by Mikhail Zinshteyn

March 31, 2022 – In the acronym soup of California public higher education, gone are two three-letter combos that led legions of students to plug their noses annually: The SAT and ACT are (functionally) no more.

After the California State University system formally ditched the SAT and ACT as admissions requirements last week, the state is now the first — and only — in the United States to have no public university accepting standardized test scores for admissions.

The Cal State system followed in the University of California’s footsteps, which swore off the SAT and any other admissions test last year.

Cal State officials and the system’s academic senate cited studies showing that high school grades better predict how well students will perform in their first year of college than test scores. Other data showed that predictive power only went up marginally when test scores were combined with high school grades; the makers of the SAT say the test’s predictive boost is significant. Critics have also long maintained that the SAT rewards students who have the financial resources to hire tutors or enroll in prep courses to improve their test scores, leaving low-income students at a disadvantage.

Both the UC and Cal State system are now “test-blind” — a rarefied club of 86 academic institutions and systems nationwide. Another 1,825 other campuses don’t require test scores but will still assess them if a student submits that information, a concept known as “test-optional.”

So, what will the era of admissions without tests look like at the nation’s largest public four-year university?

The future of Cal State admissions

Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the system’s 23 campuses chiefly admitted students based on a formula of high school grades and ACT or SAT scores. Only in the last two years, after suspending its SAT requirement during the pandemic, has the system relied on other factors.

The system’s Admissions Advisory Council plans to submit a final set of admissions eligibility criteria to the California State University Office of the Chancellor by late spring.

The recommendations will largely reflect the work the system did during the pandemic to replace its testing requirements with additional information about an applicant’s high school grades and socio-economic factors.

Currently, the minimum eligibility requirement is a 2.5 grade point average for California high school graduates and a 3.0 if the applicant isn’t a state resident. Another is to complete the required 15 courses in math, English, science, history and other subjects, known as A-G courses. Some campuses accept slightly lower GPAs but consider other academic and socio-economic factors.

The Admissions Advisory Council — in the first change to the system’s eligibility index since 1965 — is instead proposing that the minimum eligibility criteria include four factors:

• the students’ GPAs for the 15 required courses;
• whether students passed more than 15 of the required courses during their time in high school;
• whether students attend either a high school that is near the Cal State campus to which they’re applying or attend a high school with a high percentage of students who receive federal meal subsidies because they’re low-income;
• other socio-economic and interpersonal factors, such as whether students worked during high school, had no one else in their family complete college, had family commitments or volunteered.

The system is now developing the minimum GPA and weights for these factors. Once published, campuses will be able to use a formula to calculate whether applicants are eligible for admissions. It’s a quantitative approach that resembles use of an eligibility formula during the SAT era. Officials may continue to tweak it over time.

The Cal State system will roll out its new criteria gradually, giving it time to communicate the details to high school counselors. Current high school juniors who apply to enroll at a Cal State in fall 2023 will be admitted based on the current minimum eligibility criteria. Today’s high school sophomores seeking entry into a Cal State for fall 2024 will be admitted based on the current criteria or the new eligibility index in the works — whichever is more advantageous for them. Students applying for fall 2025 admissions will be governed by the new index.

Abandoning test-based criteria couldn’t come sooner for low-income students, said Cal State trustee ​​Krystal Raynes, an undergraduate at Cal State Bakersfield.

“I remember saving up my lunch money to take both the PSAT and the SAT because my parents didn’t know what that was and didn’t want to spend money on me taking a test,” she said at the March board meeting, a day before the trustees voted unanimously to ditch admissions tests. “Meanwhile I knew students who were prepping with tutors in junior high, so there’s definitely that economic gap there.”

Criteria for more competitive campuses

But minimum eligibility isn’t enough of a cut-off for numerous Cal State universities. Right now seven universities are fully impacted, a technical designation meaning a major, program or the whole university receives applications from more qualified students than there’s space. All but seven campuses have at least one major program that’s impacted.

