UCLA Chancellor discusses budget crisis, plans, priorities

[bluebayou]

^^agreed, IFF we can offer those students the financial and educational support required to graduate in four years. But, if many of that group is flunking out......

This is actually not radically different from how the Ivies have recently operated as well.

PS -- No Ivy has 30% Pell Grantees. Indeed, no highly selective private school does. So, no, they don't operate similarly.

[epiphany]

Wrong, blue. You have a huge edge at an Ivy if you have shown spectacular achievement but come not from wealth. I didn't say that Ivies have 30% Pell grantees; I said that financies figure in as an admission tip, and like UC, only if the achievement factor is competitive with other applicants.

You're going to need to show statistics about supposedly all Pell grantees flunking out or struggling. So far, my younger Pell grantee is -- as she did before admission -- outranking her classmates in her UC classes. She is experiencing UC as not a struggle, partly because she had a superior education prior to UC, unlike many of her wealthier UC classmates, who had an inferior education -- in their case, & by their admission and sudden realization.

There's a lot of distasteful and unfortunate stereotyping going on here, so I think I'll leave the thread. I'm very disappointed in the tone.

[dstark]

Not graduating in 4 years doesn't mean the student drops out.

And there is a lot to be said for giving a student a chance.

There are no guarantees.

[epiphany]

There are no guarantees.

Damn right. That's why the ELC study of several years ago, comparing poor with rich students, discovered that the poor ELC students at UC continued to outperform others at the same level they did prior to admission, whereas the rich ELC students hugely underperformed at UC relative to their high school years, & barely stayed in school. How does that grab everyone?

[dstark]

I think I remember reading that study.

[bluebayou]

epiphany:

I've always supported offering more slots to ELC'ers. It's a darn shame when a ELC'er from Lowell is rejected by Berkeley but offered a merit scholarship to Hopkins.....

[bluebayou]

btw:

UC even admits that there is a difference in graduation rates across income segments (see third bullet).

http://www.universityofcalifornia.ed...dability08.pdf

[mini]

Why, of course! The single most common reason that folks drop out of school is lack of income or poor family situation at home.

"You have a huge edge at an Ivy if you have shown spectacular achievement but come not from wealth."

Evidence?

[epiphany]

Post 53:
I'm talking about prior to The Crash. I wouldn't know if admissions for 09 and 10 have been, will be affected. But the generosities of the top 3 Ivies have made it possible to *prefer* low-income admits over non-development, non-legacy admits who had similar academic & e.c. profiles (for example, from the same high school.) and where there were no other category differences (such as ethnicity) with the exception of finances. Check out many of the acceptance threads over the prior 4 years on CC alone.

Newsflash, blue: There are poor kids who go to Lowell. I know some of them. My daughters have done activities with some of them. Those aren't being rejected to Berkeley, if they've applied AND are competitive for Berkeley.

Yes, it's a damn shame that everybody, including the rich, can't get accepted everywhere their little hearts desire. Another newsflash: a merit scholarship to JHU is hardly a major setback in life. There have been lots of discussions about this over the years on CC -- the supposed "unfairness" of the greater options that the wealthy have in comparison to the poor. I'm not derailing the thread for this.

I do not support admissions tips for illegal immigrants no matter what their national origins, btw. Nor do I support their being admitted in the first place to a public CA institution, regardless of their level of achievement in CA schools. Nor did I support that several years ago. Dstark tried to ask the question as to numbers of those admissions, and unfortunately I do not have the stats, but their numbers should be zero, just as the numbers being housed in our prisons should be zero. They should be sent back as criminals to their countries of origin; and they risked the lives and safety of their families if those are here as well, so tough. CA is not a mega-charity. We're a State with responsibilities to our own legitimate citizens first, responsibilities which we are not entirely meeting.

If you really and sincerely believe that lots and lots of Pell grantees are absconding with lots of money and never or rarely graduating, and further, that such a scandal is a major player in CA's budget crisis, then you are suffering from a deficit in information as to the *breadth* of CA expenditures.

Again, there is huge waste in the public K-12 education system -- I will maintain more so than in CA's higher institutions. I would know. I have taught there, and recently, and I currently work privately side-by-side with the publics, so I continue to see the phenomenol waste -- everything from "special programs' (NOT the ones for Special Ed kids; I'm talking about non-academic "programs" within the schools, funded from the CA education budget). I would focus much more, if I were you, on the profligate waste & incompetency of RICH CA officials in bureaucracy than on the theoretical incompetence of poor ELC'ers at UC, which is a huge myth but a convenient scapegoat.

