Good point by @calmom. It makes sense for people in many other countries to focus on rankings as there are a lot of countries where all the top institutions of higher learning are big impersonal public research U’s that teach the same way so other than ranking/brand and geography, there is virtually nothing to differentiate them.
No so true in the US with it’s wide variety of different types of schools.
Only if “normal” means only “high school” and that any other measure of performance, such as how well one does *in college/i, is not “normal”.
Having additional pathways to college education besides the high school route is of benefit to both the students and the state. Some of the people I have encountered doing high paid cognitively complex work and therefore boosting the state economy and tax base earned college degrees through the transfer pathway after high school mediocrity (sometimes with non-college activities like work or military service between high school and starting college at community college).
“The UC does this because it’s a legal way to cheat and get around the law since this rule virtually guarantees all the transfers will come from the CC since it’s so easy to get a 4.0 or a 3.9 and because standardized tests are ignored.”
I almost hate to ask, but what law is this?
“Most of these transfer students are from CC and have SAT scores 300-400 points or more below the freshman admits and simply do not belong at any elite college.”
Ok but a whole lot of freshman at UCB get weeded out, I was talking to a Dr who went to UCB undergrad who said 1800 people started out as pre-med when he went, by senior year it was 600. Those 1200 kids by your definition did not belong there, right? Maybe UCB and the other UCs discovered that people mature and hit their stride later in adolescence than others, and set up the transfer system for those people.
Not to mention the people that do have good scores but have to attend CC for cost reasons, or to be close and help the family business.
Pre-med everywhere is an aggressive merciless weed-out process*, though weeded-out pre-meds usually do graduate college despite having their medical school dreams crushed.
*Pre-med grading scale:
A = acceptable
B = bad
C = catastrophic
D = disastrous
F = …
And then there is the MCAT and the rest of the medical school application process…
^^Exactly. Anywhere from 15-25% of entering Frosh are premeds at most University’s liberal arts college. (Even higher at places ‘known’ for premed like Hopkins and Emory.) Only a few survive the gauntlet and even apply to med school.
So, 600 out of 1800 is phenomenal.
Are you by any chance referring to the California state law prohibiting public colleges and universities from considering race or ethnicity in admission decisions? If so, I don’t think there’s any evidence to support that. According to UC Berkeley’s most recent CDS, their freshman class entering in 2017 was 1.5% black and 14.9% Hispanic. The total undergraduate student body was 1.7% black and 15.5% Hispanic–virtually no difference. But the percentage of white students also increased, from 24.5% in the freshman class to 25.7% for the student body as a whole. The percentage of Asian students declined slightly from 37.6% in the freshman class to 34.5% in the total student body. Other categories showed similar trivial variations. So if they’re trying to use transfer admissions to evade the state prohibition on affirmative action, it sure isn’t working.
These figures are so close as to be probably just statistical noise—and in any event, there are confounding variables that could explain even these slight differences. It could be that the racial and ethnic composition of the applicant pool changes slightly from year to year, with more Asians applying and being admitted as freshmen in 2017 than in the three (or four or five) previous years, coupled with corresponding slight shrinkage in the numbers of black, Hispanic, and white students applying and being admitted over that time span. Or it could be that slightly higher percentages of white, black, and Hispanic students choose to take advantage of California’s large and on the whole exemplary community college system, resulting in slightly higher levels of transfers of those groups, while a slightly higher percentage of Asians elect to start straight in on a 4-year university.
I’m actually a big fan of California’s policy of offering state residents the opportunity to save money on the first two years of college by starting in CC, with articulation agreements that make it easy to transfer those CC credits into a 4-year university, coupled with a commitment by the UCs to admit a large number of transfers from the CC system. As ucbalumnus has repeatedly pointed out, this is nothing new: it goes back to the 1960s, long before California’s affirmative action ban which wasn’t adopted until 1996.
Me, as a case study: I was pretty mediocre in high school, flunked out of college (badly), landed at a community college, transferred to a state flagship after getting my associates, got a PhD from an Ivy, and am now tenured faculty and pretty decently research-active in my field of research.
Without a community college system, or transfer pathways into a pretty solid college, my later successes wouldn’t have been possible. The assumption that high school success is determinative of future success is based in some reality, but it’s a much less robust reality than we tend to think, and in fact less robust than adcoms seem to think.
FWIW, for purposes of establishing admissions chances, the stats for individual colleges of multi-college universities should appear individually. Otherwise applicants will be misled as to their true chances. There have been a number of cases where somebody posts on the Cornell sub-forum that they were surprised they were rejected from Cornell engineering, because their stats were above posted numbers for Cornell. Then it is pointed out that those are aggregated stats, and their stats were not above average, actually, for Cornell’s engineering college.
It undoubtedly happens the other way too, a student may be discouraged form applying to a college because he/she thinks they are out of range, based on the aggregated stats which are not college-specific. Whereas actually for that college that was not the case.
re #202: "Does Cornell include the land grant schools admission stats? "
Yes. It does. These students are not part of any "alternative’ admissions process. And they are not weak, either, overall. Stats-wise their ranges were the same as Barnard’s, when I was looking at this when D2 was applying. But distributed differently between math and verbal.
But everyone would be better served, for admissions purposes, if the admissions statistics were presented broken out separately by college. This is how it appeared in the college guide books when I applied to colleges. Actually it was broken out even further then, by gender as well.
