>> Incidentally, San Francisco public schools had a combined admission rate of just under 20%, well below the state average. Mission had the highest rate (26.5%) and Balboa the lowest (15.4%). It may or may not be a coincidence that 90% (the most of any SF school) of the applicants from Balboa were Asian whereas only 25% (the fewest of any SF school) of the applicants from Mission were Asian.
In order to promote diversity of the freshman classroom the college needs to suppress merit to achieve their diversity targets?
That is literally what Affirmative Action (DEI in school admissions) means.
Ignore merit, consider race.
These programs have only succeeded in making a large number of people accept that race is a valid way to screen people, at which point your goal is to win.
UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.
A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
That is, they are biased towards top performers, not just high performers, even if one student's "merely high" is formally higher than the ceiling the other student hit.
(The "winning" strategy then is to move to an underserved high school after an elite middle school, and hit the ceiling.)
You may be joking, but I have several high achieving peers whose families did this with good results. The choice was: did they want to be in the best high school with the highest level of competition, or did they want to go to an OK school that had good magnet programs and less competition. my sample size is only about three, but it worked out well for them.
I don’t think the GP is joking, but they may not have realized that this strategy is already well known. A lot of families won’t uproot themselves for it, though.
They have local magnet/specialized programs in CA public schools that they use to attract good students to poorly performing schools for help goose up test schools.
Despite the "what are secondary effects?" school admins trying to "fix inequality" by creating school lotteries, ending gifted programs and focusing on "equality of outcomes not equality of opportunity", the only thing that has actually improved troubled schools is that smart kids with involved parents now actively seek out lower rated schools like Mission High so they can more easily rise to the top of the class and get a free ride to Berkeley or another UC.
There was an article about this exact phenomenon in SFGate a year or two ago so it is definitely a real trend.
While I'm usually not a fan of ending gifted programs and such, I do believe that the kids in the lower-rated schools must feel a positive effect, mingling with highly-motivated, better-educated kids. It may do away with the whole "study is uncool, real kids hate school" vibe that holds many "bad neighborhood" schools back.
Has this not always been "the meta" everywhere for all of human history (and nature)? It's the fundamental driving force in favor of "diversity" always winning out over time. It's diffusion.
It's definitely there in sports teams, jobs, politics, etc.
There's a natural limit to this effect. The downside is that being a big fish in a small pond means you may not leave the pond without a longer term goal beyond it, and there's a saturation point of talent beyond which any competitive advantage is minimal.
This ultimately does not really impact the lesser schools much unless they were starved for talent for too long and needed to raise the bar. Migration patterns have an ebb and flow.
Once upon a time, the SAT an IQ test, and it was a real achievement to score a 1600. That achievement has been hollowed out in tandem with the value of most college degrees.
We know how to test for merit. The greatest tragedy in this college admissions racket isn't the shadowy affirmative action policies, the mountains of student loan debt, or the entire college admission-industrial complex that's sprung up.
It's that even the tools we've used to use to measure if someone was _ready_ for college have been annihilated.
You’re thinking of a 2004 study that found “the SAT (and later, with Koenig, the ACT) was substantially correlated with measures of general cognitive ability and could be used as a proxy measure for intelligence” [1]. To my knowledge, this remains the case.
Time pressure is a crucial aspect of it, though. I think GP may be alluding to the alleged abuse of disability exceptions, allowing kids (who don't need it) to take longer.
The SAT was never an IQ test, and it certainly doesn't measure "merit", whatever that is. It's a Scholastic Aptitude Test, and it isn't particularly good at that either.
If we had a good "test for merit" then we could directly assign people to their roles and ignore their actual performance.
One of the charts in TFA shows a discontinuity in admissions rate around 75% UPP. This means that if you send your kid to a HS that is underserved when you enroll, but drops below the critical 75% threshold because too many other families are doing the same, then the school could fall out of the strong-benefit category.
The kid would still have a better chance than if he applied from a high-performing school, but it wouldn't be as much of an advantage.
Socially, I'm guessing the kid could face some challenges because (1) other high performing students might not like him because he's a curve-breaker, (2) teachers would know what the family was up to and could view it as distasteful, and (3) if the student went to UCSD or another school where this is a well-known hack, there could be stigma for having gamed the system/being less-smart.
Most of the time, no one knows. But if you're from a nice part of LA or SD but you went to a HS in a bad part of town, people might wonder why you went there, or figure it out for themselves.
I think in most cases fellow undergrads would see it as just playing the game, but some might see it as "cheating" or like you didn't earn your spot as much as they did (if they were from a HS that was from a good part of town).
> A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.
The students operating at this level are identical. There’s no practical difference between a 4.0 and a 4.5 GPA when comparing students from different schools.
There nothing stupid about controlling for circumstances.
As an analogy, let’s say you want to build a fun race car that you can take to the track. You go out and look at a bunch of used cars and you want to be qualitative so you measure out their 0-60 times.
You could just say “the car with the best time wins” and take the fastest one you tested. Or you could consider context like “this one had bald tires tha could easily be upgraded” or “we tested this one going uphill”.
The goal is to find the car that can be turned into the fastest and not which has the best numbers right now.
> And all this will do is cause the best students to hide in shit schools to game the system
No it won’t, because they would get a horrible base for their education and be 1-2 years behind their “super strong school” peers. (I did not make up these numbers; it’s easy to have more than 1 year of college credit from Advanced Placement classes in the US system.)
Acting like college is the beginning of education is foolish. Imagine struggling with learning how to learn challenging material while taking classes with students who already did that three years ago.
California has that. The top 9% from each high school and the top 9% statewide are guaranteed UC admission. This does not guarantee admission to any specific campus, so if you are only interested in say Berkeley or UCLA you might get admitted but UC will find you a place at some campus.
Not only that, but high performers are incentivised to move to worse schools.
It may actually improve mean outcomes, but harm societal outcomes, as the scientific impact of educated individuals may tend to be power law distributed (e.g. the most important breakthroughs come from a small sector of the population with wildly disproportionate impact)
The bottleneck on research is funding. We have a glut of students wanting to go into research who don't because of how competitive the field is. We then have researchers constantly leaving the field for the same reason.
The thing is the people who do get the funding should be the smartest of the smartest. That funnel needs to be there and this nonsense is destroying it.
Texan here. There’s still ways to get in if you don’t make the top X% of your class (the percentage is shrinking every year as the school climbs up the rankings and more people want to go… I think it’s near top-4% now? It used to be top 15% I recall), and many of those high achievers go onto other out of state schools, so it’s in the interest of UT system to offer automatic admission to the top achievers from across the state.
Just because the top X% is guaranteed admission, that does not mean all (or even most) of the school is from the top X%.
How much control can your classmates have over your own GPA? What percentage of 'control' over your GPA is up to you vs. your teachers, parents, classmates, and everyone else? I put those in order intentionally, as I think your classmates are below teachers and parents on the hierarchy.
This kind of competition happens in other areas of academic pursuits too. Is that strictly a bad thing?
The bad thing about UT's policy is that it encourages well-off students to move to a less-competitive school district (usually rural) in order to improve their chances.
Many other schools have rolled back their temporary suspensions of SAT-optional/blindness, but UC made a decision that was permanent. And when they made the decision, it was over the objection of the UC faculty recommendation. They might roll it back, but I'm not holding my breath.
It's not unusual for families to change their school district so their kid can play for a better sports program and of course it's extremely common for families to want to live in the best district for education quality, but maybe some are now incentivized to move into a district with lesser competition for the top spots.
How does the existence of standardized testing give everyone the same chance? As an extremely over-exaggerated example example, someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject.
How does the existence of a standard hoop height in the NBA give everyone the same chance to play? Shorter players should get lower hoops, and slower runners should get electric scooters. That way, everyone can appear to be equally capable.
I would say that the NBA is explicitly not about giving everyone the same chance. Not everything has to be about giving everyone the same chance. A totally equitable NBA would probably be less entertaining to watch.
But that doesn't mean we can say that standardized testing gives everyone the same chance either...
Hmm. I suppose with modern Flock technology and GPS tracking for whole childhood we could calculate some average of gunshots heard in vicinity to score and give school spots to those with highest total.
Or well, accept that same test is fair enough solution and it is impossible and probably not even sensible to apply some gameable metrics.
“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it” -Bernard Shaw
I'm pretty tired of progressives insisting that people who grew up in poverty but were able to improve our lot in life through study, doing well on grades, and, yes, on standardized tests, like me, do not exist.
> someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject
Is there any world in which the first student, struggling in that context, treads water at a UC?
I used to volunteer to tutor high-school aged students in New York. I gave up and moved to grade schoolers. A refugee who will take the SAT in six months and wants to go to college, but is struggling with basic reading comprehension and symbolic math is just not going to do well in college in a year.
Note: the student who excels in that first setting should absolutely be admitted. But they’re, by definition, already excelling.
