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UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

auditor.ca.gov

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Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#391

Post by bzb5 »

erostrate wrote: post #370

In France to get into an elite STEM university ("engineering school") students all take the same maths/physics/CS exams and the overall grade is the only factor deciding admission. Everything is state funded. It's not perfect, but it levels the playing field a lot more than other systems. And it's good at making sure talented but poor students have access to the best programs. At those the level is high, for example…

You are comparing European culture to Anglo culture. That’s pears to oranges. Not saying one is better than the other, but they work differently.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#392

Post by ben_w »

_pd19 wrote: post #115
mywittyname wrote: post #89

People 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…

The problem is that you can only sell prestige if there is strategic ambiguity between the two categories.

Not necessarily. Fancy high-end watch bands like Rolex and Omega are not fundamentally better at telling the time than a Casio F-91W. The difference is pure prestige.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#393

Post by setgree »

peterhj wrote: post #255
setgree wrote: post #84

If you had asked me yesterday what percent of students I thought got into UC schools due to personal connection or wealth, I would have estimated between 10-20%. But this report seems to suggest otherwise: > In Violation of University Policy, the Campuses We Reviewed Admitted 64 Applicants Because of Their Families’ Donations and Connections > UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted 42 other applicants the UC schools as…

Nitpick, but undergraduate enrollment is over 31,000 (as of fall '19 [1]). [1] https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts

Thanks, I was reading too fast and just took the first number I saw.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#394

Post by koheripbal »

setgree wrote: post #84

If you had asked me yesterday what percent of students I thought got into UC schools due to personal connection or wealth, I would have estimated between 10-20%. But this report seems to suggest otherwise: > In Violation of University Policy, the Campuses We Reviewed Admitted 64 Applicants Because of Their Families’ Donations and Connections > UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted 42 other applicants the UC schools as…

This only includes those admitted from large donors. The number of students admitted for being friends/family of staff/administration/faculty is probably the highest percentage.

When I worked for Stanford in admissions, it ended up making up about 10-15% of each incoming class.

People on "the list" could still be denied, but the admissions officer would need to write a letter to the Dean explaining why - and that never happened.

People think donating small amounts to the school or being a legacy student help admissions, but they absolutely do not have an impact. The most impactful variables to admission are grades, race/gender, test scores, and essays - roughly in that order.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#395

Post by jboog »

solveit wrote: post #247
closeparen wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sufficiently prestigious schools are drowning in perfect applicants. You don’t even need to admit any rich slackers. Just let some of the qualified substitute money for luck.

> 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.

I think admitting legacies is morally and ethically wrong but the idea that what we need is another test even harder than the SATs to distinguish the "outstanding" is misguided.

The difference between kid who gets a 1550 and a 1600 on the SAT is so marginal that calling one "outstanding" and one "merely very good" is just silly.

Is that difference the extra $20,000 parents spent on tutoring? Or is that difference actually correlated with outcomes in and after college? Doubtful.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#397

Post by maccard »

Balgair wrote: post #292
teachrdan wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to become a competitive student athlete accomplished enough to get into a school like Berkeley, you have to go to a high school with its own pool, coach, and roster of fellow competitive swimmers. When it comes to who gets these coveted "easy" seats for college admissions, it's not enough to say that the sport is hypothetically inexpensive to participate in. You have to look at all the resources that make it poss…

Not always true. One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Seidemann Their demographics are white, but not majority, with ~30% hispanic. I don't know the demo in 2006 though: https://ww…

> Not always true.

> One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team.

Of course it's not always true. However your rebuttal actually proves the point of this discussion. You can name one outlier, who is exactly that, an outlier. The issue isn't "athletic scholarships are 100% inaccessible to people outside of the top 10% wealth bracket", it's more along the lines of "the overwhelming majority of athletic scholarships for sports are provided to people who are already benefitting from systemic privelege, and the remaining slots will be filled by outliers"

Consider two equally skilled waterpolo players, one who has a shared pool and the facilities to go with it, and one who has a private pool, coaching staff, etc. Now consider who is more likely to be in that position in the first place. That's not to say that there are no minorities in the second group, but they are overwhelmingly more likely to not end up in that scenario in the first place.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#398

Post by watwut »

kevincrane wrote: post #251
cultus wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of high schools where I'm from don't have public pools. Pools have also been less available historically to Blacks. After segregation ended, many jurisdictions defunded public pools rather than fund desegregated pools. Instead, wealthier whites used private ones. For a brief history: https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-expert-troubled-history-bla...

Oh yeah, I don't dispute the history of pools in America in general of having a lot of racist gatekeeping behind them, that's absolutely true. I was just saying that swimming and water polo are super cheap sports to participate in as an athlete.

Swimming is cheap only if there is cheap pool available.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#399

Post by kube-system »

secondcoming wrote: post #389
sprafa wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing that people don’t realise this. I always think back to the study that showed the amount of books in a household was a strong predictor for IQ. Background matters a whole lot, but high performance people don’t want to hear it, because they want to feel like it’s all their own credit. Nope. Just like money, there’s also an intellectual family bank that gets inherited. And it’s not genes, it’s access to kno…

Was that study done before everyone had an internet connection?

All studies ever have been done before everyone had an internet connection.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#400

Post by darkwizard42 »

jboog wrote: post #395
solveit wrote: post #247

Earlier 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.

I think admitting legacies is morally and ethically wrong but the idea that what we need is another test even harder than the SATs to distinguish the "outstanding" is misguided. The difference between kid who gets a 1550 and a 1600 on the SAT is so marginal that calling one "outstanding" and one "merely very good" is just silly. Is that difference the extra $20,000 parents spent on tutoring? Or is that difference act…

I think what the parent comment is saying is that neither the 1550 or 1600 is "outstanding" and the SAT is a flawed exam that doesn't really get you the "genius" level kids
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