The Cal State admissions policy plan is to allow these oversubscribed programs to continue using a combination of up to 21 different admissions factors to admit students. These overlap partly with the newly proposed minimum eligibility criteria but include other variables, such as grades in specific high school subjects, whether students qualify for an application fee waiver and their military status. No campus uses all 21 factors for admissions.

Like the minimum eligibility index in development, all of these factors are data the Cal State application already collects. The system software is sophisticated enough to calculate the admissions scores for each campus based on the admissions criteria they select.

Though the Cal State system admits 93% of the California high school students who apply, several campuses are far more selective. Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, and San Diego State, the most competitive, admit only a third of their California freshmen applicants.

Spotlight on admissions criteria at popular campuses

Presently six of the 23 Cal State campuses won’t consider any in-state student with a GPA below a 2.5. Even within this group, campuses are using multiple factors to handle their influx of applicants by balancing academic and socio-economic factors.

“Unequivocally, I think it is a great move” to remove admissions tests, said San Diego State President Adela de la Torre. “If we’re going to talk about diversity and inclusion, you have to have metrics that reflect a broader set of criteria.”

The San Diego university expanded its criteria for admission for students entering last fall. Half of the admissions score is based on the GPA a student earned in the 15 required courses for entry. The other half includes the grades in math and science courses, foreign language, history and whether a student comes from a local high school. The university also gives extra points for signs of socio-economic hardship among students applying from nearby high schools or entering special programs for marginalized students, like for foster youth.

San Diego State will largely keep this formula beyond 2023, but like other campuses, it may change its weights and add more admissions variables over time.

Long Beach State guarantees admission to local high school students who meet the minimum eligibility requirements. Other students will be held to a higher admissions standard. All impacted Cal State campuses give some kind of admissions priority to applicants attending local high schools. Long Beach State has more than 50 public and private high schools in its local service area.

At Cal Poly-Pomona, 86% of the points in the admissions formula come from academic factors and 14% are based on non-academic areas.

Unlike the UC, Cal State has no admissions readers

The UC campuses hire hundreds of part-time application readers who undergo training to go through every application. The Cal States have no readers and never did. And unlike the UC, the Cal State application doesn’t ask students to provide essays or extended written responses.

UCLA hires 200 part-time readers who earn stipends of $1,350 to $2,500 depending on the number of applications they review. The university received nearly 150,000 freshmen undergraduate applications for fall 2022 enrollment, the most in the country. Other UC campuses shared that they bring on 50 to 160 readers; the numbers vary depending on each campus’s application volume.

The price tag for readers at UCLA is between $400,000 and $500,000. Meanwhile, the entire operating budgets of the admissions offices at Cal State Fullerton and Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo range from about $2.2 million to $2.4 million, respectively.

Cal State campus admissions officials will occasionally review individual applications, such as when a denied student files an appeal. Admissions teams also spot-check applications to see if students omitted required information. Plus some music and performing arts programs require applicants to submit portfolios that faculty then review.

For the record: This story has been corrected to reflect the accurate price tag for readers at UCLA.

by Melissa Montalvo

April 5, 2022 Paula Cortez Medrano has worked in the agriculture industry since she arrived in the U.S. over 25 years ago.

She has labored in the heat of Fresno summers, picking onions, tomatoes, grapes, and garlic and in the freezing temperatures of local produce packing houses, where she would wear two layers of pants to stay warm while assembling frozen fruits and vegetables to be sold in grocery stores across the country.

She contracted COVID-19 during the pandemic and was sent home from work with only two weeks of paid sick leave. It took her 40 days to recover, but when she returned to her packing house job, she was turned away.

“They told me that they had no more work for me, that it was really slow,” she said in Spanish in an interview with The Bee.

The 66 year-old said she thinks she was turned away because of her age; they never called her back to work. Today, she sells tamales as a street vendor in central Fresno, earning an average of $80 a day, much less than the $15 per hour she earned in the packing house.

Because of workers like Cortez Medrano, California Democratic lawmakers want to extend unemployment benefits to undocumented workers, a proposal backed by a new report by the UC Merced Community and Labor Center which makes the case for why the California economy, workforce, and families would benefit.