This belief is how UC San Diego ends up with 900 freshman below high school math proficiency. And thus college becomes a remedial education institution.
Most likely the people living somewhere continuously with gunfire wasn’t ever going to succeed academically either way. There are exceptions of course.
You’d have to basically rebirth and resocialize them in a different culture entirely.
Far too many people already have been educated past their natural state and it’s going to get ugly.
The schools that went test-optional already have switched back because this actually gives lower income students the best chance to distinguish themselves. The narrative that lower income students with less opportunities would benefit from not submitting SATs turned out to be false.
This is a terrible system because it forces students and parents to start playing all kinds of games to navigate a non transparent process for admissions. What now? Are parents going to send their kids to good schools until it is time to apply to colleges? And then they are going to switch to the best school for applications?
Maybe they can bring their resources with them too, and the poor schools can have things like lead paint remediation, honors classes, and extra curricular activities.
Or it could end up like some Asian countries with a large afterschool tuition industry. I guess at a minimum you don't want the kid to get shot up at school though.
Resources are mainly property taxes. Unless they're building a new house whose value is significantly greater than the median for the area, families gaming the system aren't likely to have much of a lasting impact on the district.
Yeah you’re right. However, resource gaps can be filled by things like volunteer librarians, teacher wishlists/donations, field trips, strong PTAs, etc..
This is common in my city. It’s a big underfunded school district with a handful of coveted, well supported schools. I’m assuming it happens elsewhere in America with the success of platforms like donors choose.
> The opaqueness of the whole process is what I find most objectionable.
I also find that objectionable. However, recalling my own college admission process, I think we have collectively determined that this opaqueness is basically working as intended. We are now treating it as a rite passage that qualified high school students can be mysteriously rejected.
I applied to 6 colleges (not counting those outside the United States), which would be considered an extremely low number today. I have colleagues who have kids applying to colleges right now so I know. Everyone is applying to more colleges just to counteract these seemingly random rejections.
It’s an arms race. Now that students are encourage to apply to huge numbers of universities for safety, the universities are forced to accept a smaller percentage of applicants to avoid overcommitting.
So student, parents, and counselors see this and tell everyone to apply to even more colleges and the cycle continues.
Every school has increased tuition without substantially increasing the number of students. What you are seeing is that schools are getting thousands of students that are exactly the same which is why admissions is turning into a lottery system. It's basically like a CPU maxed out at 100%. There's nothing you can do except build more schools and increase the number of students otherwise it will continue to be a lottery.
Community colleges are the real heroes of California's higher education.
Unless you get a full ride you probably should start at community college. You can then transfer later and generally you'll have a better variety to choose from.
The UC system is sorta weird though. Maybe the top 2 , UCLA and Berkeley compete nationally. After that you're paying UC tuition for an average school. Out of state that's around 50k, 16k in state.
You then get an unholy fraken monster patch work of different financial aid programs. Make over 160k as a family ? No aid for you!
It's a different welfare cliff. Parents get a paper divorce, live with the less affluent one, college is going to be free.
I'm still very very pissed I couldn't get my parents income info and had to drop out. I was making around 100k when I came back to finish. I paid out if pocket at a Cal State.
> Unless you get a full ride you probably should start at community college. You can then transfer later and generally you'll have a better variety to choose from.
This does not make sense if you (like most UC students) are in-state. You're right that it's easier to get in as a CC transfer, but you'll miss out on a lot of the bonding experience that happens as freshmen. And if you want, you could always transfer from one UC to another, if you're looking to upgrade your diploma from Irvine to LA, for example. It's probably worth it to have the better network of the freshmen you met at Irvine rather than going to a CC in LA for two years. It would be cheaper, but networks can be incredibly valuable.
I was a transfer to UCSD - the transfer community itself is pretty large and one college (Sixth) houses a significant percentage, with dorms specifically for transfers. IMO there was far higher interesting diversity of folks there compared to rest of campus: veterans, addicts who got their shit together, tons of immigrants who couldn't afford going straight to UC (as well as your standard mostly 20-22 year old SoCal transfers) from which most people I know formed good networks.
Sure, there's a community either way. But how does the CC -> UCSD transfer community stack up against either (1) four years at UCSD (which OP would say not to go to without a full ride) or (2) two years at UCI and two years at UCSC or UCLA?
My guess is that there are hardworking people in both groups, but the ones who start out at a four year institution are more likely to be tip-top, and to have family/friends who would be valuable in a business network years down the road.
This is somewhat less true now that UCs are pushing to admit so many LCFF students, but I think it's still true in general.
I give a lot of credit to the GP… I’m not familiar with the UCSD demographic, but in general I would expect the 4 year applicants to be much more homogeneous. They’re all 18 years old, how much interesting life experience do they have? Some yes, lots no.
This is old anecdata, but as someone who taught at the CalState system in non-entry technical courses (so most outright failures already washed out before me):
1) 4 year students had my best average, but also my widest standard deviation. My best and my worst students were in this group.
2) Community college transfers had a slightly lower average than my 4 years, but the standard deviation was a lot tighter. They were optimizing time and schedule.
3) Returning professionals had an even slightly lower average than CC transfers, but the standard deviation was super tight. They mostly targeted the low end of the B grade range. They were very strongly optimizing every ounce of their time schedule.
Is that bonding experience worth another 12500$ a year ? CC is about 1500$ in tuition for a full 30 units vs 14000$ at a UC per year.
I made life long friends in community college.
Plus college doesn't work out for everyone, better to spend 3000$ figuring that out over 28k.
If you pay your own way and go the absolute cheapest path, your spending 3k at community college for 2 years and about 14k for 2 years at a Cal State. 17k total.
Vs 14k a year at a UC and around 56k for all 4.
This really depends on your financial situation though. For a lot of families this isn't a lot of money.
Yes, it very much depends on family circumstances. In some families/communities, there is somewhat of a stigma to not attending a 4-year college straight out of high school. That will probably fade over time, but it is a reality for some.
> The UC system is sorta weird though. Maybe the top 2 , UCLA and Berkeley compete nationally. After that you're paying UC tuition for an average school.
Does UCSB no longer have an excellent physics department and is UCSD no longer considered a top CS department?
Assuming this isn't a rhetorical question: San Diego, Davis, Irvine, and Santa Barbara all rank in the top 15 US public, top 50 US / top 200 global universities (USN&WR, THE, QS rankings) and have specific programs that are world class ( including the ones you mention--two UCSB professors won last year's Nobel in physics.
Though Berkeley and UCLA have the advantage of most all departments being top 10, "average school" is not a fair assessment for the rest.
Excellent point about CC’s. The downside is that instructor quality varies considerable both within and between CCs, and many students drop out or are not provided with adequate guidance in terms of GE requirements and transferability.
In terms of costs of UC other than Berkeley, (Davis, Cal Poly, UCLA, etc…) 16k in current times is a great bargain especially given the pipeline to grad school which is great even at non-Berkeley UCs.
I'm pretty sure that's the case at UC too. I don't know UC, but at my 4 year engineering school it felt like 25% attrition every year; if you only do a year and drop out, better to not be paying enormous student loans for probably the rest of your life for that.
If you do two or three years and drop out, better to have a degree, even if it's just an Associates.
If you know you'll make it all the way to a Bachelors, yeah, maybe it'd be better to go direct. But even then, you might get smaller class sizes (and better experiences) at a CC because of the relative levels of the student bodies. Lots of people taking calculus based physics of mechanics at a UC and not so many at a CC, so the UC might do lectures in a hall but the CC might have it in a classroom.
Community College has no real acceptance criteria.
.I think you might need to take a placement test, but even if you place low you can still enroll in most classes.
For me I literally didn't have much else going on, so why not.
Very VERY easy way to date girls from all over the world. Nothing like studying with a Japanese girl on your 20th birthday.
The thing with life is you can never *know* about tomorrow. You can do well in college, parents don't have a spare 15k for next year and have to drop out.
A lot of kids in CC are also working full time. If you have to drop out, it's fine, can always go back.
By the time I finished at a Cal State I was working a full time software engineering job.
I have issues with the current system in general. You should have to work at less one job for a few months before taking out any type of loan. You need to understand how difficult money is to earn.
I can only speak for my own experiences, but I found my instructors at community college to be absolutely fantastic and even better than the ones I had when I eventually transferred to a UC. I had transferred to a UC first, ran out of money and then I wrapped up at a cheaper CSU years later.
At a UC you're probably going to be interacting with teaching assistants anyway.
I have to completely disagree with your last paragraph. No one should be thinking grad school right after a B.A. Go and see the world for a little bit. Excluding maybe law and medicine.
Even then, I've seen this horribly backfire in families. The kid is expected to do really well in college and then become a doctor, the pressure is too much and they just spaz out.
Next thing you know your a college dropout couchsurfing because your parents are threatening to send you back to the old country for an arranged marriage.
> Nevertheless, the average private school applicant had only a 18.3% chance of admission, well below the 25.8% average for public school applicants.
