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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

#71

Post by aleph_minus_one »

ssttoo wrote: post #6

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.

> 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).

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#72

Post by apparent »

chaostheory wrote: post #2

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.

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#73

Post by 999900000999 »

apparent wrote: post #63
999900000999 wrote: post #56

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, 1…

> 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…

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.

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#74

Post by its_ethan »

School-Cotton wrote: post #32
smelendez wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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.

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#75

Post by w10-1 »

beckford wrote: post #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".

> students simply applying more frequently to their local schools

Cheaper to live at home nowadays

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#76

Post by addaon »

qwerpy wrote: post #60
danans wrote: post #50

> 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…

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.

> 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...

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#77

Post by kccqzy »

qwerpy wrote: post #60
danans wrote: post #50

> 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…

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.

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#78

Post by 999900000999 »

resumenext wrote: post #69
999900000999 wrote: post #56

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, 1…

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 n…

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.

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#79

Post by hackyhacky »

SR2Z wrote: post #52
nine_k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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 tha…

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.

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#80

Post by apparent »

999900000999 wrote: post #73
apparent wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 S…

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.
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