University of California

Saul Geiser

Senior Associate

Saul Geiser is a research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley and taught there before joining UC’s Office of the President in 1981. Geiser served as director of admissions research for the UC system after Californians voted to end affirmative action in 1996, and he helped redesign UC admissions policy. His work has focused on issues of equity and validity in college admissions, with the aim of identifying admissions criteria that have less adverse impact on low-income and...

Doctoral Education at the University of California and Factors Affecting Time-to-Degree

Maresi Nerad
1991

The Academic Kitchen: A Social History of Gender Stratification at the University of California, Berkeley

Maresi Nerad
1999

The Academic Kitchen tells the story of the evolution of an all-women's department, the Department of Home Economics, at the University of California, Berkeley from 1905 to 1954. The book's unique focus on the connection between gender and the status of a particular academic department challenges organizational theorists and higher education specialists to reconsider their traditional analysis of academic departments. By incorporating gender in the analysis, Nerad reveals the process by which departments traditionally dominated by women, including education, library science, nursing...

Why the SAT is a Poor Fit for America’s Public Universities by Saul Geiser. CSHE.2.25 (September 2025)

Saul Geiser
2025

This report responds to recent announcements by Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and other institutions reinstating the SAT or ACT for admission. Widely publicized after aNew York Timesarticle and analysis by Harvard’s Opportunity Insights group, these announcement rest on two claims: that standardized tests outperform high school grades in predicting college success and that they may enhance diversity in admissions. Both claims falter...

New UC Berkeley Report Challenges Return to SAT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New UC Berkeley Report Challenges Return to SAT: Calls for Public Universities to Double Down on Public Mission

Berkeley, CA – September 30, 2025 — As a number of elite “Ivy-Plus” universities have reinstated SAT and ACT requirements, a new research report by Saul Geiser, Senior Associate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, argues that the tests are a poor fit for the mission of America’s public universities.

The report, Why the SAT is a Poor Fit for America’s Public Universities, responds to a wave of high-...

Zachary Bleemer

Assistant Professor, Princeton University
BIO/CV:

Zach Bleemer(link is external) is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University in the Industrial Relations Section(link is external). He is also a research associate of Opportunity Insights(link is external) and...

University of California History and Archives

Earning My Degree: Memoirs of an American University President

David P. Gardner
2005

Chronicle of the University of California Archive

Clark Kerr and the Californian Model of Higher Education

Simon Marginson
2014

Fifty years on, Clark Kerr’s multiversity and the Californian Master Plan for Higher Education stand as signal high points in the building of not just great public institutions but high participation modern human society. Key features of the Californian Model have become a universal template for research universities and system design. Seminal ideas and practices of higher education developed by Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, Burton Clark and others continue to colonize the thinking of policy makers, scientists, scholars, students and citizens, with profound effects not just in the United States...