Emily Engelschall is the Interim Associate Vice Chancellor of Enrollment Services at UC Riverside. She told me one of the possible factors for the record was removing the SAT requirement, but also because Covid-19 made the university take a different approach to recruiting.
She said, “We were also able to go into spaces that we traditionally aren’t able to because recruitment was conducted entirely in a virtual environment. And while we did miss a lot of those personal interactions with students, it did provide us an opportunity to spread our reach.”
Vice-Chancellor Engelschall also added that more students were accepted into UCR because of COVID-19 uncertainty and because other state schools were expected to have higher acceptance numbers. UC Riverside in total accepted 32,708 freshman students.
Both fellow Inland Empire state schools also hit freshman admissions records, with 58,147 accepted into Cal Poly Pomona, and over 22,000 at Cal State San Bernardino. These numbers represent students accepted and not necessarily the number of students that will attend this Fall.
