Unnecessary marketing. Believe it or not, the University of California has a whopping $62 million marketing budget to convince students to apply to its nine prestigious campuses. Yet, the UC campuses are so full that they do not even have room to accept the tens of thousands of students they are already attracting. In 2003, the UC system received approximately 100,000 applications. Just more than 50 percent, or 50,291 freshman students, were offered fall admission for the 2003-2004 school year. To make matters even worse, Assemblyman John Campbell (R–Irvine) wrote in the Orange County Register (April 9, 2003) that “according to one analysis, the program spends at least $50,000 per student it actually enrolls.” Independent Sources didn’t check John’s math but we agree that there must surely be a better way to spend $62 million in education money than on a marketing program that has no purpose.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 13th, 2005 at 7:22 pm by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, California Schemin', Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.