However 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".
Cheaper to live at home nowadays
Admissions has to target a fixed number of students each year, plus or minus. Students have to decide where to attend in a narrow window. If you accept a lot of students who are unlikely to attend then you would undershoot your admissions target and have to try to convince students to attend in later rounds of admission, but that’s too late because they’ve already decided to go somewhere else.
It’s not really a risk to overaccept if you know what % will commit.
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 strong candidates that will go somewhere else - quite the opposite: if you admit such a candidate, but the candidate goes somewhere else, the university earns even more (the semester fee without having to provide any service for this money).
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).
Insurance premiums would be a significant fraction of the average tuition, which would be beyond the reach of many.
The effect of the proposed system would be that most people would just apply to one school. If rejected they would try another next year, if they haven’t given up on college, and so on.
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
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.
But they do have to “craft a class” to some extent. An obvious example is athletic recruiting, but some schools are consciously thinking about populating other extracurriculars, like marching bands or orchestras.
And you also don’t want a class that’s all computer science majors or zero philosophy majors. I imagine they consider other factors as well. The admissions staff may be liberal, but I’m guessing at most schools they deliberately admit some outspoken conservatives.
Look at the charter of any university and they do not just say: "create students who excel in their academic subject of choice".
The vast, vast majority of higher education mission statements/charters include goals like: "helping students develop their identity", "pursuing meaning", "strengthening community", "sharing perspectives", "helping others", etc. etc. etc.
Things like "can this person work on as a team (did they play sports?)" or "have they been a part of a community (like marching band?)" are hugely important for building a community at the university that can successfully achieve those mission statements.
Any university in the world? Or any university in the very idiosyncratic US system?
Again, nobody else does stuff like this, and their universities seem to be working fine.
Itself a very US-specific thing. So much so that trans athletes in college sports were a focal point of a propaganda campaign that resulted in Trump winning.
I don't think any large European country even has athletic admissions, outside of maybe Olympic-level athletes.
Competitive admission hasn't really changed by nature
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 be extremely broken if it worked the way you suggest since the same cohort of kids would all be accepted to multiple schools and the schools would then have to backfill from a alternate list - which would also be the same cohort of kids…
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?
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.
So student, parents, and counselors see this and tell everyone to apply to even more colleges and the cycle continues.
Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
The 'holistic' admissions lie - The Daily Californian https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-...
The False Promise of 'Holistic' College Admissions - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...
Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
There is a special term to denote "amount which something is opaque" and that term is opacity.
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.
(The "winning" strategy then is to move to an underserved high school after an elite middle school, and hit the ceiling.)
We know how to test for merit. The greatest tragedy in this college admissions racket isn't the shadowy affirmative action policies, the mountains of student loan debt, or the entire college admission-industrial complex that's sprung up.
It's that even the tools we've used to use to measure if someone was _ready_ for college have been annihilated.
If we had a good "test for merit" then we could directly assign people to their roles and ignore their actual performance.
It’s a pretty good measure for how a student will do in their first year in college.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Name_changes
It may have become something of a dirty word ...
You’re thinking of a 2004 study that found “the SAT (and later, with Koenig, the ACT) was substantially correlated with measures of general cognitive ability and could be used as a proxy measure for intelligence” [1]. To my knowledge, this remains the case.
The kid would still have a better chance than if he applied from a high-performing school, but it wouldn't be as much of an advantage.
Socially, I'm guessing the kid could face some challenges because (1) other high performing students might not like him because he's a curve-breaker, (2) teachers would know what the family was up to and could view it as distasteful, and (3) if the student went to UCSD or another school where this is a well-known hack, there could be stigma for having gamed the system/being less-smart.
I think in most cases fellow undergrads would see it as just playing the game, but some might see it as "cheating" or like you didn't earn your spot as much as they did (if they were from a HS that was from a good part of town).
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.
It's definitely there in sports teams, jobs, politics, etc.
There's a natural limit to this effect. The downside is that being a big fish in a small pond means you may not leave the pond without a longer term goal beyond it, and there's a saturation point of talent beyond which any competitive advantage is minimal.
This ultimately does not really impact the lesser schools much unless they were starved for talent for too long and needed to raise the bar. Migration patterns have an ebb and flow.
I like this idea!
This is common in my city. It’s a big underfunded school district with a handful of coveted, well supported schools. I’m assuming it happens elsewhere in America with the success of platforms like donors choose.
Just because the top X% is guaranteed admission, that does not mean all (or even most) of the school is from the top X%.
The bad thing about UT's policy is that it encourages well-off students to move to a less-competitive school district (usually rural) in order to improve their chances.
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)
In other words: you've just pissed off a lot of Aggies grouping them in with, ahem, tu.