As a parent of a student in a private school, this is how it should be. For the amount of support and resources that private school students receive vs their public school peers, the standards should be higher. My child understands this, and knows that they will have to achieve more to get admission to a UC than a kid at a low income public school.
There should be exceptions, for example: very low SES student attending a private school on scholarship - although such students are usually exceptional or else they would not have qualified for private school scholarship.
The working class shouldn't be subsidizing the higher education of the wealthy.
This seems backwards to me. Colleges should be prioritizing strong students for admission and nothing else. Our country needs the best engineers and doctors. Colleges are a scarce, valuable resource and should be reserved for the best students, regardless of why they are the best students.
I agree with this, but I think you didn’t get the point. The point is, the way we measure strength has to be considered in light of the environment. If a student is in a high school where the average strength is 100, and the student has achieved a strength of 200, it shows that the student has tenacity and grit and drive. Whereas another student might be in a high school where the average strength is 200 and has a strength of 200, and this shows that the student is content to be just average. After admission, the first student has a much higher potential of outperforming the average freshman. The first student’s strength could very well be limited by the amount of resources available in this high school, and not by his/her innate ability.
At least, this is what is supposed to happen, if you believe the UC admission officers.
I understand that point and I still disagree with it. There are objective, direct measurements of strength (standardized tests, performance at state/nation-wide academic competitions, admissions essays), and we don't need to resort to this more flimsy chain of subjective comparisons that use "relative strength of student within school" and "relative strength of school across all schools".
You said above that our country “needs the best engineers and doctors.” Are the tests you mention really objective, direct measures of which student is likely to be the best engineer or doctor in the future? What does it even mean to be the best engineer, and how do you test that?
This doesn't describe what UC is doing, however. LCFF is for (1) kids in foster care, (2) English learners, and (3) low income. If you go to a school that has lots of these kids, but you yourself do not have one of these disadvantages, then it doesn't mean that you've risen up out of poverty to achieve relative greatness. It means that you're not an immigrant/poor, but you go to school with a lot of such students. And in the age of grade inflation, getting good grades at a school with lots of low-performing kids is especially easy.
> This seems backwards to me. Colleges should be prioritizing strong students for admission and nothing else. Our country needs the best engineers and doctors. Colleges are a scarce, valuable resource and should be reserved for the best students, regardless of why they are the best students.
It seems unlikely that Americans would be so massively overrepresented in American colleges under this policy...
You seem to be falsely equating private schools with "the wealthy" and public schools with "the working class". Plenty of people are wealthy and send their kids to public schools. They fund them via property taxes rather than tuition payments.
Back when I was applying to college, there was the idea of "yield protection": a college might decline overqualified students to optimize for their "yield" (the percentage of admitted students who accepted). The yield might affect college rankings.
I'm not sure whether yield protection is actually practiced vs. just a paranoid student meme, but it was the first thing I thought of here and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the article.
> One reason is that far more of their students actually applied than would be expected.
This sentence is buried midway through the article. It would be good for a future post to expand on this ... how much is explained by students simply applying more frequently to their local schools. This explanation was the only plausible explanation in the article I saw answer "why".
A lot of commenters seem to think this is purely a DEI thing, but doesn't it match how the best companies hire? Couldn't it be that the colleges are genuinely trying to select who they think will end up at the top of their fields? Common hiring advice for startups (my game) is to look for slope and drive, not deep expertise or experience. The top kid at a bad high school seems like a better bet to me than the median kid from a stellar high school, even if they've done 3x more AP classes. There have been "revelatory" articles like every year for decades about how google doesn't just hire ivy leaguers.
No, at FAANG I was coached to strictly evaluate based on individual merit, defined by some fixed rubric. We certainly would not penalize an applicant for attending a school with "too many" qualified graduates.
Not exactly the same scenario, but I definitely wondered whether something unsaid was going on last year when my child applied for colleges. He attended a special education high school and was accepted at all nine colleges he applied for, while most of his friends at non-special education schools were averaging about 33% acceptance at similarly competitive, and often the exact same, colleges. I mean, I think my kid is great, but that seemed like a pretty wide discrepancy.
The current administration is looking to go after AA workarounds. There are probably some smoking guns in email discussions among UC administrators/admissions officials.
I thought the UC system was supposed to admit students based strictly on their GPA and test scores to avoid weird types of admission discrimination? Is that not the case? The article mentions UCSD going “test blind” as a turning point for weighing the high school someone attended heavily.
No. They’re no longer allowed to use race but can, and still consider a wide range of factors.
They have to - it’s likely they have far more applicants with near perfect GPA/Test score combos then they have spots. (Noting that your GPA gets fuzzy once it’s over a 4.0 since that “extra” is going to be somewhat school and school system dependent)
Since each kid likely applies to multiple schools the process would also be extremely broken if it worked the way you suggest since the same cohort of kids would all be accepted to multiple schools and the schools would then have to backfill from a alternate list - which would also be the same cohort of kids…
> that “extra” is going to be somewhat school and school system dependent
Is it? That’s news to me. I grew up thinking it was standard to just have 5 grade points for honors and AP classes. I guess the nuance comes into the bar for a class being “honors,” vs. AP which has a more consistent definition given the standardized exam?
There’s the weird incentive for schools to appear selective. That’s why UCSD would rather reject great candidates because chances are they’ll go to the likes of Harvard. Why accept candidates that will ultimately go elsewhere? Better to be the dumper than the dumpee and improve your rankings. It’s awful.
It’s not about dumpee or dumper or rankings games.
Admissions has to target a fixed number of students each year, plus or minus. Students have to decide where to attend in a narrow window. If you accept a lot of students who are unlikely to attend then you would undershoot your admissions target and have to try to convince students to attend in later rounds of admission, but that’s too late because they’ve already decided to go somewhere else.
If the acceptance rate wasn’t being gamed, they could accept a lot more of the top candidates - they would have years of statistical data knowing that only x% of those top students will commit.
It’s not really a risk to overaccept if you know what % will commit.
> Why accept candidates that will ultimately go elsewhere?
Idea: When you apply for a college, you have to prepay for the first semester. If you get admitted, you have already paid for the first semester. If you get rejected, you get this advance payment back. On the other hand, if you get admitted, but decide to go somewhere else, you loose money.
This should give the university a strong incentive not to reject strong candidates that will go somewhere else - quite the opposite: if you admit such a candidate, but the candidate goes somewhere else, the university earns even more (the semester fee without having to provide any service for this money).
Interesting idea, but look at it from the applicant’s perspective: you’d have to front like $50,000 to apply to just 5 schools (if you call $10k the average price for a semester). Even if you solved the financial aid question here, admissions is a numbers game for students, usually, so getting accepted to more than one school would dig the student loan debt hole that much deeper across the board.
> you’d have to front like $50,000 to apply to just 5 schools (if you call $10k the average price for a semester). Even if you solved the financial aid question here, admissions is a numbers game for students, usually, so getting accepted to more than one school would dig the student loan debt hole that much deeper across the board.
Perhaps insurance companies could create an insurance product to insurance the applicant against the case that he gets admitted at many colleges and thus has to pay many, many times the semester fee (or application fee).
Even getting admitted to two colleges would be financial crippling to a majority of applicants.
Insurance premiums would be a significant fraction of the average tuition, which would be beyond the reach of many.
The effect of the proposed system would be that most people would just apply to one school. If rejected they would try another next year, if they haven’t given up on college, and so on.
This would result in lots of schools moving to a rolling admission process with monthly (or even weekly) notification cycles. Students would then apply serially to several schools.
Of course, there's no way to get schools to all require a deposit, and even if there were schools would give fee-waivers to low-income students (giving them an advantage over middle-class kids).
Conversely, the correlation between university eliteness and occupational eliteness is weakening.
Who is more elite - a new grad who has founded a YC backed startup who attended UIUC (an elite and selective CS program at a university that is not viewed as prestigious by society at large) or a Yale grad working on the Hill earning $50k?
As of today, all UCs are viewed similarly from a tech hiring practice perspective, though there is a bit of a geographic bias helping UC Berkeley, but this same bias also helps much less selective and less socially prestigious SJSU.
I have met more other founders that came from large engineering state schools then the next tier-up of prestigious schools, with one exception being Stanford. Of course these larger schools produce far more students. Purdue (where I went) generates over 3000 new engineering graduates every year.
From the hiring perspective - A degree from from ivy school means so little compared to the actual skill level of the applicant. I honestly could not tell you where the last 10 people I hired went to school, or if they even did.
Alma mater prestige is increasingly divorced from employability and thus financial prestige.
You don't need to go to an Ivy or Ivy adjacent to have a very successful career in Tech (software/hardware), Accounting, Actuary, Nurse Practitioners, and other high paying careers.
And historically (past 40-45 years) "prestigious" careers like law, consulting, marketing, advertising, publishing, and media with significant gatekeeping just haven't kept up.
