California legislators order CSU officials to let in more local students to neighboring universities

By Joseph Sanker • November 2, 2017

Information for the following graph was obtained from the El Camino College 2016 Annual Fact Book. Photo credit: Emma Dimaggio

Every year, hundreds of EC students apply to transfer to a California State University. Some get in, some don’t, but now a student’s location could improve their chances of acceptance.

It was recently reported that California state legislators have ordered CSU officials to give admission preference to what are called “place-bound” students.

Place-bound students are students who are local to the area where the CSU is located. For example, a place-bound student would be a student who lives in Carson, California that attends California State University Dominguez Hills.

This means that if two students were to apply to Cal State Dominguez Hills, both with the same GPA, test scores, extracurriculars, etcetera, and the only difference between them was that one lived in Carson, California, and one lived in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, then that would be the deciding factor.

With the push by the state legislatures to give local students admission preference, the student living in Carson would be given admittance over the Rancho Palos Verdes student.

However, according to EC transfer coordinator Rene Lozano, this practice of giving admission preference to local students is nothing new.

“It’s been around. Local area has been around now for a good half decade at least,” Lozano said. “I know how it’s impacting (students because) it’s been happening already.”

According to the ECC Annual Factbook, during the 2015-2016 academic school year, a total of 860 EC students transferred to a Cal State. That is an eight percent decrease when compared to the 2012-2013 academic school year, in which 935 EC students transferred to a Cal State.

The number of students who transfer to California State Universities has exceeded those to University of California schools, private universities, and out of state universities since 2011. Photo credit: Emma Dimaggio

The more local admission preference is pushed by state officials, the more of a negative impact it seems to have on EC transfer rates. EC transfer coordinator Rene Lozano agrees.

“If El Camino is not considered local to (Cal State) Long Beach for example, that means our students are going to have a harder time getting into Long Beach than their local students or (Cal State) Fullerton, or Cal State LA,” Lozano said. “Anybody that uses local area where we’re not their local college, it’s going to absolutely negatively affect the number of our students that can get into that school.”

When it comes to transfer applicants from community colleges, a preference for more admissions for local students has been shown to be a drawback for EC, at least according to EC Transfer Counselor Dr. Kelsey Iino.

“If I’m speaking from El Camino College specifically, we are at a disadvantage,” Iino said. “We’ve always been at a disadvantage in this whole grand scheme of local campus.”

Calvin Mosley, 18, English major, believes that the order to give place-bound students admission preference over other students is unjust.

“From a personal standpoint, I don’t stay anywhere close to El Camino nor do I stay close to any Cal States,” Mosley said. “Say I wanted to apply to Dominguez. If I have the same grade point average as someone else and they get to go to Dominguez over me just because they live closer, I feel like that would be an unfair advantage.”