A&M is the other very large public university system in Texas. So there is a small intra-state rivalry there.
That's why standardized testing is good - 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.
You’d have to basically rebirth and resocialize them in a different culture entirely.
Far too many people already have been educated past their natural state and it’s going to get ugly.
I'm pretty tired of progressives insisting that people who grew up in poverty but were able to improve our lot in life through study, doing well on grades, and, yes, on standardized tests, like me, do not exist.
But that doesn't mean we can say that standardized testing gives everyone the same chance either...
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.
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
Or well, accept that same test is fair enough solution and it is impossible and probably not even sensible to apply some gameable metrics.
Damn, this is as stupid as it gets.
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.
No it won’t, because they would get a horrible base for their education and be 1-2 years behind their “super strong school” peers. (I did not make up these numbers; it’s easy to have more than 1 year of college credit from Advanced Placement classes in the US system.)
Acting like college is the beginning of education is foolish. Imagine struggling with learning how to learn challenging material while taking classes with students who already did that three years ago.
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.
My point is, for the younger generation a university's societal eliteness just isn't a strong predictor for success, and I strongly believe data will back up this observation within the next decade (there's usually a 5-7 year delay on data gathering in the social sciences, eg. Data from 2018-22 is only now starting to be analyzed).
Source: I live right next to their citrus and asparagus test fields and often visit their geology building to use their XRD and XRF systems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems unlikely that Americans would be so massively overrepresented in American colleges under this policy...
I agree with this, but I think you didn’t get the point. The point is, the way we measure strength has to be considered in light of the environment. If a student is in a high school where the average strength is 100, and the student has achieved a strength of 200, it shows that the student has tenacity and grit and drive. Whereas another student might be in a high school where the average strength is 200 and has a strength of 200, and this shows that the student is content to be just average. After admission, the first student has a much higher potential of outperforming the average freshman. The first student’s strength could very well be limited by the amount of resources available in this high school, and not by his/her innate ability.
At least, this is what is supposed to happen, if you believe the UC admission officers.
You are begging the question, especially with standardized testing, by presuming these things are measuring what you think they are measuring.
Agree. Plenty of non-wealthy get to attend private schools through scholarships and financial aid
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.
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 one UC to another, if you're looking to upgrade your diploma from Irvine to LA, for example. It's probably worth it to have the better network of the freshmen you met at Irvine rather than going to a CC in LA for two years. It would be cheaper, but networks can be incredibly valuable.
I made life long friends in community college.
Plus college doesn't work out for everyone, better to spend 3000$ figuring that out over 28k.
If you pay your own way and go the absolute cheapest path, your spending 3k at community college for 2 years and about 14k for 2 years at a Cal State. 17k total.
Vs 14k a year at a UC and around 56k for all 4.
This really depends on your financial situation though. For a lot of families this isn't a lot of money.
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.
1) 4 year students had my best average, but also my widest standard deviation. My best and my worst students were in this group.
2) Community college transfers had a slightly lower average than my 4 years, but the standard deviation was a lot tighter. They were optimizing time and schedule.
3) Returning professionals had an even slightly lower average than CC transfers, but the standard deviation was super tight. They mostly targeted the low end of the B grade range. They were very strongly optimizing every ounce of their time schedule.
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 non-Berkeley UCs.
At a UC you're probably going to be interacting with teaching assistants anyway.
I have to completely disagree with your last paragraph. No one should be thinking grad school right after a B.A. Go and see the world for a little bit. Excluding maybe law and medicine.
Even then, I've seen this horribly backfire in families. The kid is expected to do really well in college and then become a doctor, the pressure is too much and they just spaz out.
Next thing you know your a college dropout couchsurfing because your parents are threatening to send you back to the old country for an arranged marriage.
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.
For me I literally didn't have much else going on, so why not.
Very VERY easy way to date girls from all over the world. Nothing like studying with a Japanese girl on your 20th birthday.
The thing with life is you can never *know* about tomorrow. You can do well in college, parents don't have a spare 15k for next year and have to drop out.
A lot of kids in CC are also working full time. If you have to drop out, it's fine, can always go back.
By the time I finished at a Cal State I was working a full time software engineering job.
I have issues with the current system in general. You should have to work at less one job for a few months before taking out any type of loan. You need to understand how difficult money is to earn.
Does UCSB no longer have an excellent physics department and is UCSD no longer considered a top CS department?
Though Berkeley and UCLA have the advantage of most all departments being top 10, "average school" is not a fair assessment for the rest.
In order to promote diversity of the freshman classroom the college needs to suppress merit to achieve their diversity targets?
Ignore merit, consider race.
These programs have only succeeded in making a large number of people accept that race is a valid way to screen people, at which point your goal is to win.
Racism resets.
[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.
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