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.
> 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".
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.
I read the book SAT Wars and came away with a horrifying takeaway: admissions programs in US universities are creative enterprises for the person involved. One of them talks about “crafting a class”.
Getting into many of these places is a question of playing into your admissions officer’s biases. Knowing that they’re mostly liberal voters, often female, and nowadays more likely to be childless it’s presumably important to match that person’s energy.
Someone who would otherwise be writing romance novels is now picking students. Hence the infamous essay of the accepted student that went “Black Lives Matter” x100
I 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.
> The opaqueness of the whole process is what I find most objectionable.
I also find that objectionable. However, recalling my own college admission process, I think we have collectively determined that this opaqueness is basically working as intended. We are now treating it as a rite passage that qualified high school students can be mysteriously rejected.
I applied to 6 colleges (not counting those outside the United States), which would be considered an extremely low number today. I have colleagues who have kids applying to colleges right now so I know. Everyone is applying to more colleges just to counteract these seemingly random rejections.
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 offered twice as many.
A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
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, though there is a bit of a geographic bias helping UC Berkeley, but this same bias also helps much less selective and less socially prestigious SJSU.
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.
> 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 achieve more to get admission to a UC than a kid at a low income public school.
There should be exceptions, for example: very low SES student attending a private school on scholarship - although such students are usually exceptional or else they would not have qualified for private school scholarship.
The working class shouldn't be subsidizing the higher education of the wealthy.
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, 16k in state.
You then get an unholy fraken monster patch work of different financial aid programs. Make over 160k as a family ? No aid for you!
It's a different welfare cliff. Parents get a paper divorce, live with the less affluent one, college is going to be free.
I'm still very very pissed I couldn't get my parents income info and had to drop out. I was making around 100k when I came back to finish. I paid out if pocket at a Cal State.
> 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.
Does UCSB no longer have an excellent physics department and is UCSD no longer considered a top CS department?
The current administration is looking to go after AA workarounds. There are probably some smoking guns in email discussions among UC administrators/admissions officials.
>> 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?
The merit metric is just different than you expect it to be. The university wants students who rise to the top of their school.
The state champions all move on to the regional tournament even if 2nd and 3rd place in Illinois are better than 1st place in Ohio.
And I have to say, doing it this way is a fantastic way of breaking the "good school district" rat race when everyone piling on to a few really wealthy schools actually makes it more difficult to get in.
A lot of commenters seem to think this is purely a DEI thing, but doesn't it match how the best companies hire? Couldn't it be that the colleges are genuinely trying to select who they think will end up at the top of their fields? Common hiring advice for startups (my game) is to look for slope and drive, not deep expertise or experience. The top kid at a bad high school seems like a better bet to me than the median kid from a stellar high school, even if they've done 3x more AP classes. There have been "revelatory" articles like every year for decades about how google doesn't just hire ivy leaguers.
Are Universities still good? They're good socially but for education in the age of AI I can't imagine university even being worth it anymore outside of the absolutely most prestigious ones there are.
Certainly not your run-of-the-mill UC school except maybe UCLA or Berkeley and only then for very specific majors.
I went to a UC and graduated 14 years ago. I basically had to teach myself everything with the other students once I got into my major. And this school has done notable research in my field. But the quality of education was just terrible. Nobody could teach us multi-threading, compilers, theory of computation, networking, or algorithms properly. Like not at all. The students had to help each other the best they can and the most experienced or smartest individuals were just the ones that actually were able to do those subjects competently. But everyone else was pretty much shorted on their education, just like the poor math education throughout the country. It's pretty irritating how much it costs versus the quality you get. No way is it worth it.
And since I've graduated I learned that none of these topics is IQ-limited at all whatsoever. Math is completely intuitively if taught properly. ANYONE can learn it to a high level with good analogies and demonstrations and applicative knowledge. I developed competence with linear algebra and vector math not in school but doing game programming after I graduated. That's what actually made it "make sense".
I tutored several students since I graduated and I think I helped them for $30 an hour learning fundamentals and how to program and I think I did a significantly better job one-on-one for these students at a way cheaper rate than they would have to pay in school. It's sad.
I imagine LLMs could do a better job for many things than research professors that just throw slides on the board and barely elaborate on anything. The only way you learn in those courses is by really struggling on your own and going to as many office hours and TA hours as possible.
Not exactly the same scenario, but I definitely wondered whether something unsaid was going on last year when my child applied for colleges. He attended a special education high school and was accepted at all nine colleges he applied for, while most of his friends at non-special education schools were averaging about 33% acceptance at similarly competitive, and often the exact same, colleges. I mean, I think my kid is great, but that seemed like a pretty wide discrepancy.
