See link from Ms. Sun blog below – it looks like UCSC may have over admitted by up to 1000 students and admissions is using transcripts that are late or slightly off to correct for this mistake. There is a petition for students in this situation and according to Ms Sun UCSC is violating policy.
I suspect you are right. I was pretty surprised that they accepted more students for 2015 than for 2014, particularly given that 2014’s admissions resulted in over-enrollment of about 500 freshman. It looks like they tried to shift a thousand of the admits to out-of-state/international applicants in hopes that that would reduce overall yield, but perhaps it wasn’t enough. Last year’s overcrowding was bad for everyone–super cramped dorm rooms, foundation classes required for a 4-year exit were full or closed to freshman, and many profs scrambled to teach courses they hadn’t thought about in years.
Clearly, as a result of the state’s funding stinginess, students who could have attended a more prestigious UC (Irvine, SB & Davis) are getting bumped down into schools like Santa Cruz and perhaps more of those are accepting the offer. I have a hard time believing that UCSC admissions had their strategy so fouled up but the numbers seem to say otherwise–a record number of applicants, an unused waitlist, increased admissions over the prior year, and now this, perfectly good admits be cancelled for frivolous reasons. The final enrollment numbers will clarify what actually happened but the way things look, someone in admissions should be fired.
Apparently, UCSC is forced to use some equation from the UC regents in order to decide how many students to accept. The last (2?) years, UCSC has been forced to accept way too many students and “coincidently” the number of rescinded students increased exponentially. It sounds like it’s not UCSC’s fault for accepting too many students, but I think they definitely handled it badly.