A BBA from Purdue wouldn't get you an MBB interview, but that increasingly doesn't matter because now that BBA could land a PMM or FP&A role in a tech company and end up with a faster career potential than the MBB hire - both will end up fighting for the same job within 3-5 years of graduating anyhow.
Despite being an Ivy grad, I'm happy about this return to the pre-1980s norm.
idk man, I’ve always thought UIUC was pretty selective, especially for their EE and CS programs. I’m also 10+ years out from college applications so maybe things have changed.
It's an elite program within a non-prestigious university. It goes to show how concepts like prestige are truly performative in nature.
Even at my Ivy League alma mater, a traditional public school like UIUC or UW was well regarded by most departments, but society at large pedestalled my alma mater to an unrealistic degree.
Pierre Bourdieu tends to dig deeper into the sociology of elitism, and is in my opinion a must-read.
It's treated as "good enough", and now the the second generation of SWEs, PMs, and AEs are getting hired I've seen their parents (a large number of whom are now mid-level leadership in most tech companies here in the Bay) increasingly lobby to include these "lower tier" UCs to the recruiting pool.
My point is, for the younger generation a university's societal eliteness just isn't a strong predictor for success, and I strongly believe data will back up this observation within the next decade (there's usually a 5-7 year delay on data gathering in the social sciences, eg. Data from 2018-22 is only now starting to be analyzed).
UCR is where you want to go if you're going for Geology or Ag/Hort, you aren't really trying to go there for SWE or EE, it isn't exactly known for those sorts of programs.
Source: I live right next to their citrus and asparagus test fields and often visit their geology building to use their XRD and XRF systems.
I read the book SAT Wars and came away with a horrifying takeaway: admissions programs in US universities are creative enterprises for the person involved. One of them talks about “crafting a class”.
Getting into many of these places is a question of playing into your admissions officer’s biases. Knowing that they’re mostly liberal voters, often female, and nowadays more likely to be childless it’s presumably important to match that person’s energy.
Someone who would otherwise be writing romance novels is now picking students. Hence the infamous essay of the accepted student that went “Black Lives Matter” x100
Maybe in the US, but not elsewhere. Lots of places just sort by grades or test scores. Part of the reason for the weird US system is the low ceiling: school is relatively easy compared to developed countries, so there are way too many people with identical scores at the top.
Yeah, there’s really no way around it when you have more qualified students than slots, unless you just mark each applicant as qualified or not and run a lottery.
But they do have to “craft a class” to some extent. An obvious example is athletic recruiting, but some schools are consciously thinking about populating other extracurriculars, like marching bands or orchestras.
And you also don’t want a class that’s all computer science majors or zero philosophy majors. I imagine they consider other factors as well. The admissions staff may be liberal, but I’m guessing at most schools they deliberately admit some outspoken conservatives.
You could have quotas for each program. And then just set exams differently for each. Removes the "general education" as major, but most other countries find that one insane thing in first place. University is already for specialisation. High school is place were general education should happen.
No they don’t “have” to do any of this as evidenced by the fact that the US is the only country where it happens. In most countries it would (rightly) be considered strange to care how good someone is at sports or marching band when evaluating their ability to study academic subjects (the actual purpose of a university).
That feels like a fairly narrow view of what the purpose of a university is.
Look at the charter of any university and they do not just say: "create students who excel in their academic subject of choice".
The vast, vast majority of higher education mission statements/charters include goals like: "helping students develop their identity", "pursuing meaning", "strengthening community", "sharing perspectives", "helping others", etc. etc. etc.
Things like "can this person work on as a team (did they play sports?)" or "have they been a part of a community (like marching band?)" are hugely important for building a community at the university that can successfully achieve those mission statements.
Itself a very US-specific thing. So much so that trans athletes in college sports were a focal point of a propaganda campaign that resulted in Trump winning.
I don't think any large European country even has athletic admissions, outside of maybe Olympic-level athletes.
Come on. For math/physics/chemistry/CS the exams are easy. Just written questions and answers. Grading is also simple, just check if the answer is correct. For high-school-level questions, all the answers can be trivially checked. We're not talking about PhD-level problems.
It's a bit more complicated for humanities, grading essays is more subjective. But we also have solutions for that: have 2-3 people independently grade each essay, and have a special group review all the cases where the graders disagree.
I mean contrary to the comment above this is how American universities used to be. They had standing exams... Show up on admission day, take a test, highest scores get admission. Easy
Not relevant for UC schools but flagship tier state schools love being able to say they have students from all 50 states so if you're from Wyoming, getting a scholarship to somewhere like South Carolina or Maine is going to be relatively easy.
I thought this was old news. US universities have hard quotas per high school, so you’ll have better chances of admission if you attend a poor performing school.
The charts that show changes over time reveal that it is not old news. The change has been happening for a couple years, but before the last year or so it would have been impossible to show that it was a trend, not just a blip. And of course the UCSD faculty report on remedial math shined a spotlight on the issue.
Are Universities still good? They're good socially but for education in the age of AI I can't imagine university even being worth it anymore outside of the absolutely most prestigious ones there are.
Certainly not your run-of-the-mill UC school except maybe UCLA or Berkeley and only then for very specific majors.
I went to a UC and graduated 14 years ago. I basically had to teach myself everything with the other students once I got into my major. And this school has done notable research in my field. But the quality of education was just terrible. Nobody could teach us multi-threading, compilers, theory of computation, networking, or algorithms properly. Like not at all. The students had to help each other the best they can and the most experienced or smartest individuals were just the ones that actually were able to do those subjects competently. But everyone else was pretty much shorted on their education, just like the poor math education throughout the country. It's pretty irritating how much it costs versus the quality you get. No way is it worth it.
And since I've graduated I learned that none of these topics is IQ-limited at all whatsoever. Math is completely intuitively if taught properly. ANYONE can learn it to a high level with good analogies and demonstrations and applicative knowledge. I developed competence with linear algebra and vector math not in school but doing game programming after I graduated. That's what actually made it "make sense".
I tutored several students since I graduated and I think I helped them for $30 an hour learning fundamentals and how to program and I think I did a significantly better job one-on-one for these students at a way cheaper rate than they would have to pay in school. It's sad.
I imagine LLMs could do a better job for many things than research professors that just throw slides on the board and barely elaborate on anything. The only way you learn in those courses is by really struggling on your own and going to as many office hours and TA hours as possible.
>> Incidentally, San Francisco public schools had a combined admission rate of just under 20%, well below the state average. Mission had the highest rate (26.5%) and Balboa the lowest (15.4%). It may or may not be a coincidence that 90% (the most of any SF school) of the applicants from Balboa were Asian whereas only 25% (the fewest of any SF school) of the applicants from Mission were Asian.
In order to promote diversity of the freshman classroom the college needs to suppress merit to achieve their diversity targets?
You just discovered affirmative action?
That is literally what Affirmative Action (DEI in school admissions) means.
Ignore merit, consider race.
These programs have only succeeded in making a large number of people accept that race is a valid way to screen people, at which point your goal is to win.
Racism resets.
Universities and basically every major company, including all the big tech companies, have been openly and publicly doing this for years.
See: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co...
Excerpts:
UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.
A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
That is, they are biased towards top performers, not just high performers, even if one student's "merely high" is formally higher than the ceiling the other student hit.
(The "winning" strategy then is to move to an underserved high school after an elite middle school, and hit the ceiling.)
You may be joking, but I have several high achieving peers whose families did this with good results. The choice was: did they want to be in the best high school with the highest level of competition, or did they want to go to an OK school that had good magnet programs and less competition. my sample size is only about three, but it worked out well for them.
I don’t think the GP is joking, but they may not have realized that this strategy is already well known. A lot of families won’t uproot themselves for it, though.
They have local magnet/specialized programs in CA public schools that they use to attract good students to poorly performing schools for help goose up test schools.
This is the new meta, in SF at least.
Despite the "what are secondary effects?" school admins trying to "fix inequality" by creating school lotteries, ending gifted programs and focusing on "equality of outcomes not equality of opportunity", the only thing that has actually improved troubled schools is that smart kids with involved parents now actively seek out lower rated schools like Mission High so they can more easily rise to the top of the class and get a free ride to Berkeley or another UC.
There was an article about this exact phenomenon in SFGate a year or two ago so it is definitely a real trend.
While I'm usually not a fan of ending gifted programs and such, I do believe that the kids in the lower-rated schools must feel a positive effect, mingling with highly-motivated, better-educated kids. It may do away with the whole "study is uncool, real kids hate school" vibe that holds many "bad neighborhood" schools back.
Has this not always been "the meta" everywhere for all of human history (and nature)? It's the fundamental driving force in favor of "diversity" always winning out over time. It's diffusion.
It's definitely there in sports teams, jobs, politics, etc.
There's a natural limit to this effect. The downside is that being a big fish in a small pond means you may not leave the pond without a longer term goal beyond it, and there's a saturation point of talent beyond which any competitive advantage is minimal.
