According to the 2005 UC Irvine Strategic Plan, only around 15 percent of graduating high school students in Orange County are eligible to attend a University of California campus. As a result, such sources as the Orange County Register have projected that UC Irvine’s international student population will increase while its state population dwindles.
At first glance, this projection looks incomprehensible due to the overwhelming percentage of undergraduate students on campus. According to statistics collected by the College Board, 97 percent of all UCI undergraduate students are California residents.
However, UCI is not exclusive to undergraduate students.
According to Vice Chancellor Manuel Gomez, the combined number of undergraduate students, graduate students and academic researcher at UCI is in the thousands.
‘We have nearly 3,000 international scholars on campus. This includes about 1,300 visiting faculty, 1,000 graduate students, nearly 400 undergraduates and about 300 post-docs,’ Gomez said.
Also, College Board statistics do not take into account the number of students who spend only part of their undergraduate career at UCI.
For instance, Brendan Ratter, a third-year material science and engineering major, is currently studying at UCI. However Ratter, who is originally from Australia, will only spend a single quarter at UCI after which he will return to his home institution of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Despite his short stay on campus, Ratter found UCI quite appealing when he was looking to study abroad at an English-speaking school.
‘The University of California system as a whole was the
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