Leaders of the University of California system appear strongly inclined to drop the requirement that applicants to UC campuses take the SAT or ACT test, heeding the argument that it hurts the chances of Latino and African-American students to be admitted.

A faculty task force is expected to deliver a report on whether the mandate should be retained in February. But UC Regent Eloy Ortiz Oakley, who is also the chancellor of the California Community College system, has already called for scrapping the standardized test requirement. So has UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ and Michael Brown, the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs for the UC system and its 10 campuses. No one who works for UC appears to be standing up, at least publicly, for the testing mandate.

The SAT/ACT test has for decades been criticized for alleged cultural bias against minorities. But that claim is strongly disputed by the College Board, which administers the test and says it has long since fine-tuned the language of questions in the test so that they don’t presume knowledge of white cultural norms. Some academic studies back up this claim of neutrality and find that SATs are a better indicator of college success than grades.

But one of the SAT critiques offered by Ortiz, the regent, is mostly undisputed. It’s that low-income Latino and African-American families are unable to pay for the vast variety of test-preparation classes used by middle-income and wealthy families to help their children. “Perhaps the tests were well-intended, but they are perpetuating a wealth advantage and undervaluing low-income students,” he wrote earlier this year.

The Princeton Review test-prep company, for example, “guarantees” that its 30-hour, $1,599 class will lead to at least a 1400 score on the basic SAT. A 1400 is at the 95th percentile of the approximately 2 million SATs taken each year.

Meanwhile, upper-income families have long been willing to spend whatever it takes to help their children on standardized tests, in particular by hiring specialized English and math tutors who charge up to $450 an hour.

But the College Board pushes back on this front as well, saying it provides free test prep online that helps tens of thousands of students each year.

Nonprofit behind SAT defends UC admission practices

The New Jersey-based nonprofit is so worried that a UC decision to drop the SAT would be copied by many other U.S. universities – as a recent USA Today analysis predicts – that it is offering increasingly thorough defenses of how UC makes its admission decisions.

According to an EdSource report, Jessica Howell, vice president of research at the College Board, appeared at a symposium on the SAT two weeks ago in Berkeley in which she suggested that critics of the test exaggerated its importance to UC admission officers, who consider 14 factors in evaluating prospective students.

“Any effective standardized measure that is one of those factors is going to reveal underlying inequities in our society,” she said. “As researchers, we shouldn’t stop using them, or measuring them because we don’t like what they say. … [Instead,] we should continue to have a discussion about solutions to close the gaps that we see.”

The comment reflects the College Board’s argument that if SAT critics think it’s unfair that students from wealthy families with more resources do better than students from poor families, it’s not the test that’s unfair. It’s American life – the rich can help their kids more than other families.

To address this issue, the College Board proposed also giving SAT test takers an “adversity score” in May so colleges could quickly determine if a student came from difficult circumstances. But the plan was dropped in August after if faced harsh criticism that it was a facile attempt to label students from wildly different backgrounds with a simple number.

The need for less expensive housing in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley has been so plain for so long that many of those on the outside of California looking in wonder why local governments, developers and voters can’t get on the same page and get things done. A January story in the New York Times about the unexpected backlash to San Jose Unified’s attempts to prevent an exodus of teachers by offering subsidized housing reflected this sense of puzzlement.

But a story unfolding at the University of California’s Berkeley campus shows the complexity and difficulty of adding housing in urban areas of the Golden State. Housing development is seen by some communities and interest groups as a zero-sum game – if one side wins, then the other side or sides must have lost.

To address a lack of affordable housing that UC Berkeley says has made it difficult to attract and retain professors, Chancellor Carol Christ last year launched an aggressive push to replace a four-story campus parking building with 350 vehicle spaces with a $126 million complex that included 150 faculty apartments, 170 parking spots and a relatively small academic building.

But the plan to tear down the Upper Hearst parking building has faced steadily increasing criticism from faculty members. Their concern is that building the project would add to the heavy debt load borne by the university because of the $474 million cost of recent stadium renovations and the construction of a new student athletic center.

