How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
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How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
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Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#2I 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.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#3This 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.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#4> 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".
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#5I knew this secret early on. The better your high school - the lower your odds of going to UC.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#6There’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.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#7I 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
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#8I 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.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#9I 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.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#10I 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…