This ultimately does not really impact the lesser schools much unless they were starved for talent for too long and needed to raise the bar. Migration patterns have an ebb and flow.
Once upon a time, the SAT an IQ test, and it was a real achievement to score a 1600. That achievement has been hollowed out in tandem with the value of most college degrees.
We know how to test for merit. The greatest tragedy in this college admissions racket isn't the shadowy affirmative action policies, the mountains of student loan debt, or the entire college admission-industrial complex that's sprung up.
It's that even the tools we've used to use to measure if someone was _ready_ for college have been annihilated.
> the SAT an IQ test
You’re thinking of a 2004 study that found “the SAT (and later, with Koenig, the ACT) was substantially correlated with measures of general cognitive ability and could be used as a proxy measure for intelligence” [1]. To my knowledge, this remains the case.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6963451/
Time pressure is a crucial aspect of it, though. I think GP may be alluding to the alleged abuse of disability exceptions, allowing kids (who don't need it) to take longer.
The SAT was never an IQ test, and it certainly doesn't measure "merit", whatever that is. It's a Scholastic Aptitude Test, and it isn't particularly good at that either.
If we had a good "test for merit" then we could directly assign people to their roles and ignore their actual performance.
"Aptitude" was dropped from the name back in 1990.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Name_changes
It may have become something of a dirty word ...
> It's a Scholastic Aptitude Test, and it isn't particularly good at that either
It’s a pretty good measure for how a student will do in their first year in college.
So is high school GPA.
Not if you went to an easy school vs a difficult school vs a school that gives mostly As. Never heard of grade inflation or what?
One of the charts in TFA shows a discontinuity in admissions rate around 75% UPP. This means that if you send your kid to a HS that is underserved when you enroll, but drops below the critical 75% threshold because too many other families are doing the same, then the school could fall out of the strong-benefit category.
The kid would still have a better chance than if he applied from a high-performing school, but it wouldn't be as much of an advantage.
Socially, I'm guessing the kid could face some challenges because (1) other high performing students might not like him because he's a curve-breaker, (2) teachers would know what the family was up to and could view it as distasteful, and (3) if the student went to UCSD or another school where this is a well-known hack, there could be stigma for having gamed the system/being less-smart.
No one cares what high school you went to in college, unless maybe you went to the same high school yourself.
Most of the time, no one knows. But if you're from a nice part of LA or SD but you went to a HS in a bad part of town, people might wonder why you went there, or figure it out for themselves.
I think in most cases fellow undergrads would see it as just playing the game, but some might see it as "cheating" or like you didn't earn your spot as much as they did (if they were from a HS that was from a good part of town).
> A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.
Damn, this is as stupid as it gets.
The students operating at this level are identical. There’s no practical difference between a 4.0 and a 4.5 GPA when comparing students from different schools.
There nothing stupid about controlling for circumstances.
As an analogy, let’s say you want to build a fun race car that you can take to the track. You go out and look at a bunch of used cars and you want to be qualitative so you measure out their 0-60 times.
You could just say “the car with the best time wins” and take the fastest one you tested. Or you could consider context like “this one had bald tires tha could easily be upgraded” or “we tested this one going uphill”.
The goal is to find the car that can be turned into the fastest and not which has the best numbers right now.
Better circumstance do create better students though. And all this will do is cause the best students to hide in shit schools to game the system
> And all this will do is cause the best students to hide in shit schools to game the system
No it won’t, because they would get a horrible base for their education and be 1-2 years behind their “super strong school” peers. (I did not make up these numbers; it’s easy to have more than 1 year of college credit from Advanced Placement classes in the US system.)
Acting like college is the beginning of education is foolish. Imagine struggling with learning how to learn challenging material while taking classes with students who already did that three years ago.
So they’ll take dual-enrollment classes at the local community college instead.
Ok well look at it the other way. Should a student be punished if they took every AP offered but less than another student?
They should just make this explicit, like the UT system does. The top X% of students are admitted automatically from each school.
California has that. The top 9% from each high school and the top 9% statewide are guaranteed UC admission. This does not guarantee admission to any specific campus, so if you are only interested in say Berkeley or UCLA you might get admitted but UC will find you a place at some campus.
Recall that there are UC campuses in Riverside, Merced, Davis.
It's all publicly funded universities in Texas, not just the UT system.
In other words: you've just pissed off a lot of Aggies grouping them in with, ahem, tu.
No one in Texas calls it “TU”. Rather, UT.
"tu" is a term of disrespect used by the students at Texas A&M University (Aggies).
A&M is the other very large public university system in Texas. So there is a small intra-state rivalry there.
UCs already guarantee this to the top % of students in every school.
I think U of Florida used to give full rides to the top n of each high school's graduating class. I think n was something around 5.
This seems terrible incentives. You are now in a purely adversarial relationship with your peers and hurting them helps you
Not only that, but high performers are incentivised to move to worse schools.
It may actually improve mean outcomes, but harm societal outcomes, as the scientific impact of educated individuals may tend to be power law distributed (e.g. the most important breakthroughs come from a small sector of the population with wildly disproportionate impact)
What breakthroughs are coming from high school students?
The bottleneck on research is funding. We have a glut of students wanting to go into research who don't because of how competitive the field is. We then have researchers constantly leaving the field for the same reason.
The thing is the people who do get the funding should be the smartest of the smartest. That funnel needs to be there and this nonsense is destroying it.
Texan here. There’s still ways to get in if you don’t make the top X% of your class (the percentage is shrinking every year as the school climbs up the rankings and more people want to go… I think it’s near top-4% now? It used to be top 15% I recall), and many of those high achievers go onto other out of state schools, so it’s in the interest of UT system to offer automatic admission to the top achievers from across the state.
Just because the top X% is guaranteed admission, that does not mean all (or even most) of the school is from the top X%.
I believe it's only UT Austin that's shrunk the percentage. All of the other public universities are still at the original top 10%.
How much control can your classmates have over your own GPA? What percentage of 'control' over your GPA is up to you vs. your teachers, parents, classmates, and everyone else? I put those in order intentionally, as I think your classmates are below teachers and parents on the hierarchy.
This kind of competition happens in other areas of academic pursuits too. Is that strictly a bad thing?
The bad thing about UT's policy is that it encourages well-off students to move to a less-competitive school district (usually rural) in order to improve their chances.
This seems like a good thing to me actually, lower performing students generally benefit from having high performers in their social circles
It is hard to hurt someone when their score is a standardized test.
UCs don't consider standardized tests.
IMO they'll roll back. It was a bad decision, and a few unis already rolled back.
Many other schools have rolled back their temporary suspensions of SAT-optional/blindness, but UC made a decision that was permanent. And when they made the decision, it was over the objection of the UC faculty recommendation. They might roll it back, but I'm not holding my breath.
It's not unusual for families to change their school district so their kid can play for a better sports program and of course it's extremely common for families to want to live in the best district for education quality, but maybe some are now incentivized to move into a district with lesser competition for the top spots.
Honestly, I don't know how do you even compare students with different backgrounds against each other.
That's why standardized testing is good - it gives everyone the same chance to excel.
> it gives everyone the same chance to excel.
How does the existence of standardized testing give everyone the same chance? As an extremely over-exaggerated example example, someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject.
How does the existence of a standard hoop height in the NBA give everyone the same chance to play? Shorter players should get lower hoops, and slower runners should get electric scooters. That way, everyone can appear to be equally capable.
I would say that the NBA is explicitly not about giving everyone the same chance. Not everything has to be about giving everyone the same chance. A totally equitable NBA would probably be less entertaining to watch.
But that doesn't mean we can say that standardized testing gives everyone the same chance either...
Hmm. I suppose with modern Flock technology and GPS tracking for whole childhood we could calculate some average of gunshots heard in vicinity to score and give school spots to those with highest total.
Or well, accept that same test is fair enough solution and it is impossible and probably not even sensible to apply some gameable metrics.
“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it” -Bernard Shaw
I'm pretty tired of progressives insisting that people who grew up in poverty but were able to improve our lot in life through study, doing well on grades, and, yes, on standardized tests, like me, do not exist.
> someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject
Is there any world in which the first student, struggling in that context, treads water at a UC?
I used to volunteer to tutor high-school aged students in New York. I gave up and moved to grade schoolers. A refugee who will take the SAT in six months and wants to go to college, but is struggling with basic reading comprehension and symbolic math is just not going to do well in college in a year.
Note: the student who excels in that first setting should absolutely be admitted. But they’re, by definition, already excelling.
This belief is how UC San Diego ends up with 900 freshman below high school math proficiency. And thus college becomes a remedial education institution.
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
Most likely the people living somewhere continuously with gunfire wasn’t ever going to succeed academically either way. There are exceptions of course.
You’d have to basically rebirth and resocialize them in a different culture entirely.
Far too many people already have been educated past their natural state and it’s going to get ugly.
