16 ms·

How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

88 points by mutator 9mo ago

chaostheory 9mo ago
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.
- rahimnathwani 9mo ago
  The article makes a more extreme claim: that quotas are not equal per school, but differ based on LCFF+ status.
- apparent 9mo ago
  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.
AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
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.
- Mountain_Skies 9mo ago
  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.
beckford 9mo ago
> 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".
- w10-1 9mo ago
  > students simply applying more frequently to their local schools Cheaper to live at home nowadays
ransom1538 9mo ago
I knew this secret early on. The better your high school - the lower your odds of going to UC.
- anon291 9mo ago
  I figured it out intuitively early on as well.
ssttoo 9mo ago
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.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  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.
  - nerdsniper 9mo ago
    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.
- aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
  > 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).
  - just-ok 9mo ago
    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.
renewiltord 9mo ago
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 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-39492187
- flufluflufluffy 9mo ago
  It’s always been this way; previously we just had to play to the old white men’s biases.
  - cyberax 9mo ago
    Some other countries just use test scores and exam results.
    - anon291 9mo ago
      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
    - smelendez 9mo ago
      That’s not unbiased though. You still have the question of what’s tested and how it’s graded.
      - cyberax 9mo ago
        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.
SilverElfin 9mo ago
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.
- mikeryan 9mo ago
  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…
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - just-ok 9mo ago
    > 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?
    - mikeryan 9mo ago
      A significant, and growing, number of schools (many of them independent and high end) are no longer offering AP/Honors classes. Which means that you now don’t have a level measure for comparing GPA. To the original point though it’s one of many reasons why GPA + Test scores isn’t really a standard metric to be used on their own for merit based admissions. It’s really just a bar after which you have to take additional factors into account.
kccqzy 9mo ago
> 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.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  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.
  - cherryteastain 9mo ago
    UK caps applications to 5 to combat this exact problem.
    - kelipso 9mo ago
      When you have this problem of universities rejecting applicants based on arbitrary criteria, limiting that becomes an issue too.
- lateforwork 9mo ago
  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/history-privilege-elite-college-admissions/585088/ 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-reveals-how-peculiar-harvards-definition-of-merit-is 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-lie/ 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-false-promise-of-holistic-college-admissions/282432/ 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-the-veil-on-the-holistic-process-at-the-university-of-california-berkeley.html?pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
lateforwork 9mo ago
See: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-college-admissions-season-brings-rejection-heartbreak 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.
- nine_k 9mo ago
  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.)
  - xnyan 9mo ago
    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.
    - fn-mote 9mo ago
      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.
      - osnium123 9mo ago
        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.
alephnerd 9mo ago
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.
- blindriver 9mo ago
  UC Riverside, UC Merced etc are not viewed similarly to UCLA or UCB.
  - alephnerd 9mo ago
    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).
  - lightedman 9mo ago
    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.
- ajoseps 9mo ago
  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.
djoldman 9mo ago
Looks like the data is available here: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-center/admissions-source-school 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).
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
danans 9mo ago
> 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.
- qwerpy 9mo ago
  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.
  - addaon 9mo ago
    > 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...
  - kccqzy 9mo ago
    > 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.
999900000999 9mo ago
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.
- apparent 9mo ago
  > 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.
  - 999900000999 9mo ago
    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.
sfblah 9mo ago
This is just doing DEI in a different way because it's technically illegal. It's obvious what's going on here.
- apparent 9mo ago
  The current administration is looking to go after AA workarounds. There are probably some smoking guns in email discussions among UC administrators/admissions officials.
cuttothechase 9mo ago
>> 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?
- donw 9mo ago
  Universities and basically every major company, including all the big tech companies, have been openly and publicly doing this for years.
  - aprilthird2021 9mo ago
    Not UCs, they are forbidden from doing so by law
- Izikiel43 9mo ago
  You just discovered affirmative action?
  - aprilthird2021 9mo ago
    That is illegal in California public schools like this article focused on. The truth is, UC San Diego admits students who didn't get into the more prestigious UCs like Berkeley, LA, etc. That's probably why you see data like this
    - apparent 9mo ago
      Everyone knows that UC still practices AA, though not named as such. And UCSD doesn't just admit students who didn't get into UCLA and UCB. Students who get into the latter also get into UCSD. Some much lower-ranked UCs might not admit these students because they assume they'll not come (yield managing), but UCSD is close enough that some students might choose it, especially if they want to be near on the beach/in SD.
rgbrgb 9mo ago
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-top-college-graduates https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-to...
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- verteu 9mo ago
  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.
Madmallard 9mo ago
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.
technothrasher 9mo ago
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.
bobbiechen 9mo ago
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.
throwaway2037 9mo ago
As I understand, the easiest way to get into a very good UC (Berkeley, LA, etc.) is to first study at a junior college (JC). It is easy to get a perfect grade point average (4.0). There are a number of reserves spots at UCs for JC transfers.
- mikeryan 9mo ago
  It’s actually easier than that. Depending on the UC many just require completing a dedicated set of courses with a 2.0 or higher with no class lower than a C and will provide guaranteed admissions as long as the criteria is met. It’s the Transfer Admissions Guarantee program. https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/transfer-requirements/uc-transfer-programs/transfer-admission-guarantee-tag.html https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
lern_too_spel 9mo ago
There is no analysis of selective majors. Students from Lynbrook and Bellarmine are more likely to apply to majors like CSE and ECE, which have lower admissions rates than general admission. https://undergrad.ucsd.edu/academics/selective-major-process/selective-major-faq.html#i-am-applying-to-ucsd-and-want-a-selectivescreened https://undergrad.ucsd.edu/academics/selective-major-process...

