Jake Parent did almost everything right.
The 28-year-old political-science student at De Anza College compiled a perfect 4.0 grade-point average, helped start an orphanage for boys in Afghanistan, and was one of two students to receive the college’s annual President’s Award. This year he received a conditional acceptance to San Jose State University for this fall.
But Mr. Parent had made a mistake. He had accidentally marked the wrong major on his online admissions application: English instead of political science. When San Jose State asked him to attend a required transfer orientation for English majors, he declined to go, he says, and asked to attend the political-science orientation instead.
In a normal year, the mix-up scarcely would have mattered. But San Jose State, like nearly every campus of California State University, must sharply cut its enrollment by the spring of 2011 to meet a systemwide goal of reducing the number of students by 40,000. In taking on the difficult task, many of the system’s universities have cut provisionally accepted students who had missed deadlines, paid late, or otherwise made mistakes in their applications.
This summer, Mr. Parent says, officials informed him that his admission had been revoked because he failed to attend the transfer orientation, even after he tried to attend another one. He managed to gain late admission to the University of California at Santa Cruz this fall, an unusual break. But he says he was frustrated by the experience and compared San Jose, in its effort to find something wrong with his application, to “the insurance companies.”
The new, stricter policies worry advisers at community colleges who help students prepare transfer applications. “That’s why I’m so scared to turn in all of these applications that I have on my desk: I’m afraid that I’ve missed something,” says Susie Tong, transfer and career adviser at West Valley College.
Pat Lopes Harris, a spokeswoman for San Jose State, says it was excruciating for campus officials to have to turn away students who would normally be admitted. But the university clearly indicates to students who receive conditional acceptances the steps they must complete to gain admission, she says.
“If we’re going to be turning away qualified students—something that’s unprecedented and very difficult for the individuals involved—we need to be fair as we possibly can,” Ms. Harris says. “That means we need to look at the rules of the game and take note of those who follow the rules.”