Not to mention that the commercial property owners have made out like bandits since Prop 13. Not to mention corruption in the Workers' Comp. area. Not to mention the vast social services offered to vast sub-populations which do not begin to be able to repay, even eventually, the support offered to them by the State, since these populations are mostly quite uneducated and will remain so, and/or impaired in some other significant way from contributing economically to the State.

CA is going to have to stop defining itself as an infinite source of funds to every new needy group or desirous group that comes along. As to college grants, those are finite. They are linked to units completed (rather than years). I have no problem having the gov't legislate a clause requiring a certain level of performance as a condition both of continuing funding to that student, as well as assurance that the grant will not convert to a loan if the student does not graduate in a continuous time period. No problem at all. But I wouldn't hold your breath that that's the primary reason for CA's massive budget crisis. You're grasping at straws here.

[epiphany]

Another elephant in the room that no one has talked about -- as it applies to UC -- is the absurdity of the residency requirement for UC. It used to be that you had to live here for several years before you qualified as a resident. Thus, not only would you not go into the general pool for admissions consideration as an in-stater, you most certainly would not be paying in-state rates. But now there's a one-year residency requirement. Who did that? Do you think belligerent lobbying groups did that? If so, I'll stand corrected, but I don't remember that. So unless I'm corrected on that, that was CA's foolishness. And by so doing it invited millions of newcomers for the express purpose of taking advantage of CA higher education at considerably reduced rates than private college rates. Further, it also invited situations such as a parent + dependent from overseas, legitimately by UC's rules, setting up "residency" for a year, crowding the UC admissions pool and paying in-State rates, while the spouse remained overseas earning money. And if you think those situations have been largely poor families, I have a bridge to sell you. And btw, many of these families (I don't know percentages) have applied for & rec'd generous FA (not necessarily Pells) because they've claimed reduced circumstances from "having" to maintain 2 households, even though of course they didn't have to at all; they were merely exploiting the system.

[mini]

"But the generosities of the top 3 Ivies have made it possible to *prefer* low-income admits over non-development, non-legacy admits who had similar academic & e.c. profiles (for example, from the same high school.) and where there were no other category differences (such as ethnicity) with the exception of finances."

I see absolutely no evidence of this. I see the Ivies, all of them, consistently enrolling 50% of their student body from the top 3-5% of the population; and then adding "need-based" scholarships for those in the top 20% on top of it. I see Pell Grants at the Ivies (with a few exceptions, Princeton being one), at the lowest they have been since the early 1990s. I've seen the Gordon Winston study indicating there are 3-4X as many qualified low-income students available to the Ivies and their ilk than are actually attending.

They "might" prefer low-income students, but I see no evidence of it.

[bluebayou]

If you really and sincerely believe that lots and lots of Pell grantees are absconding with lots of money and never or rarely graduating, and further, that such a scandal is a major player in CA's budget crisis, then you are suffering from a deficit in information as to the *breadth* of CA expenditures.

I'm not sure I ever posted that.

[dstark]

Post #55, epiphany, I posted a link in post #45 from 2008 and it looks like it you need to be in Calif for 3 years to get instate tuition. Has there been a change?.

[epiphany]

blue:

I'm not sure I ever posted that.

You absolutely implied that somehow Pell grantees usurping their grants (and then not completing their program, which would also imply not contributing financially to society), is a major factor in CA's budget problems, which in turn assumes this happening on a signfiicantly large/frequent basis. No evidence of either.

mini:

They "might" prefer low-income students, but I see no evidence of it.

Like you see no evidence of lots of things because you choose not to see it.

[epiphany]

Establishing Legal Residence for Tuition Purposes at the University of California
For Students Seeking Resident Classification
To be classified as a resident for tuition purposes, an adult student (18 years or older by the residence determination date for the applicable semester) who is a US citizen or an eligible noncitizen must have: 1) relinquished his/her prior residence and 2) been physically present and established residence in California for more than one (1) year immediately preceding the residence determination date. The residence of a minor is derived from the parent(s) with whom the minor last resided.

^^Page last updated (it says) April 8, 2009

* "more than one year" means literally 366 days.