Yet coverage by the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this month of the Berkeley faculty Senate’s 174-69 vote asking Christ to suspend the project noted that the most pitched criticisms of the proposal came from engineering faculty members who stood to lose their access to convenient parking. Their criticism of the project continued even after Christ presented documents that she said showed the developer and property manager bore the financial risks if the project had cost overruns or other problems – not the university.

City says campus minimized enrollment growth

Meanwhile, a new front in this fight emerged in late April when the Berkeley City Council voted to sue UC Berkeley and the UC system over the apartment complex – even though city leaders praised Christ for seeking to add on-campus housing.

Council members cited planning documents previously filed with the city under which the university forecast it would have a student enrollment of 33,450 by 2020. Instead, as of January, enrollment already stood at about 41,000 – more than 25 percent higher than what UC officials had predicted.

Since under state law, the UC campus doesn’t pay local property taxes, city leaders say Berkeley taxpayers are the ones who are saddled with the cost of this fast growth.

This enrollment spurt has led to “increasing burdens on our streets, police and fire services,” Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin said in a news release.

But Christ has been conciliatory to city officials, suggesting the university sees a path to addressing City Hall’s concerns about campus enrollment growth.

Yet the Berkeley chancellor isn’t deferring to the faculty Senate. She’s moved ahead with plans to tear down the Upper Hearst parking structure. The building could be closed next month, and construction work could begin this September, according to stories in the Daily Californian student newspaper. UC Berkeley officials hope the new complex can be finished by summer 2021.

Last week, University of California President Janet Napolitano (pictured) and UC regents generated positive headlines with their decision to reduce tuition for in-state students – the first cut since 1999-2000 – as well as their success in getting a 4 percent funding hike from the state Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown.

The announcement that total annual in-state charges would drop from $12,630 to $12,370 – a 0.5 percent reduction – was framed as reflecting both UC’s relative fiscal health and a truce between UC leaders and UC student activists.

Nevertheless, the UC system continues to have a murky financial future, with billions in unmet infrastructure needs and underfunded pension liabilities. And while some past UC presidents worked hard to establish strong relationships with other state leaders, Napolitano appears to have relatively few allies in the state Capitol, with many lawmakers still upset with the former Arizona governor over her office’s interference with an audit the Legislature had ordered. As for the governor, he has complained for years that UC is too quick to seek higher state aid or higher tuition and has never engaged in meaningful belt-tightening.

Against this backdrop, chances for a major increase in state funding seems a long shot – though that may change with a new governor in January.

Yet the need for such increased aid – or the billions that could be raised with future tuition hikes – is plain, many UC leaders believe.

In January, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ made a presentation to regents that amounted to a plea for much more funding. Christ said her campus had a $700 million backlog of needed maintenance alone. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that every campus except for recently opened UC Merced had at least $100 million in maintenance needs, topped by Berkeley, followed by UCLA at $677 million.

20 years of not funding pensions backfires

But Christ and other UC leaders face an even more daunting challenge in paying for pensions, especially given the coming wave of retirements in UC’s aging workforce. That’s because UC’s estimated $15 billion in unfunded pension liabilities is far bigger than it would have been were it not for the decision of UC officials to contribute nothing to the pension fund from 1990 to 2010.

UC’s pension system has more than 80 percent in projected funding for its long-term liabilities and is in significantly better shape than CalPERS or CalSTRS. Nonetheless, a September analysis by the Los Angeles Times noted how the 20-year pension payment holiday had backfired on UC. The analysis detailed how the steadily growing cost of retirement benefits was reducing funds available for “core fund” basic expenses. As of 2016, more than 5,400 retirees from the UC system made pensions of $100,000 or more.

Under pressure from the Brown administration, Napolitano’s office has taken some actions to rein in pension costs. UC employees hired beginning in July 2016 have a cap on how much of their final pay can be used to determine pensions. Earlier this year, regents also approved a plan to allow new hires to choose between having a defined-benefit pension or a 401(k)-style account.

But the plan’s fate is unclear after it faced strong objections from Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, and government unions.