Introduced last month by Assemblyman Eduardo García, a Democrat from Coachella, and currently under review in the legislature, AB 2847 would create the Excluded Workers Pilot Program, a two-year program that would provide funds to undocumented workers who lose their job or have their hours reduced during the calendar year 2023. The proposal, estimated at $597 million, plus administrative costs, would allow qualifying, unemployed individuals to receive up to $300 a week for 20 weeks.

The report, released Thursday, argues that undocumented workers play a key role in California’s economy, contributing an estimated $3.7 billion in annual state and local tax revenues. Additionally, these workers hold one in 16 jobs in the state, many of whom were deemed “essential workers” during the COVID-19 pandemic because of the risks they took working in the agriculture fields, meatpacking houses, and other key industries.

An estimated 2 million undocumented individuals live in California with about 1.1 million of that population participating in the workforce.

Of the 1.6 million workers in the central San Joaquin Valley, an estimated 7% are undocumented, the report states.

Nearly 38% of noncitizen workers, and more than 61% of children living with noncitizen workers, live in households earning less than a living wage and face chronic and severe housing and food insecurity, the report states. “Unfortunately, such workers face high rates of extreme hardship and do not have access to unemployment benefits.”

The report concludes that the challenges facing undocumented workers are only likely to increase as a result of a number of environmental challenges like wildfires, earthquakes, extreme heat, and drought, piled on top of the ongoing public health crisis the state is already grappling with.

Cortez Medrano said access to unemployment benefits from a pilot program would be “la gloria,” or glory, and that she would use such funds to pay rent, bills, and buy food during her time without stable work.

“I need the help – urgently,” she said in Spanish. “It’s high time.”

Beyond access to unemployment, Cortez Medrano said what she really wants is a work permit to make her job search easier. “I can still work,” she said.

High risk, few safeguards for undocumented workforce

UC Merced researchers found a relationship between in-person work, unemployment benefits usage, and the undocumented workforce.

Workers in the industries with the highest COVID-related deaths also reported the lowest rates of unemployment insurance use.

Immigrants made up nearly 60% of coronavirus-related deaths in California’s industries with the highest rate of pandemic-related deaths. Immigrants were the majority of deaths in agriculture at 83%, landscaping, 81%, food processing, 69%, restaurants and food services, 53%, and building services deaths, 52%.

Undocumented workers in these industries were especially vulnerable because they had no source of wage replacement in the event of job loss. They are excluded from collecting benefits, even though they contribute to the unemployment insurance system.

“Lacking a safety net benefit system, many undocumented workers often felt as if they had no choice but to continue working — facing unlawful working conditions that caused serious risks to their own and others’ health — in order to meet their financial commitments,” researchers said the report.

Access to unemployment benefits could have prevented some of these deaths. “When workers don’t have access to unemployment benefits, they’re more vulnerable,” said Edward Flores, professor of Sociology and researcher at the UC Merced Community and Labor Center.

On the flip side, researchers found that workers in industries that have low rates of in-person work and higher rates of unemployment use didn’t see such high increases in pandemic-related death.

Researchers concluded that “economic aid is an important tool that safeguards the health and wellbeing of workers and their families during a public health crisis.”

California offered some support during the pandemic. Undocumented workers were eligible to receive up to $1,700 in state funds: a $500 COVID-19 Disaster Relief pre-paid card and $1,200 from the Golden State Stimulus Fund.

Still, the report calculated these benefits were 20 times less than the $36,000 in economic aid that California citizen workers received from a mix of unemployment insurance, federal pandemic unemployment compensation, and federal stimulus aid during the first year of the pandemic.

Meanwhile employers in these industries reported record profits during the pandemic. In 2021, Fresno County saw record-breaking production, while meat processing company profits soared during the pandemic.

“Low earnings and a lack of a safety net, however, pose an ongoing threat to the economic stability and wellbeing of workers who created such wealth,” said the report.

Part of the solution, according to the UC Merced researchers, is for the state to address this “policy gap” by taking advantage of the budget surplus and lessons learned from the pandemic.

