Not surprising at all; however, I am curious how someone who didn't meet the admissions criteria is able to graduate CAL with a passing GPA...
Easier majors
UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
311–320 of 456 posts
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#312Earlier 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.
That’s because future career is mostly influenced by how much money your parents have.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#313People 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…
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Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will be the picky one: Caché, cache, cachette and cachet have a different pronunciation. Cachet and cachait do have the same though. Same for caché and cacher.
> Caché, cachet I'll be honest I have no idea what the difference is between these two.
Ones French, and is the past tense of the verb cacher, “to hide”
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#315Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never seen or heard of that happening. My brother goes to an Ivy on a fully need based scholarship
At Harvard at least, there is a "dorm crew", comprised mostly of poorer students meeting their term-time work requirements that come with finaid, that is responsible for cleaning the in-suite bathrooms. I think I recall recently reading that some schools might have finally eliminated the requirement (maybe, Yale?) but I'm not sure. It was definitely the case at Harvard as of ~March 2020. (but probably not for this ye…
Yale has a `student income contribution`, where students on finanical aid are expected to work in some term-time jobs. However these jobs are virtually all administrative (doing paperwork, making calls, etc.), research or teaching assistant-ships. I have not heard of poorer students doing any cleaning.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because universities such as Berkeley claim they are a bastion of "diverse admission policies" as opposed to meritocracy which they call "a tyranny" which make them hypocrites as they have corrupt admission policies and practice cronyism.
So there are tons of people in this thread saying "it seems fine to me, of course wealthy people should get special treatment, that's fine." It was never a "meritocracy". Wealthy people and well-connected people have always had an advantage, and still do. This seems to me an argument for things like affirmative action. To try to balance the scales a bit. Not sure why you see it as an argument against.
> It was never a "meritocracy".
Of course it wasn't meritocracy since it was cronyism and nepotism like what happens at Berkeley. But neither is "affirmative action", a racist policy which isn't going to end nepotism and cronyism, just make things even more arbitrary. No need to be an "athlete" now, just put "latino" or "black" on your registration form and don't forget the bribes. That's the system you are rooting for.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is grade inflation for rich students really an issue at many colleges? Most majors at most colleges are honestly not that hard. Anyone who shows up and does a modicum of work can skate by with a gentleman's C. At D1 schools the football and basketball programs generate huge revenue, which is used to subsidize less popular sports (particularly women's teams under Title IX). For better or worse a lot of prospective stu…
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 baked into culture but that's because people still like it. And the changing popularity of different sports (eg MMA 25 years ago vs today) shows that this isn't some forced behavior - people like watching and participating.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
* allow people to pay millions to go to college; allow this to fund student aid for other students. Explicitly stop using it to build buildings Most elite colleges (not the UCs though) offer 100% need-based aid to accepted students and are need blind in the admissions process. This comes directly from the endownment or the rich alumni and donors already. * stop having all of these overfunded and weirdly inappropriate…
> The admissions office is somewhat decoupled from the rest of the institution, and receive fixed salaries -- this problem does not exist.
It's not the admissions office that that was targeted at. The donations today go to programs, buildings, etc -- things that involve lots of administrative staff and leaders who are payed executive-level salaries. This should all be going to support students and educators.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#320Earlier 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…
>But because they are so important for the rest of one's career Seriously? I'd never even thought about mentioning college grades _in my country_ and if somebody e.g during interview tried to use tham as strong argument then I'd consider it as a red flag why anybody competent would need to brag about something unreliable as grades?
I wasn't saying that the grades themselves are important for the rest of anyone's career. They're important for determining what happens to you right after school -- how good of a grad school or job you get -- which has exponential returns for the rest of your life.