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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

#101

Post by lubujackson »

nine_k wrote: post #16
lateforwork wrote: post #12

See: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... Excerpts: UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offere…

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.)

This is the new meta, in SF at least.

Despite the "what are secondary effects?" school admins trying to "fix inequality" by creating school lotteries, ending gifted programs and focusing on "equality of outcomes not equality of opportunity", the only thing that has actually improved troubled schools is that smart kids with involved parents now actively seek out lower rated schools like Mission High so they can more easily rise to the top of the class and get a free ride to Berkeley or another UC.

There was an article about this exact phenomenon in SFGate a year or two ago so it is definitely a real trend.

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

#102

Post by cyberax »

smelendez wrote: post #58
cyberax wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some other countries just use test scores and exam results.

That’s not unbiased though. You still have the question of what’s tested and how it’s graded.

Come on. For math/physics/chemistry/CS the exams are easy. Just written questions and answers. Grading is also simple, just check if the answer is correct. For high-school-level questions, all the answers can be trivially checked. We're not talking about PhD-level problems.

It's a bit more complicated for humanities, grading essays is more subjective. But we also have solutions for that: have 2-3 people independently grade each essay, and have a special group review all the cases where the graders disagree.

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

#103

Post by parpfish »

galkk wrote: post #36
lateforwork wrote: post #12

See: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... Excerpts: UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offere…

> A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many. Damn, this is as stupid as it gets.

There nothing stupid about controlling for circumstances.

As an analogy, let’s say you want to build a fun race car that you can take to the track. You go out and look at a bunch of used cars and you want to be qualitative so you measure out their 0-60 times.

You could just say “the car with the best time wins” and take the fastest one you tested. Or you could consider context like “this one had bald tires tha could easily be upgraded” or “we tested this one going uphill”.

The goal is to find the car that can be turned into the fastest and not which has the best numbers right now.

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

#104

Post by sponaugle »

alephnerd wrote: post #26

Conversely, 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,…

I have met more other founders that came from large engineering state schools then the next tier-up of prestigious schools, with one exception being Stanford. Of course these larger schools produce far more students. Purdue (where I went) generates over 3000 new engineering graduates every year.

From the hiring perspective - A degree from from ivy school means so little compared to the actual skill level of the applicant. I honestly could not tell you where the last 10 people I hired went to school, or if they even did.

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

#105

Post by aleph_minus_one »

just-ok wrote: post #98
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

Perhaps insurance companies could create an insurance product to insurance the applicant against the case that he gets admitted at many colleges and thus has to pay many, many times the semester fee (or application fee).

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

#106

Post by apparent »

postpriorx wrote: post #96
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…

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…

Sure, there's a community either way. But how does the CC -> UCSD transfer community stack up against either (1) four years at UCSD (which OP would say not to go to without a full ride) or (2) two years at UCI and two years at UCSC or UCLA?

My guess is that there are hardworking people in both groups, but the ones who start out at a four year institution are more likely to be tip-top, and to have family/friends who would be valuable in a business network years down the road.

This is somewhat less true now that UCs are pushing to admit so many LCFF students, but I think it's still true in general.

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

#107

Post by cuttothechase »

>> Incidentally, San Francisco public schools had a combined admission rate of just under 20%, well below the state average. Mission had the highest rate (26.5%) and Balboa the lowest (15.4%). It may or may not be a coincidence that 90% (the most of any SF school) of the applicants from Balboa were Asian whereas only 25% (the fewest of any SF school) of the applicants from Mission were Asian.

In order to promote diversity of the freshman classroom the college needs to suppress merit to achieve their diversity targets?

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

#108

Post by jayd16 »

galkk wrote: post #36
lateforwork wrote: post #12

See: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... Excerpts: UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offere…

> A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many. Damn, this is as stupid as it gets.

Ok well look at it the other way. Should a student be punished if they took every AP offered but less than another student?

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

#109

Post by daedrdev »

parpfish wrote: post #103
galkk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many. Damn, this is as stupid as it gets.

There nothing stupid about controlling for circumstances. As an analogy, let’s say you want to build a fun race car that you can take to the track. You go out and look at a bunch of used cars and you want to be qualitative so you measure out their 0-60 times. You could just say “the car with the best time wins” and take the fastest one you tested. Or you could consider context like “this one had bald tires tha could…

Better circumstance do create better students though. And all this will do is cause the best students to hide in shit schools to game the system

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

#110

Post by alephnerd »

sponaugle wrote: post #104
alephnerd wrote: post #26

Conversely, 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,…

I have met more other founders that came from large engineering state schools then the next tier-up of prestigious schools, with one exception being Stanford. Of course these larger schools produce far more students. Purdue (where I went) generates over 3000 new engineering graduates every year. From the hiring perspective - A degree from from ivy school means so little compared to the actual skill level of the appli…

That's my point.

Alma mater prestige is increasingly divorced from employability and thus financial prestige.

You don't need to go to an Ivy or Ivy adjacent to have a very successful career in Tech (software/hardware), Accounting, Actuary, Nurse Practitioners, and other high paying careers.

And historically (past 40-45 years) "prestigious" careers like law, consulting, marketing, advertising, publishing, and media with significant gatekeeping just haven't kept up.

A BBA from Purdue wouldn't get you an MBB interview, but that increasingly doesn't matter because now that BBA could land a PMM or FP&A role in a tech company and end up with a faster career potential than the MBB hire - both will end up fighting for the same job within 3-5 years of graduating anyhow.

Despite being an Ivy grad, I'm happy about this return to the pre-1980s norm.

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