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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

#341

Post by TimTheTinker »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #71
CharlesMerriam2 wrote: post #34

Have a rule. Our republic, and the California state government, is based on rule of law. One group makes the laws, another enforces it, and a third interprets the conflicts. This works. What we have here is a 'no rules' set of actions. How about rules that say "we will take any student for $200K/year". This is enough money to supply extra supervision and also give a full scholarship to another student.

Completely agreed. The idea that we have to "tear it all down" and institute Marxism is backward and self-contradictory. As you said, we need to identify where and how rule of law is lacking and fix it, making sure that representative government and separation of powers remains intact (or is put in place again).

I know this may be against the guidelines, but does anyone know why the above comment was downvoted?

Do people really favor Marxism, or is something else wrong?

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#342

Post by solveit »

lumost wrote: post #302
solveit wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sufficiently prestigious schools are drowning in perfect applicants. This is by design. There exist tests that can distinguish between the merely very good and the outstanding. Elite US universities go out of their ways to not use them, precisely so they can admit the merely very good legacies.

A test that splits the top .1% of test takers vs. the top 1% likely isn't the best indicator of future career performance ( the source of university prestige ), or necessarily academic performance.

It doesn't have to be the best, merely better than what is used now. And what is used now is some obfuscated proxies of socioeconomic status.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#343

Post by haihaibye »

ajkjk wrote: post #141
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…

I'm generally opposed to this kind of acceptance-of-bad-things but in this case I kinda agree. If people are willing to pay millions to go to college, that's potentially a great advantage to students who otherwise have trouble affording it -- let the rich kids subsidize it for everyone else. By not funneling the donations through weird under-the-table transactions it can be more directly used for a net good for the s…

Elite universities have limited enrollments to maintain their exclusivity.

Admittance is a zero sum game, someone paying to get in doesn't subside another student they take their spot.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#344

Post by goodluckchuck »

brightball wrote: post #293
goodluckchuck wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be fraud against other students. Applicants are told that admissions decisions are based on qualifications. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars for that qualification. They pay $50-100 to apply. Then it turns out that the qualification isn’t real... That admission can simply be purchased. If admissions can be purchased, the the degrees can likely be purchased too. Fraud is a crime.

I feel like this is being over thought. Making a donation to a university is certainly a direct way to apply money to the process, but we already see that through additional factors. You’ve got private K-12 schools that give many people a leg up, but even the best public schools have a similar effect through zoning. You want to get your child into a better public school, you move to a home that’s zoned for it. The ho…

You’re literally saying that studying and becoming more qualified is cheating.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#345

Post by andrewem »

kepler1 wrote: post #262
renewiltord wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UCs are prohibited from doing this by Prop 209. Prop 16 this year is an attempt to undo that https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...

And yet, they still try to introduce racial diversity by using policies in disguise. 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 ...

It's funny you mention that policy, because note it can only have a substantial effect on admissions by race if a lot of high schools are racially segregated, as is the case.

See any of a number of sources, such as this one which a quick search turned up: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/learning/lesson-plans/sti...

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#346

Post by Thorrez »

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…

I thought it was widely regarded as acceptable that athletes had lower academic requirements. You can meet the admissions criteria via academics or via athletics. This doesn't mean any sort of inappropriate behavior.

The article describes something actually inappropriate: falsely saying students are good athletes in exchange for money.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#347

Post by Thorrez »

leapis wrote: post #282
setgree wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Standardize…

The way I've seen it calculated is this: For regular classes, A: 4.0, B: 3.0, C: 2.0, D: 1.0 (with some variance depending on + or - grades offered). For Honors/AP classes, every grade is essentially bumped up 1.0 point. So yes, a 3.74 is around an A- average, but that's an A- average in less rigorous classes, without competition from top students. That's more of a B-/C+ average in AP/Honors classes (obviously the ca…

Most schools do that, but not all. My school (a private school in the US) didn't bump up anything.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#348

Post by User23 »

analog31 wrote: post #326
solveit wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sufficiently prestigious schools are drowning in perfect applicants. This is by design. There exist tests that can distinguish between the merely very good and the outstanding. Elite US universities go out of their ways to not use them, precisely so they can admit the merely very good legacies.

I suspect the schools are trying to curate their student body so it doesn't turn into a freak show, which would itself reduce prestige. It would be like a zoo that contains exactly one species of animal. This is the dilemma. Taking the top 1000 scorers on some particularly difficult exam, and putting them all together in one place, would be a freak show. Not because they are freaks per se , but because any monocultur…

Also pure test based admission ends up being something around 75% asian, 15% white, and 10% others. See Stuyvesant for example[1]. For some reason Harvard feels like being 75-80% Asian would be bad for their brand so they got sued for discrimination. But Harvard is Harvard and it's hard to win a lawsuit against an institution that is that well connected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School#Demogra...

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#349

Post by ajkjk »

nl wrote: post #318
ajkjk wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grade inflation for everyone is an issue at most colleges. Grades should reflect your credibility in a subject, and should be roughly normalized across subjects. But because they are so important for the rest of one's career, they end up being heavily pressured towards A's -- which results in careers not paying as much attention to them because they're widely understood to be not meaningful. A better world would see…

> [grades] are so important for the rest of one's career This isn't really true beyond specific gates (college admission, grad school administration) and for a couple of years after you graduate. 5 years after graduation no one looks at someone's college grades. > Lots of people care about sports but that's partly cause lots of people in the past cared and baked it into our culture. What does this mean? Sport is bake…

> What does this mean?

I meant, the reason college sports are such a big deal in America is that they've been growing for decades with the support of tuition, donations, etc -- which is due to the perverse state of American university system. It didn't necessarily have to end up like this, but it would be hard to undo it now because it has become so important to so many people.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#350

Post by godelski »

solveit wrote: post #247
closeparen wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sufficiently prestigious schools are drowning in perfect applicants. You don’t even need to admit any rich slackers. Just let some of the qualified substitute money for luck.

> Sufficiently prestigious schools are drowning in perfect applicants. This is by design. There exist tests that can distinguish between the merely very good and the outstanding. Elite US universities go out of their ways to not use them, precisely so they can admit the merely very good legacies.

> There exist tests that can distinguish between the merely very good and the outstanding.

What tests are these?

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