88 points by mutator 9mo ago

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.

rahimnathwani 9mo ago
The article makes a more extreme claim: that quotas are not equal per school, but differ based on LCFF+ status.
apparent 9mo ago
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.

AndrewKemendo 9mo ago

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.

Mountain_Skies 9mo ago
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.

beckford 9mo ago

> 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".

w10-1 9mo ago
> students simply applying more frequently to their local schools Cheaper to live at home nowadays

ransom1538 9mo ago

I knew this secret early on. The better your high school - the lower your odds of going to UC.

anon291 9mo ago
I figured it out intuitively early on as well.

ssttoo 9mo ago

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.

Aurornis 9mo ago
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.
- nerdsniper 9mo ago
  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.
aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
> 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).
- just-ok 9mo ago
  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.

renewiltord 9mo ago

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 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-39492187

flufluflufluffy 9mo ago
It’s always been this way; previously we just had to play to the old white men’s biases.
- cyberax 9mo ago
  Some other countries just use test scores and exam results.
  - anon291 9mo ago
    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
  - smelendez 9mo ago
    That’s not unbiased though. You still have the question of what’s tested and how it’s graded.
    - cyberax 9mo ago
      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.

SilverElfin 9mo ago

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.

mikeryan 9mo ago
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…
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- just-ok 9mo ago
  > 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?
  - mikeryan 9mo ago
    A significant, and growing, number of schools (many of them independent and high end) are no longer offering AP/Honors classes. Which means that you now don’t have a level measure for comparing GPA. To the original point though it’s one of many reasons why GPA + Test scores isn’t really a standard metric to be used on their own for merit based admissions. It’s really just a bar after which you have to take additional factors into account.

kccqzy 9mo ago

> 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.

Aurornis 9mo ago
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.
- cherryteastain 9mo ago
  UK caps applications to 5 to combat this exact problem.
  - kelipso 9mo ago
    When you have this problem of universities rejecting applicants based on arbitrary criteria, limiting that becomes an issue too.
lateforwork 9mo ago
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/history-privilege-elite-college-admissions/585088/ 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-reveals-how-peculiar-harvards-definition-of-merit-is 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-lie/ 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-false-promise-of-holistic-college-admissions/282432/ 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-the-veil-on-the-holistic-process-at-the-university-of-california-berkeley.html?pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...

lateforwork 9mo ago

See: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-college-admissions-season-brings-rejection-heartbreak 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.

nine_k 9mo ago
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.)
- xnyan 9mo ago
  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.
  - fn-mote 9mo ago
    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.
    - osnium123 9mo ago
      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.

alephnerd 9mo ago

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.

blindriver 9mo ago
UC Riverside, UC Merced etc are not viewed similarly to UCLA or UCB.
- alephnerd 9mo ago
  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).
- lightedman 9mo ago
  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.
ajoseps 9mo ago
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.

djoldman 9mo ago

Looks like the data is available here: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-center/admissions-source-school 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).

deleted 9mo ago

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danans 9mo ago

> 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.

qwerpy 9mo ago
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.
- addaon 9mo ago
  > 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...
- kccqzy 9mo ago
  > 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.

999900000999 9mo ago

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.

apparent 9mo ago
> 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.
- 999900000999 9mo ago
  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.

sfblah 9mo ago

This is just doing DEI in a different way because it's technically illegal. It's obvious what's going on here.

apparent 9mo ago
The current administration is looking to go after AA workarounds. There are probably some smoking guns in email discussions among UC administrators/admissions officials.

cuttothechase 9mo ago

>> 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?

donw 9mo ago
Universities and basically every major company, including all the big tech companies, have been openly and publicly doing this for years.
- aprilthird2021 9mo ago
  Not UCs, they are forbidden from doing so by law
Izikiel43 9mo ago
You just discovered affirmative action?
- aprilthird2021 9mo ago
  That is illegal in California public schools like this article focused on. The truth is, UC San Diego admits students who didn't get into the more prestigious UCs like Berkeley, LA, etc. That's probably why you see data like this
  - apparent 9mo ago
    Everyone knows that UC still practices AA, though not named as such. And UCSD doesn't just admit students who didn't get into UCLA and UCB. Students who get into the latter also get into UCSD. Some much lower-ranked UCs might not admit these students because they assume they'll not come (yield managing), but UCSD is close enough that some students might choose it, especially if they want to be near on the beach/in SD.

rgbrgb 9mo ago

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-top-college-graduates https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-to...

deleted 9mo ago
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verteu 9mo ago
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.

Madmallard 9mo ago

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.

technothrasher 9mo ago

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.

bobbiechen 9mo ago

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.

throwaway2037 9mo ago

As I understand, the easiest way to get into a very good UC (Berkeley, LA, etc.) is to first study at a junior college (JC). It is easy to get a perfect grade point average (4.0). There are a number of reserves spots at UCs for JC transfers.

mikeryan 9mo ago
It’s actually easier than that. Depending on the UC many just require completing a dedicated set of courses with a 2.0 or higher with no class lower than a C and will provide guaranteed admissions as long as the criteria is met. It’s the Transfer Admissions Guarantee program. https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/transfer-requirements/uc-transfer-programs/transfer-admission-guarantee-tag.html https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...

lern_too_spel 9mo ago

There is no analysis of selective majors. Students from Lynbrook and Bellarmine are more likely to apply to majors like CSE and ECE, which have lower admissions rates than general admission. https://undergrad.ucsd.edu/academics/selective-major-process/selective-major-faq.html#i-am-applying-to-ucsd-and-want-a-selectivescreened https://undergrad.ucsd.edu/academics/selective-major-process...