The schools that went test-optional already have switched back because this actually gives lower income students the best chance to distinguish themselves. The narrative that lower income students with less opportunities would benefit from not submitting SATs turned out to be false.
Ear plugs are under $5. If you could not think of that over years, you're not gonna be able to score well in SAT for different reasons.
This is a terrible system because it forces students and parents to start playing all kinds of games to navigate a non transparent process for admissions. What now? Are parents going to send their kids to good schools until it is time to apply to colleges? And then they are going to switch to the best school for applications?
Right, up until middle school send kids to the best school, then for high school move to an area with poor schools.
Maybe they can bring their resources with them too, and the poor schools can have things like lead paint remediation, honors classes, and extra curricular activities.
I like this idea!
Or it could end up like some Asian countries with a large afterschool tuition industry. I guess at a minimum you don't want the kid to get shot up at school though.
Resources are mainly property taxes. Unless they're building a new house whose value is significantly greater than the median for the area, families gaming the system aren't likely to have much of a lasting impact on the district.
Yeah you’re right. However, resource gaps can be filled by things like volunteer librarians, teacher wishlists/donations, field trips, strong PTAs, etc..
This is common in my city. It’s a big underfunded school district with a handful of coveted, well supported schools. I’m assuming it happens elsewhere in America with the success of platforms like donors choose.
Yes. Well off schools raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from parent donations.
This exists. They’re called magnet schools. The IB program is decades old.
> The opaqueness of the whole process is what I find most objectionable.
I also find that objectionable. However, recalling my own college admission process, I think we have collectively determined that this opaqueness is basically working as intended. We are now treating it as a rite passage that qualified high school students can be mysteriously rejected.
I applied to 6 colleges (not counting those outside the United States), which would be considered an extremely low number today. I have colleagues who have kids applying to colleges right now so I know. Everyone is applying to more colleges just to counteract these seemingly random rejections.
The opaqueness is unique to USA and is thanks to "holistic reviews", which is a highly questionable practice.
Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
The 'holistic' admissions lie - The Daily Californian https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-...
The False Promise of 'Holistic' College Admissions - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...
Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
For you and your parent:
There is a special term to denote "amount which something is opaque" and that term is opacity.
Opaqueness is in the dictionary, so that’s good enough. Opacity sounds like it should be in a physics textbook.
It’s an arms race. Now that students are encourage to apply to huge numbers of universities for safety, the universities are forced to accept a smaller percentage of applicants to avoid overcommitting.
So student, parents, and counselors see this and tell everyone to apply to even more colleges and the cycle continues.
UK caps applications to 5 to combat this exact problem.
When you have this problem of universities rejecting applicants based on arbitrary criteria, limiting that becomes an issue too.
Every school has increased tuition without substantially increasing the number of students. What you are seeing is that schools are getting thousands of students that are exactly the same which is why admissions is turning into a lottery system. It's basically like a CPU maxed out at 100%. There's nothing you can do except build more schools and increase the number of students otherwise it will continue to be a lottery.
Community colleges are the real heroes of California's higher education.
Unless you get a full ride you probably should start at community college. You can then transfer later and generally you'll have a better variety to choose from.
The UC system is sorta weird though. Maybe the top 2 , UCLA and Berkeley compete nationally. After that you're paying UC tuition for an average school. Out of state that's around 50k, 16k in state.
You then get an unholy fraken monster patch work of different financial aid programs. Make over 160k as a family ? No aid for you!
It's a different welfare cliff. Parents get a paper divorce, live with the less affluent one, college is going to be free.
I'm still very very pissed I couldn't get my parents income info and had to drop out. I was making around 100k when I came back to finish. I paid out if pocket at a Cal State.
> Unless you get a full ride you probably should start at community college. You can then transfer later and generally you'll have a better variety to choose from.
This does not make sense if you (like most UC students) are in-state. You're right that it's easier to get in as a CC transfer, but you'll miss out on a lot of the bonding experience that happens as freshmen. And if you want, you could always transfer from one UC to another, if you're looking to upgrade your diploma from Irvine to LA, for example. It's probably worth it to have the better network of the freshmen you met at Irvine rather than going to a CC in LA for two years. It would be cheaper, but networks can be incredibly valuable.
I was a transfer to UCSD - the transfer community itself is pretty large and one college (Sixth) houses a significant percentage, with dorms specifically for transfers. IMO there was far higher interesting diversity of folks there compared to rest of campus: veterans, addicts who got their shit together, tons of immigrants who couldn't afford going straight to UC (as well as your standard mostly 20-22 year old SoCal transfers) from which most people I know formed good networks.
Sure, there's a community either way. But how does the CC -> UCSD transfer community stack up against either (1) four years at UCSD (which OP would say not to go to without a full ride) or (2) two years at UCI and two years at UCSC or UCLA?
My guess is that there are hardworking people in both groups, but the ones who start out at a four year institution are more likely to be tip-top, and to have family/friends who would be valuable in a business network years down the road.
This is somewhat less true now that UCs are pushing to admit so many LCFF students, but I think it's still true in general.
I give a lot of credit to the GP… I’m not familiar with the UCSD demographic, but in general I would expect the 4 year applicants to be much more homogeneous. They’re all 18 years old, how much interesting life experience do they have? Some yes, lots no.
This is old anecdata, but as someone who taught at the CalState system in non-entry technical courses (so most outright failures already washed out before me):
1) 4 year students had my best average, but also my widest standard deviation. My best and my worst students were in this group.
2) Community college transfers had a slightly lower average than my 4 years, but the standard deviation was a lot tighter. They were optimizing time and schedule.
3) Returning professionals had an even slightly lower average than CC transfers, but the standard deviation was super tight. They mostly targeted the low end of the B grade range. They were very strongly optimizing every ounce of their time schedule.
Is that bonding experience worth another 12500$ a year ? CC is about 1500$ in tuition for a full 30 units vs 14000$ at a UC per year.
I made life long friends in community college.
Plus college doesn't work out for everyone, better to spend 3000$ figuring that out over 28k.
If you pay your own way and go the absolute cheapest path, your spending 3k at community college for 2 years and about 14k for 2 years at a Cal State. 17k total.
Vs 14k a year at a UC and around 56k for all 4.
This really depends on your financial situation though. For a lot of families this isn't a lot of money.
Yes, it very much depends on family circumstances. In some families/communities, there is somewhat of a stigma to not attending a 4-year college straight out of high school. That will probably fade over time, but it is a reality for some.
> The UC system is sorta weird though. Maybe the top 2 , UCLA and Berkeley compete nationally. After that you're paying UC tuition for an average school.
Does UCSB no longer have an excellent physics department and is UCSD no longer considered a top CS department?
Assuming this isn't a rhetorical question: San Diego, Davis, Irvine, and Santa Barbara all rank in the top 15 US public, top 50 US / top 200 global universities (USN&WR, THE, QS rankings) and have specific programs that are world class ( including the ones you mention--two UCSB professors won last year's Nobel in physics.
Though Berkeley and UCLA have the advantage of most all departments being top 10, "average school" is not a fair assessment for the rest.
Excellent point about CC’s. The downside is that instructor quality varies considerable both within and between CCs, and many students drop out or are not provided with adequate guidance in terms of GE requirements and transferability.
In terms of costs of UC other than Berkeley, (Davis, Cal Poly, UCLA, etc…) 16k in current times is a great bargain especially given the pipeline to grad school which is great even at non-Berkeley UCs.
> many students drop out
I'm pretty sure that's the case at UC too. I don't know UC, but at my 4 year engineering school it felt like 25% attrition every year; if you only do a year and drop out, better to not be paying enormous student loans for probably the rest of your life for that.
If you do two or three years and drop out, better to have a degree, even if it's just an Associates.
If you know you'll make it all the way to a Bachelors, yeah, maybe it'd be better to go direct. But even then, you might get smaller class sizes (and better experiences) at a CC because of the relative levels of the student bodies. Lots of people taking calculus based physics of mechanics at a UC and not so many at a CC, so the UC might do lectures in a hall but the CC might have it in a classroom.
Community College has no real acceptance criteria. .I think you might need to take a placement test, but even if you place low you can still enroll in most classes.
For me I literally didn't have much else going on, so why not.
Very VERY easy way to date girls from all over the world. Nothing like studying with a Japanese girl on your 20th birthday.
The thing with life is you can never *know* about tomorrow. You can do well in college, parents don't have a spare 15k for next year and have to drop out.
A lot of kids in CC are also working full time. If you have to drop out, it's fine, can always go back.
By the time I finished at a Cal State I was working a full time software engineering job.
I have issues with the current system in general. You should have to work at less one job for a few months before taking out any type of loan. You need to understand how difficult money is to earn.
I can only speak for my own experiences, but I found my instructors at community college to be absolutely fantastic and even better than the ones I had when I eventually transferred to a UC. I had transferred to a UC first, ran out of money and then I wrapped up at a cheaper CSU years later.
