With the departure of the liberal arts program to the Malibu campus, the students who remained on the LA campus were less impressive academically. In a letter to The Inner View, one student challenged the notion that the campus was competitive academically, pointing out that GRE scores from 1969-1970 put Pepperdine grads around the 27th percentile nationally.¹

These scores square well with data from Pepperdine historian David Baird, who reports that SAT scores for freshman beginning at the LA campus in 1973 averaged 780, about 150 points below freshmen at Malibu, who were near the national average.²