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UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

auditor.ca.gov

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Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#251

Post by kevincrane »

cultus wrote: post #241
kevincrane wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played water polo at my public high school and only had to buy a swimsuit?

The vast majority of high schools where I'm from don't have public pools. Pools have also been less available historically to Blacks. After segregation ended, many jurisdictions defunded public pools rather than fund desegregated pools. Instead, wealthier whites used private ones. For a brief history: https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-expert-troubled-history-bla...

Oh yeah, I don't dispute the history of pools in America in general of having a lot of racist gatekeeping behind them, that's absolutely true. I was just saying that swimming and water polo are super cheap sports to participate in as an athlete.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#254

Post by setgree »

jbullock35 wrote: post #108
setgree wrote: post #84

If you had asked me yesterday what percent of students I thought got into UC schools due to personal connection or wealth, I would have estimated between 10-20%. But this report seems to suggest otherwise: > In Violation of University Policy, the Campuses We Reviewed Admitted 64 Applicants Because of Their Families’ Donations and Connections > UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted 42 other applicants the UC schools as…

> if you get recruited to play Water Polo, Crew, Golf, Volleyball, or Beach volleyball at UC Berkeley, and ~95% of kids who play those sports come from wealthy families, and recruiting gave them an edge in admissions, does that count as "inappropriate?" I would say so, but I doubt this report would. The report comes close: "the average grade point average for the bottom quartile of applicants whom UCLA admitted for a…

> the average grade point average for the bottom quartile of applicants whom UCLA admitted for academic year 2019–20 was 4.15, but the average grade point average for its admitted student athletes was 3.74

So the student athletes averaged halfway between an A and an A-? So did I in HS, 15 years ago, and I was a pretty good student! GPAs are really hard to make sense of with all the AP bonuses and whatnot. Standardized test scores strike me as providing a more apples-to-apples comparison. Of course that’s increasingly difficult to do in a test-optional world. (My recollection from an article about ‘The Chosen’ in 2005 is that recruited athletes tend to score 100-200 points lower on the SAT, on average, at Ivy League schools. I would double-check had I not exceeded my monthly free New Yorker quota: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in/amp)

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#255

Post by peterhj »

setgree wrote: post #84

If you had asked me yesterday what percent of students I thought got into UC schools due to personal connection or wealth, I would have estimated between 10-20%. But this report seems to suggest otherwise: > In Violation of University Policy, the Campuses We Reviewed Admitted 64 Applicants Because of Their Families’ Donations and Connections > UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted 42 other applicants the UC schools as…

Nitpick, but undergraduate enrollment is over 31,000 (as of fall '19 [1]).

[1] https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#257

Post by kbenson »

_pd19 wrote: post #115
mywittyname wrote: post #89

People are always going to use their money to buy status. So as long as these college offer prestige & status, people with money are going to use it to get in. Much like doping in sports, you have two paths you can take: try to combat cheating, or accept the cheating as part of the game. I think these universities should accept that they are providing an education, but they are selling prestige, and split their admis…

The problem is that you can only sell prestige if there is strategic ambiguity between the two categories.

Just because you know the relative size of each cohort doesn't mean you know if a specific person was in one or the other. There's always the possibility that someone admitted for money actually ends up excelling. I know quite a few people that got far more serious in college and ended up doing quite well even through in high school they were far from good students.

That's before even considering that some small amount of what graduating from one of these schools conveys is a high likelihood of having networked with other people that will be well placed later. My naive expectation is that someone graduating with a science major from MIT might have had a harder curriculum than someone graduating from that same major from Harvard, but I also (again, naively) expect that the person from Harvard may have made contacts with people that will be more diversely placed and in more powerful positions later.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#258

Post by dnautics »

_pd19 wrote: post #115
mywittyname wrote: post #89

People are always going to use their money to buy status. So as long as these college offer prestige & status, people with money are going to use it to get in. Much like doping in sports, you have two paths you can take: try to combat cheating, or accept the cheating as part of the game. I think these universities should accept that they are providing an education, but they are selling prestige, and split their admis…

The problem is that you can only sell prestige if there is strategic ambiguity between the two categories.

not really. If the auction monetary results were somehow leaked (or hell even if they were published) it's a very strong indicator of what people are willing to pay to be around kids who have brains. You're only in a bind if you're rich AND your kid is smart, because everyone will be suspicious that your kid only got in because of $$. And then, if I were rich I'd probably want my kid to have to struggle a bit to see what it's like for a change. I'm sure there are plenty of actually rich people who think like me.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#259

Post by monoideism »

setgree wrote: post #84

If you had asked me yesterday what percent of students I thought got into UC schools due to personal connection or wealth, I would have estimated between 10-20%. But this report seems to suggest otherwise: > In Violation of University Policy, the Campuses We Reviewed Admitted 64 Applicants Because of Their Families’ Donations and Connections > UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted 42 other applicants the UC schools as…

> what percent of students I thought got into UC schools due to personal connection or wealth, I would have estimated between 10-20%. But this report seems to suggest otherwise:

It's among the private schools, such as the Ivies, where this really comes into play.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#260

Post by kepler1 »

MiroF wrote: post #137
belorn wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are three systems. People who pay their way in, people who has the highest grades, and people who get in through diversity quota. Transparency in all three would cause a major waves into the public perspective of admission practices.

Cal doesn't have a "diversity quota."

If you don't think UC has a diversity quota, you are deceiving yourself.

The entire sub-part of UC admissions having to do with top 9% of students (by school) being guaranteed admission is an effort to achieve racial diversity without calling it that and violating the law.

See page 9 and 21 of the UC's admissions materials. https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/file...

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