At a UC you're probably going to be interacting with teaching assistants anyway.
I have to completely disagree with your last paragraph. No one should be thinking grad school right after a B.A. Go and see the world for a little bit. Excluding maybe law and medicine.
Even then, I've seen this horribly backfire in families. The kid is expected to do really well in college and then become a doctor, the pressure is too much and they just spaz out.
Next thing you know your a college dropout couchsurfing because your parents are threatening to send you back to the old country for an arranged marriage.
> Nevertheless, the average private school applicant had only a 18.3% chance of admission, well below the 25.8% average for public school applicants.
As a parent of a student in a private school, this is how it should be. For the amount of support and resources that private school students receive vs their public school peers, the standards should be higher. My child understands this, and knows that they will have to achieve more to get admission to a UC than a kid at a low income public school.
There should be exceptions, for example: very low SES student attending a private school on scholarship - although such students are usually exceptional or else they would not have qualified for private school scholarship.
The working class shouldn't be subsidizing the higher education of the wealthy.
This seems backwards to me. Colleges should be prioritizing strong students for admission and nothing else. Our country needs the best engineers and doctors. Colleges are a scarce, valuable resource and should be reserved for the best students, regardless of why they are the best students.
> Colleges should be prioritizing strong students
I agree with this, but I think you didn’t get the point. The point is, the way we measure strength has to be considered in light of the environment. If a student is in a high school where the average strength is 100, and the student has achieved a strength of 200, it shows that the student has tenacity and grit and drive. Whereas another student might be in a high school where the average strength is 200 and has a strength of 200, and this shows that the student is content to be just average. After admission, the first student has a much higher potential of outperforming the average freshman. The first student’s strength could very well be limited by the amount of resources available in this high school, and not by his/her innate ability.
At least, this is what is supposed to happen, if you believe the UC admission officers.
I understand that point and I still disagree with it. There are objective, direct measurements of strength (standardized tests, performance at state/nation-wide academic competitions, admissions essays), and we don't need to resort to this more flimsy chain of subjective comparisons that use "relative strength of student within school" and "relative strength of school across all schools".
> There are objective, direct measurements of strength (standardized tests, performance at state/nation-wide academic competitions, admissions essays)
You are begging the question, especially with standardized testing, by presuming these things are measuring what you think they are measuring.
You said above that our country “needs the best engineers and doctors.” Are the tests you mention really objective, direct measures of which student is likely to be the best engineer or doctor in the future? What does it even mean to be the best engineer, and how do you test that?
This doesn't describe what UC is doing, however. LCFF is for (1) kids in foster care, (2) English learners, and (3) low income. If you go to a school that has lots of these kids, but you yourself do not have one of these disadvantages, then it doesn't mean that you've risen up out of poverty to achieve relative greatness. It means that you're not an immigrant/poor, but you go to school with a lot of such students. And in the age of grade inflation, getting good grades at a school with lots of low-performing kids is especially easy.
> This seems backwards to me. Colleges should be prioritizing strong students for admission and nothing else. Our country needs the best engineers and doctors. Colleges are a scarce, valuable resource and should be reserved for the best students, regardless of why they are the best students.
It seems unlikely that Americans would be so massively overrepresented in American colleges under this policy...
You seem to be falsely equating private schools with "the wealthy" and public schools with "the working class". Plenty of people are wealthy and send their kids to public schools. They fund them via property taxes rather than tuition payments.
> You seem to be falsely equating private schools with "the wealthy" and public schools with "the working class"
Agree. Plenty of non-wealthy get to attend private schools through scholarships and financial aid
Back when I was applying to college, there was the idea of "yield protection": a college might decline overqualified students to optimize for their "yield" (the percentage of admitted students who accepted). The yield might affect college rankings.
I'm not sure whether yield protection is actually practiced vs. just a paranoid student meme, but it was the first thing I thought of here and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the article.
> One reason is that far more of their students actually applied than would be expected.
This sentence is buried midway through the article. It would be good for a future post to expand on this ... how much is explained by students simply applying more frequently to their local schools. This explanation was the only plausible explanation in the article I saw answer "why".
> students simply applying more frequently to their local schools
Cheaper to live at home nowadays
A lot of commenters seem to think this is purely a DEI thing, but doesn't it match how the best companies hire? Couldn't it be that the colleges are genuinely trying to select who they think will end up at the top of their fields? Common hiring advice for startups (my game) is to look for slope and drive, not deep expertise or experience. The top kid at a bad high school seems like a better bet to me than the median kid from a stellar high school, even if they've done 3x more AP classes. There have been "revelatory" articles like every year for decades about how google doesn't just hire ivy leaguers.
[0]: https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-to...
No, at FAANG I was coached to strictly evaluate based on individual merit, defined by some fixed rubric. We certainly would not penalize an applicant for attending a school with "too many" qualified graduates.
Not exactly the same scenario, but I definitely wondered whether something unsaid was going on last year when my child applied for colleges. He attended a special education high school and was accepted at all nine colleges he applied for, while most of his friends at non-special education schools were averaging about 33% acceptance at similarly competitive, and often the exact same, colleges. I mean, I think my kid is great, but that seemed like a pretty wide discrepancy.
This is just doing DEI in a different way because it's technically illegal. It's obvious what's going on here.
The current administration is looking to go after AA workarounds. There are probably some smoking guns in email discussions among UC administrators/admissions officials.
Looks like the data is available here:
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...
I'm surprised to see this granularity (# of applicants/admitted/enrolled to a college broken out by high school).
I thought the UC system was supposed to admit students based strictly on their GPA and test scores to avoid weird types of admission discrimination? Is that not the case? The article mentions UCSD going “test blind” as a turning point for weighing the high school someone attended heavily.
No. They’re no longer allowed to use race but can, and still consider a wide range of factors.
They have to - it’s likely they have far more applicants with near perfect GPA/Test score combos then they have spots. (Noting that your GPA gets fuzzy once it’s over a 4.0 since that “extra” is going to be somewhat school and school system dependent)
Since each kid likely applies to multiple schools the process would also be extremely broken if it worked the way you suggest since the same cohort of kids would all be accepted to multiple schools and the schools would then have to backfill from a alternate list - which would also be the same cohort of kids…
> that “extra” is going to be somewhat school and school system dependent
Is it? That’s news to me. I grew up thinking it was standard to just have 5 grade points for honors and AP classes. I guess the nuance comes into the bar for a class being “honors,” vs. AP which has a more consistent definition given the standardized exam?
UC is indeed "test blind" and until this changes, their admissions system will remain fucked.
There’s the weird incentive for schools to appear selective. That’s why UCSD would rather reject great candidates because chances are they’ll go to the likes of Harvard. Why accept candidates that will ultimately go elsewhere? Better to be the dumper than the dumpee and improve your rankings. It’s awful.
It’s not about dumpee or dumper or rankings games.
Admissions has to target a fixed number of students each year, plus or minus. Students have to decide where to attend in a narrow window. If you accept a lot of students who are unlikely to attend then you would undershoot your admissions target and have to try to convince students to attend in later rounds of admission, but that’s too late because they’ve already decided to go somewhere else.
If the acceptance rate wasn’t being gamed, they could accept a lot more of the top candidates - they would have years of statistical data knowing that only x% of those top students will commit.
It’s not really a risk to overaccept if you know what % will commit.
> Why accept candidates that will ultimately go elsewhere?
Idea: When you apply for a college, you have to prepay for the first semester. If you get admitted, you have already paid for the first semester. If you get rejected, you get this advance payment back. On the other hand, if you get admitted, but decide to go somewhere else, you loose money.
This should give the university a strong incentive not to reject strong candidates that will go somewhere else - quite the opposite: if you admit such a candidate, but the candidate goes somewhere else, the university earns even more (the semester fee without having to provide any service for this money).
Interesting idea, but look at it from the applicant’s perspective: you’d have to front like $50,000 to apply to just 5 schools (if you call $10k the average price for a semester). Even if you solved the financial aid question here, admissions is a numbers game for students, usually, so getting accepted to more than one school would dig the student loan debt hole that much deeper across the board.
> you’d have to front like $50,000 to apply to just 5 schools (if you call $10k the average price for a semester). Even if you solved the financial aid question here, admissions is a numbers game for students, usually, so getting accepted to more than one school would dig the student loan debt hole that much deeper across the board.
Perhaps insurance companies could create an insurance product to insurance the applicant against the case that he gets admitted at many colleges and thus has to pay many, many times the semester fee (or application fee).
Even getting admitted to two colleges would be financial crippling to a majority of applicants.
Insurance premiums would be a significant fraction of the average tuition, which would be beyond the reach of many.
The effect of the proposed system would be that most people would just apply to one school. If rejected they would try another next year, if they haven’t given up on college, and so on.
This would result in lots of schools moving to a rolling admission process with monthly (or even weekly) notification cycles. Students would then apply serially to several schools.