Back when I was applying to college, there was the idea of "yield protection": a college might decline overqualified students to optimize for their "yield" (the percentage of admitted students who accepted). The yield might affect college rankings.
I'm not sure whether yield protection is actually practiced vs. just a paranoid student meme, but it was the first thing I thought of here and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the article.
As I understand, the easiest way to get into a very good UC (Berkeley, LA, etc.) is to first study at a junior college (JC). It is easy to get a perfect grade point average (4.0). There are a number of reserves spots at UCs for JC transfers.
There is no analysis of selective majors. Students from Lynbrook and Bellarmine are more likely to apply to majors like CSE and ECE, which have lower admissions rates than general admission. https://undergrad.ucsd.edu/academics/selective-major-process...
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 48.8 ms ] threadHowever nothing in this series mentioned anything about out-of-state admission so I’m curious if there’s any data about that.
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".
Getting into many of these places is a question of playing into your admissions officer’s biases. Knowing that they’re mostly liberal voters, often female, and nowadays more likely to be childless it’s presumably important to match that person’s energy.
Someone who would otherwise be writing romance novels is now picking students. Hence the infamous essay of the accepted student that went “Black Lives Matter” x100
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-39492187
I also find that objectionable. However, recalling my own college admission process, I think we have collectively determined that this opaqueness is basically working as intended. We are now treating it as a rite passage that qualified high school students can be mysteriously rejected.
I applied to 6 colleges (not counting those outside the United States), which would be considered an extremely low number today. I have colleagues who have kids applying to colleges right now so I know. Everyone is applying to more colleges just to counteract these seemingly random rejections.
How could it realistically work any other way? Each year, Harvard gets nearly 50K applications for 2K acceptances and 1.6K enrollments.
It’s not hard to see that tens of thousands of qualified high school students will unavoidably be rejected from just this one university.
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 offered twice as many.
A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
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, though there is a bit of a geographic bias helping UC Berkeley, but this same bias also helps much less selective and less socially prestigious SJSU.
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.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...
I'm surprised to see this granularity (# of applicants/admitted/enrolled to a college broken out by high school).
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 achieve more to get admission to a UC than a kid at a low income public school.
There should be exceptions, for example: very low SES student attending a private school on scholarship - although such students are usually exceptional or else they would not have qualified for private school scholarship.
The working class shouldn't be subsidizing the higher education of the wealthy.
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, 16k in state.
You then get an unholy fraken monster patch work of different financial aid programs. Make over 160k as a family ? No aid for you!
It's a different welfare cliff. Parents get a paper divorce, live with the less affluent one, college is going to be free.
I'm still very very pissed I couldn't get my parents income info and had to drop out. I was making around 100k when I came back to finish. I paid out if pocket at a Cal State.
Does UCSB no longer have an excellent physics department and is UCSD no longer considered a top CS department?
In order to promote diversity of the freshman classroom the college needs to suppress merit to achieve their diversity targets?
The state champions all move on to the regional tournament even if 2nd and 3rd place in Illinois are better than 1st place in Ohio.
And I have to say, doing it this way is a fantastic way of breaking the "good school district" rat race when everyone piling on to a few really wealthy schools actually makes it more difficult to get in.
[0]: https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-to...
Certainly not your run-of-the-mill UC school except maybe UCLA or Berkeley and only then for very specific majors.
I went to a UC and graduated 14 years ago. I basically had to teach myself everything with the other students once I got into my major. And this school has done notable research in my field. But the quality of education was just terrible. Nobody could teach us multi-threading, compilers, theory of computation, networking, or algorithms properly. Like not at all. The students had to help each other the best they can and the most experienced or smartest individuals were just the ones that actually were able to do those subjects competently. But everyone else was pretty much shorted on their education, just like the poor math education throughout the country. It's pretty irritating how much it costs versus the quality you get. No way is it worth it.
And since I've graduated I learned that none of these topics is IQ-limited at all whatsoever. Math is completely intuitively if taught properly. ANYONE can learn it to a high level with good analogies and demonstrations and applicative knowledge. I developed competence with linear algebra and vector math not in school but doing game programming after I graduated. That's what actually made it "make sense".
I tutored several students since I graduated and I think I helped them for $30 an hour learning fundamentals and how to program and I think I did a significantly better job one-on-one for these students at a way cheaper rate than they would have to pay in school. It's sad.
I imagine LLMs could do a better job for many things than research professors that just throw slides on the board and barely elaborate on anything. The only way you learn in those courses is by really struggling on your own and going to as many office hours and TA hours as possible.
I'm not sure whether yield protection is actually practiced vs. just a paranoid student meme, but it was the first thing I thought of here and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the article.