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In a system-wide movement that could change the University of California’s admissions process, a group of UC professors Friday proposed expanding a holistic approach to all 10 campuses.

Holistic admissions are already used at UC Berkeley and are in the process of being established at UCLA.

The professors presented their proposal at a conference at UC Berkeley that centered around Proposition 209 and equal opportunities in education. The proposal would put more emphasis on an applicant’s personal background, in addition to considering academic qualifications.

Proposition 209, passed ten years ago, is a measure which prohibits public institutions from the use of race or gender as a factor in public hiring or admissions.

“There’s a lot more to picking good students than simply looking at their grades and their test scores,” said Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu, co-director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity, which sponsored the symposium.

Because of their emphasis on personal circumstances and ability to overcome adversity, holistic admissions have been touted by some educators as a way to increase numbers of underrepresented minorities.

The professors said low-income students have a disadvantage in terms of academic eligibility since they were less able to afford education assistance programs, such as SAT preparation classes.

UC Berkeley adopted holistic admissions several years ago, and has since seen their numbers of admitted minority students climb.

But some students said just because an admissions process works at one university does not mean that it will be as successful across all the UC campuses.

“Berkeley put in a lot of time and money making sure it would work under their campus. Their numbers (of minority admits) are great, but if you put it indiscriminately to other campuses, I don’t know how it would work out,” said Tina Park, external vice president of UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association Council.

Written by four UC professors, the proposal would break the UC’s admissions process down into two groups – one in which admission would automatically be given to the top 5 or 6 percent of high school graduates based on grades, and another that would select students based on holistic review.

All students would still have to have at least a 2.6 grade point average to be eligible for admission.

Though factors to be considered under holistic admissions could include socio-economic determinants such as whether a student has overcome personal hardships, the report did not lay out explicit plans as to how these students would be selected.

Park said though the holistic approach has been fairly successful at UC Berkeley, it is not a complete step to nondiscrimination in the admissions process.

“It’s a better option than what we have now, but it seems like a bad solution to a bigger problem. It’s not the step to equity we want to see in our admissions process,” Park said.

But for a system-wide change to occur, the UC Board of Regents must first approve any changes.

UC President Robert Dynes said though the ideas brought forward by the professors will be taken into consideration, he cautioned against overturning the current admissions process

“It is a set of provocative, but not earth-shattering, ideas by a lot of smart people,” Dynes told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Lucero Chavez, the undergraduate representative on the undergraduate admissions workgroup, said when the holistic approach is applied to UCLA she doesn’t expect much change.

For it to be applied to the rest of the UC, Chavez said, seems to be a “solution to a problem that’s not going to be effective.”