This is just doing DEI in a different way because it's technically illegal. It's obvious what's going on here.
How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
91–100 of 199 posts
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I don't know how do you even compare students with different backgrounds against each other. That's why standardized testing is good - it gives everyone the same chance to excel.
> it gives everyone the same chance to excel. How does the existence of standardized testing give everyone the same chance? As an extremely over-exaggerated example example, someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject.
How does the existence of a standard hoop height in the NBA give everyone the same chance to play? Shorter players should get lower hoops, and slower runners should get electric scooters. That way, everyone can appear to be equally capable.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I don't know how do you even compare students with different backgrounds against each other. That's why standardized testing is good - it gives everyone the same chance to excel.
> it gives everyone the same chance to excel. How does the existence of standardized testing give everyone the same chance? As an extremely over-exaggerated example example, someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject.
> someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject
Is there any world in which the first student, struggling in that context, treads water at a UC?
I used to volunteer to tutor high-school aged students in New York. I gave up and moved to grade schoolers. A refugee who will take the SAT in six months and wants to go to college, but is struggling with basic reading comprehension and symbolic math is just not going to do well in college in a year.
Note: the student who excels in that first setting should absolutely be admitted. But they’re, by definition, already excelling.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems terrible incentives. You are now in a purely adversarial relationship with your peers and hurting them helps you
Not only that, but high performers are incentivised to move to worse schools. It may actually improve mean outcomes, but harm societal outcomes, as the scientific impact of educated individuals may tend to be power law distributed (e.g. the most important breakthroughs come from a small sector of the population with wildly disproportionate impact)
The bottleneck on research is funding. We have a glut of students wanting to go into research who don't because of how competitive the field is. We then have researchers constantly leaving the field for the same reason.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#95> 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…
You seem to be falsely equating private schools with "the wealthy" and public schools with "the working class". Plenty of people are wealthy and send their kids to public schools. They fund them via property taxes rather than tuition payments.
> You seem to be falsely equating private schools with "the wealthy" and public schools with "the working class"
Agree. Plenty of non-wealthy get to attend private schools through scholarships and financial aid
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#96Community 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…
I was a transfer to UCSD - the transfer community itself is pretty large and one college (Sixth) houses a significant percentage, with dorms specifically for transfers. IMO there was far higher interesting diversity of folks there compared to rest of campus: veterans, addicts who got their shit together, tons of immigrants who couldn't afford going straight to UC (as well as your standard mostly 20-22 year old SoCal transfers) from which most people I know formed good networks.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#97Conversely, 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,…
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.
It's an elite program within a non-prestigious university. It goes to show how concepts like prestige are truly performative in nature.
Even at my Ivy League alma mater, a traditional public school like UIUC or UW was well regarded by most departments, but society at large pedestalled my alma mater to an unrealistic degree.
Pierre Bourdieu tends to dig deeper into the sociology of elitism, and is in my opinion a must-read.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#98There’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 stro…
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.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#99Community 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…
> many students drop out
I'm pretty sure that's the case at UC too. I don't know UC, but at my 4 year engineering school it felt like 25% attrition every year; if you only do a year and drop out, better to not be paying enormous student loans for probably the rest of your life for that.
If you do two or three years and drop out, better to have a degree, even if it's just an Associates.
If you know you'll make it all the way to a Bachelors, yeah, maybe it'd be better to go direct. But even then, you might get smaller class sizes (and better experiences) at a CC because of the relative levels of the student bodies. Lots of people taking calculus based physics of mechanics at a UC and not so many at a CC, so the UC might do lectures in a hall but the CC might have it in a classroom.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#100I 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…
> 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?