The consolidated number only became a “thing” due to US News. I think. It may be useful for some ****- measuring contest, but it is less helpful than the broken out stats would be, for admissions purposes.
Some schools where selection standards vary by division do show admission stats by division (e.g. https://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/undergraduate-admission-statistics ), or show them by major when selection standards vary by major (e.g. http://www.sjsu.edu/admissions/impaction/impactionresultsfreshmen/index.html , http://www.sjsu.edu/admissions/impaction/impactionresultstransfer/index.html , and https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/transfers-major ). But it is not universal practice.
Thing is, before US News, it was a universal practice.
^^The cynic in me says that colleges no longer show admit stats by individual colleges so that they can hide the stats of the demographic groups of the incoming class. (How big is that ‘plus factor’ for women in Engineering or B-School, or men in Education/Nursing?)
Many reasonable comments but none refuted my main point. The UC’s utilize this transfer system as a way to game the law. Otherwise they would require the HS GPA/SAT and weight the college GPA’s somewhat based on a scale. Comparing CC grades to U of Chicago, NU,Duke, or MIT is absurd. What this policy does is effectively reserve all the UC transfer slots to students from CC. Very few middle and upper middle class parents with qualified kids would so limit their child’s experience to CC versus admission to say Emory or U of Mich if they were denied at UCB or UCLA. But once you begin college at a regular school as a freshman transferring is almost impossible. You know this is common knowledge and not hard to find out except that the UC’s obscure this reality. Do all of you believe there should not be some sort of threshold minimum in test scores to go to a top school. You will not find anyone but superstar athletes at a top private school with an SAT of 1600. They just can’t do the course work the same way that bus drivers can not become jet pilots. It may be an uncountable fact but one’s IQ does somewhat determine what you can do. Would any of you want to fly on a plane with a pilot with an average IQ?
@SAY
Well to be fair, their admissions to Emory or Umich would be in serious doubt if rejected to UCB or UCLA especially. So maybe it’s in their interest to enroll in a California CC and save some money while at it.
@SAY, What law are you talking about?
Personally I don’t see anything wrong with reserving most of the transfer slots in the UC system for kids coming from CA CC’s.Is there any evidence these students aren’t succeeding in their final 2 years?
What law are you claiming that they are gaming?
High school based credentials like HS GPA and SAT are no longer relevant when the applicant has enough of a college record. How well a student does in college is a better predictor of future college performance than any high school based credentials. Despite what you may think, community college is college.
The number of transfer applicants from super-selective colleges to UCs is probably insignificant to begin with. And emphasizing transfer student intake from community colleges has been UC (and CSU) policy since 1960.
Many many white/Asians get rejected from UCB and UCLA and get into schools like Emory and U of Mich. Anyone who doubts this just doesn’t know the situation in CA. Please go look at the transfer requirements for every selective school. Every one ask for your HS transcripts and scores precisely because it is relevant. The UC’s have seriously diluted their undergraduate schools by having so many transfer students many of which who are far below the standards of any top 15 school. It’s just a fact.
Ah yes, but the college population and rigor of school was quite a lot different 50 years ago. Now, all sorts of low intelligence people are in community colleges, and doing well is trivial, at least in our experience. We looked into it for our precocious math kid, and by 9th grade would have exhausted most of the curriculum (it was a pretty crappy community college, admittedly).
The applicable law is the master plan adopted and signed into law in 1960. It requires the UC’s to accept the top 12.5% of resident students. The UC’s use an academic index calculated by a combination of grades in A-G courses and test scores to determine which students qualify. The AI has evolved over time and there has even been discussion about eliminating standardized test scores entirely; in any case, high GPA students can meet the AI requirements with average level test scores.
The master plan also requires that the CSU’s accept the top 33% of resident students, and that both CSU’s and UC’s accept CC transfers. And the CC’s are required essentially to accept all comers. The only requirement at the CC level is and always has been simply that that the student must be “capable of benefiting from instruction.”
The purpose of the master plan was and is to establish a high quality education system accessible to all state residents, not to establish an elite or exclusive system, and not to compete against private colleges for rankings or prestige.
So the UC’s are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, as one sector of a 3-tiered system intended to make higher education fully available to all California residents.
The one thing that isn’t part of the master plan is the idea that any one UC should be more selective than any other.
For this discussion, an important point seems to be that the CDS/USNWR admission statistics mask significant variations among a university’s divisions and entering student cohorts. Even so, I don’t think there is much doubt that virtually all the top 25 or more RUs are extremely selective. I doubt you’d see big changes in the ranking results if you included Columbia GS or Berkeley’s transfer students in the admission selectivity stats. In Berkeley’s case, the single biggest boost to its ranking is its high Peer Assessment score. If the Peers believe transfer students diminish the quality of undergraduate education there, then they can express that opinion in their PA scores.
In comparing selectivity, one way to look at it is that US News is measuring how the best HS students vote with their feet for the best colleges. This measurement complements the PA and GC assessments. High ranking, high scoring students have the greatest freedom to choose colleges; it is not unreasonable to assume that after comparing all their options, they tend to choose the best available colleges. A high concentration of high ranking, high scoring students in a school’s Fall freshman cohort means it must have earned the approval of many HS students whose “votes” count most heavily in the scoring. The fact that a college later admits more students with weaker stats may or may not affect classroom quality, but either way, it is fairly irrelevant to that initial vote.