“It took the Great Depression to create the New Deal and a lot of the worker protections that exist today, like unemployment (insurance) or Social Security,” said Flores of UC Merced.

“Our state is at a similar historical juncture where we experienced a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, but then have an abundance of wealth to think about how to manage,” he said.

California saw a $38 billion state budget surplus in 2021 and a $31 billion surplus in 2022.

“This is an opportunity now for policymakers to close on the policy gaps not just for now, but also for any subsequent public emergencies that happen in the future,” Flores said.

California has extended state benefits to undocumented immigrants. In 2020, the state allowed qualifying low-income undocumented immigrants to qualify for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a state tax credit worth hundreds of dollars. Last year the state made the historic move of offering public health care to undocumented Californians 50 years and older.

But not everyone agrees with the idea of extending benefits to the undocumented.

During the initial months of the pandemic, when California announced the $125 million emergency relief fund that provided assistance to undocumented workers, The Center for American Liberty and Dhillon Law Group filed a lawsuit to try to block the aid package Newsom had already approved.

Eulalio Gomez, a spokesperson for the Fresno County Republican Party, said the proposed program is a reflection of how Sacramento is “disconnected” from middle-class California residents.

Gomez said undocumented people do “work hard,” but he thinks providing them with unemployment benefits could attract more unauthorized immigration and hurt California’s citizen workforce.

“I think there could be negative impacts on unions and union members if you continue incentivizing people to come here,” he said.

But the UC Merced researchers say there isn’t any evidence this would happen.

“It hasn’t happened when we expanded health coverage; it hasn’t happened when we removed exclusions to the CalEITC (Earned Income Tax Credit),” said Ana Padilla, executive director of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center. “There is no reason to believe it would happen in this case.”

In addition, Padilla said, many recent migrants have been moving away from California in recent decades due to the high cost of living, which is causing the state’s workforce to shrink.

‘There’s no water, there are no jobs,’ say some Valley farmworkers

An estimated 852,065 immigrants in California lost their jobs when the pandemic first hit in the spring of 2020, including 357,867 undocumented workers, according to a separate June 2020 policy report from the UC Merced Community and Labor Center.

The state’s frontline workers are facing additional threats posed by climate change phenomena, which will impact the number of jobs available to such workers, resulting in displacement and income loss, said the report.

Already an estimated 8,745 full and part-time jobs were lost last year due to the drought in the Central Valley, the Russian River Basin, and Northern Intermountain Valleys regions.

The undocumented workforce has been in decline over the past decade, according to Flores of UC Merced, and the number of people retiring is growing — developments that are causing “seismic” demographic changes in the state’s workforce.

“We need to have a workforce that’s supported by the state that can continue to (afford to) live in the state,” he said. “Otherwise, the state’s workforce is going to continue to shrink and the economy is going to have trouble growing.”

Carlos Morales left his home in Coquimatlán, Colima, a small coastal state in Mexico, to work in California’s Central Valley over 15 years ago.

The 40-year-old has worked in Fresno County’s agriculture fields, harvesting crops like peaches, nectarines, plums, and more. Now he worries about future job prospects for himself and his fellow undocumented workers. “There are many fields where the farmers have stopped growing,” Morales said in Spanish in an interview with The Bee.

Word is starting to spread among certain parts of the county workforce that “no hay agua, no hay trabajo,” said Morales. “There’s no water; there are no jobs.”

If the proposed Excluded Workers Pilot Program is approved, California would join states such as New York and Colorado that have recently launched similar initiatives. New York’s Excluded Worker’s Fund has distributed $2 billion dollars to over 128,000 undocumented New Yorkers, while Colorado’s Left Behind Workers Fund distributed millions of dollars to thousands of undocumented workers.

As for Morales, he said he wants state and federal leaders to know that undocumented workers have labored constantly during the pandemic, and should be helped in return.

“Supposedly we were essential workers,” Morales said. “We’re making this country strong.”

“Volteen a vernos un poquito más,” he said. “Turn around to see us a little bit more.”

– Melissa Montalvo is a reporter with The Fresno Bee and a Report for America corps.