Of course, there's no way to get schools to all require a deposit, and even if there were schools would give fee-waivers to low-income students (giving them an advantage over middle-class kids).
Conversely, the correlation between university eliteness and occupational eliteness is weakening.
Who is more elite - a new grad who has founded a YC backed startup who attended UIUC (an elite and selective CS program at a university that is not viewed as prestigious by society at large) or a Yale grad working on the Hill earning $50k?
As of today, all UCs are viewed similarly from a tech hiring practice perspective, though there is a bit of a geographic bias helping UC Berkeley, but this same bias also helps much less selective and less socially prestigious SJSU.
I have met more other founders that came from large engineering state schools then the next tier-up of prestigious schools, with one exception being Stanford. Of course these larger schools produce far more students. Purdue (where I went) generates over 3000 new engineering graduates every year.
From the hiring perspective - A degree from from ivy school means so little compared to the actual skill level of the applicant. I honestly could not tell you where the last 10 people I hired went to school, or if they even did.
That's my point.
Alma mater prestige is increasingly divorced from employability and thus financial prestige.
You don't need to go to an Ivy or Ivy adjacent to have a very successful career in Tech (software/hardware), Accounting, Actuary, Nurse Practitioners, and other high paying careers.
And historically (past 40-45 years) "prestigious" careers like law, consulting, marketing, advertising, publishing, and media with significant gatekeeping just haven't kept up.
A BBA from Purdue wouldn't get you an MBB interview, but that increasingly doesn't matter because now that BBA could land a PMM or FP&A role in a tech company and end up with a faster career potential than the MBB hire - both will end up fighting for the same job within 3-5 years of graduating anyhow.
Despite being an Ivy grad, I'm happy about this return to the pre-1980s norm.
idk man, I’ve always thought UIUC was pretty selective, especially for their EE and CS programs. I’m also 10+ years out from college applications so maybe things have changed.
It's an elite program within a non-prestigious university. It goes to show how concepts like prestige are truly performative in nature.
Even at my Ivy League alma mater, a traditional public school like UIUC or UW was well regarded by most departments, but society at large pedestalled my alma mater to an unrealistic degree.
Pierre Bourdieu tends to dig deeper into the sociology of elitism, and is in my opinion a must-read.
UC Riverside, UC Merced etc are not viewed similarly to UCLA or UCB.
It's treated as "good enough", and now the the second generation of SWEs, PMs, and AEs are getting hired I've seen their parents (a large number of whom are now mid-level leadership in most tech companies here in the Bay) increasingly lobby to include these "lower tier" UCs to the recruiting pool.
My point is, for the younger generation a university's societal eliteness just isn't a strong predictor for success, and I strongly believe data will back up this observation within the next decade (there's usually a 5-7 year delay on data gathering in the social sciences, eg. Data from 2018-22 is only now starting to be analyzed).
UCR is where you want to go if you're going for Geology or Ag/Hort, you aren't really trying to go there for SWE or EE, it isn't exactly known for those sorts of programs.
Source: I live right next to their citrus and asparagus test fields and often visit their geology building to use their XRD and XRF systems.
I read the book SAT Wars and came away with a horrifying takeaway: admissions programs in US universities are creative enterprises for the person involved. One of them talks about “crafting a class”.
Getting into many of these places is a question of playing into your admissions officer’s biases. Knowing that they’re mostly liberal voters, often female, and nowadays more likely to be childless it’s presumably important to match that person’s energy.
Someone who would otherwise be writing romance novels is now picking students. Hence the infamous essay of the accepted student that went “Black Lives Matter” x100
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-39492187
It’s always been this way; previously we just had to play to the old white men’s biases.
Maybe in the US, but not elsewhere. Lots of places just sort by grades or test scores. Part of the reason for the weird US system is the low ceiling: school is relatively easy compared to developed countries, so there are way too many people with identical scores at the top.
Yeah, there’s really no way around it when you have more qualified students than slots, unless you just mark each applicant as qualified or not and run a lottery.
But they do have to “craft a class” to some extent. An obvious example is athletic recruiting, but some schools are consciously thinking about populating other extracurriculars, like marching bands or orchestras.
And you also don’t want a class that’s all computer science majors or zero philosophy majors. I imagine they consider other factors as well. The admissions staff may be liberal, but I’m guessing at most schools they deliberately admit some outspoken conservatives.
You could have quotas for each program. And then just set exams differently for each. Removes the "general education" as major, but most other countries find that one insane thing in first place. University is already for specialisation. High school is place were general education should happen.
No they don’t “have” to do any of this as evidenced by the fact that the US is the only country where it happens. In most countries it would (rightly) be considered strange to care how good someone is at sports or marching band when evaluating their ability to study academic subjects (the actual purpose of a university).
That feels like a fairly narrow view of what the purpose of a university is.
Look at the charter of any university and they do not just say: "create students who excel in their academic subject of choice".
The vast, vast majority of higher education mission statements/charters include goals like: "helping students develop their identity", "pursuing meaning", "strengthening community", "sharing perspectives", "helping others", etc. etc. etc.
Things like "can this person work on as a team (did they play sports?)" or "have they been a part of a community (like marching band?)" are hugely important for building a community at the university that can successfully achieve those mission statements.
> Look at the charter of any university
Any university in the world? Or any university in the very idiosyncratic US system?
Again, nobody else does stuff like this, and their universities seem to be working fine.
> An obvious example is athletic recruiting
Itself a very US-specific thing. So much so that trans athletes in college sports were a focal point of a propaganda campaign that resulted in Trump winning.
I don't think any large European country even has athletic admissions, outside of maybe Olympic-level athletes.
Some other countries just use test scores and exam results.
That’s not unbiased though. You still have the question of what’s tested and how it’s graded.
Blind review to same rubric works reasonably well. Same test with same expected learning goals should remove nearly all issues.
Come on. For math/physics/chemistry/CS the exams are easy. Just written questions and answers. Grading is also simple, just check if the answer is correct. For high-school-level questions, all the answers can be trivially checked. We're not talking about PhD-level problems.
It's a bit more complicated for humanities, grading essays is more subjective. But we also have solutions for that: have 2-3 people independently grade each essay, and have a special group review all the cases where the graders disagree.
I mean contrary to the comment above this is how American universities used to be. They had standing exams... Show up on admission day, take a test, highest scores get admission. Easy
I can’t say I’m the kind of guy who faces bootlicking with a gastronomic interest. The taste of the boot doesn’t change what’s being done.
From School Ties' Brendan Frasiers character "Youre going to use me for football, Im going to use you to get into Harvard"
Competitive admission hasn't really changed by nature
I knew this secret early on. The better your high school - the lower your odds of going to UC.
I figured it out intuitively early on as well.
This is super interesting because I have kids who are trying to apply for the UC system.
However nothing in this series mentioned anything about out-of-state admission so I’m curious if there’s any data about that.
Not relevant for UC schools but flagship tier state schools love being able to say they have students from all 50 states so if you're from Wyoming, getting a scholarship to somewhere like South Carolina or Maine is going to be relatively easy.
I thought this was old news. US universities have hard quotas per high school, so you’ll have better chances of admission if you attend a poor performing school.
The article makes a more extreme claim: that quotas are not equal per school, but differ based on LCFF+ status.
The charts that show changes over time reveal that it is not old news. The change has been happening for a couple years, but before the last year or so it would have been impossible to show that it was a trend, not just a blip. And of course the UCSD faculty report on remedial math shined a spotlight on the issue.
Are Universities still good? They're good socially but for education in the age of AI I can't imagine university even being worth it anymore outside of the absolutely most prestigious ones there are.
Certainly not your run-of-the-mill UC school except maybe UCLA or Berkeley and only then for very specific majors.
I went to a UC and graduated 14 years ago. I basically had to teach myself everything with the other students once I got into my major. And this school has done notable research in my field. But the quality of education was just terrible. Nobody could teach us multi-threading, compilers, theory of computation, networking, or algorithms properly. Like not at all. The students had to help each other the best they can and the most experienced or smartest individuals were just the ones that actually were able to do those subjects competently. But everyone else was pretty much shorted on their education, just like the poor math education throughout the country. It's pretty irritating how much it costs versus the quality you get. No way is it worth it.
And since I've graduated I learned that none of these topics is IQ-limited at all whatsoever. Math is completely intuitively if taught properly. ANYONE can learn it to a high level with good analogies and demonstrations and applicative knowledge. I developed competence with linear algebra and vector math not in school but doing game programming after I graduated. That's what actually made it "make sense".
I tutored several students since I graduated and I think I helped them for $30 an hour learning fundamentals and how to program and I think I did a significantly better job one-on-one for these students at a way cheaper rate than they would have to pay in school. It's sad.
I imagine LLMs could do a better job for many things than research professors that just throw slides on the board and barely elaborate on anything. The only way you learn in those courses is by really struggling on your own and going to as many office hours and TA hours as possible.