I have no axe to grind vis-a-vis UCSD. I think the California system in total does a great job of doing what it is designed to do. I think you’re going to see stresses and failure and underperforming anywhere that huge. No system is going to be able to customize a curriculum and a program that works for every single kid all the time, and delivers something that is cost-effective and politically viable.
But I do think it’s just as patronizing to low SES kids to defend remedial work as “baked in” somehow to their educational needs as it is to try and shunt those kids out of the elite universities. I suspect that if you were to conduct a longitudinal study of top 100 (too many, not enough?) ranked U’s (use whichever ranking you want) you would find that at private U’s, the kids who need remedial work are very, very strong in some other area. So the musical prodigy needs remedial HS English (and English may even be a third or fourth language). The published novelist needs remedial math. And of course the athletes- some who walk in prepared to do university level work in every way and are outstanding academically across the board, and others who will need remediation.
But there’s a logic to the system- kids with extreme talent in one arena who need help in another, but allegedly that’s what holistic admissions is supposed to do now that Harvard is no longer using “holistic” to systematically exclude Jewish, Asian, or other kids.
The patronizing piece is to assume that as a cohort, low SES kids NEED remediation (some do, some don’t), and that their entire value to the university lies in their ethnic, racial, or economic “identity” in some way. Moreover, what under-resourced means in California is different from West Virginia/Kentucky, and is different from New Hampshire/Maine or Illinois. So defending this remedial track across the board strikes me as a really blunt instrument. You are likely not increasing the number of Black or Brown kids in Vermont by ignoring test scores at the flagship and providing a solid remediation track.