USCB hopes to raise caliber of students

With a 68 percent acceptance rate, USCB is one of the state's least selective public four-year colleges.

University officials would like to change that, according to outgoing chancellor Jane Upshaw. But a reliance on tuition and fees for the majority of its funding means USCB accepts any student who meets its entrance requirements.

"The tuition and fees we generate are important, and we have not enjoyed a position as a new institution of having so many applicants that we can draw a line in the sand and stop taking students," Upshaw said. "Will that happen in the future? I believe yes, but it has not happened yet."

And its entrance requirements are set relatively low when compared with the state's 11 other four-year public colleges.

The median SAT scores for incoming USCB students is 932 on a 1,600-point scale. Only South Carolina State University, with a median score of 851, is lower, according to the U.S. News & World Report's college rankings.

The USC system's flagship campus in Columbia reports a median SAT score of 1,200 while USC Aiken is at 973 and USC Upstate is at 982.

Its lower entrance requirements mean the Beaufort campus often is serving students who are more at risk of not finishing college -- whether they are first-generation college students, socio-economically disadvantaged or have struggled academically in the past.

More than half of USCB's students fall into those categories, Upshaw said.

Before USCB became a baccalaureate institution in 2004, it was viewed more as a "transfer pipeline" that offered associate's degrees and allowed students who often could not get into more selective four-year colleges to complete their general education requirements before transferring.

But now that it's a four-year college, USCB wants to shed that image.

An initiative to accept students rejected from the Columbia campus into other schools in the USC system could both help and hurt that goal. By bringing in students who barely missed the cut at USC Columbia, USCB would receive a higher caliber of student. But these students might be more likely to use the regional campuses as a stepping stone to the main campus.

It is still up in the air whether USC will implement the plan for the four-year campuses. It is already in place at the two-year schools.

Mack Palmour, vice chancellor for enrollment management at USCB, said the plan should be implemented.

"It (would) allow us to bring students toward us that originally might not be aware of us," Palmour said. "But once they are here, we want to make sure they want to succeed with us and will stay with us until they graduate."

Follow reporter Sarah Bowman at twitter.com/IPBG_Sarah and at facebook.com/IPBGSarah.

This story was originally published July 31, 2015 at 4:23 PM with the headline "USCB hopes to raise caliber of students."