However, it looks like CA high school students have a higher percentage of high academic students than TX high school students. A top 6% automatic admission woul likely overflow UCB and UCLA by a lot.
Also, UT Austin does not guarantee majors to top 6% applicants. The usual suspects like CS, engineering majors, and business are highly competitive, and top 6% applicants may be admitted to the school with little or no chance of being able to get into one of these majors.
If the top 6% actually attended UT Austin, it too would be overwhelmed with students. Fortunately, the predicted yield is always lower, though sometimes that gets miscalculated.
Because it relates to one of the âbucketsâ that elite schools maintain which is the students âfrom the same schools and even the lacrosse teams.â One of the roles of the Ivy League (and some of the NESCACs etc) is as a sort of country club. People nominally join a country club to play tennis and golf, but mainly they join to make social connections with other wealthy people. The Ivys have never wanted to have too many âstriversâ in comparison to âthe better classesâ of people. They need some (for academic legitimacy sake) but not so many as to change their mission.
And I may be the only one who doesnât even know what âPEâ is referencing. In my world it is short for Pulmonary EmbolismâŠbut that canât be right in this context. 
I think that they key point is that the system is fundamentally broken for high performing CA students (especially students from higher performing schools) to the point that there is no trust in the system for large groups of people. High performing CA kids should not be subject to admissions chances similar to the T10 for their state flagships.
PE stands for Private Equity.
One of our friends from CA didnât even have his kids apply to the UCs - they all went to BC instead.
Are you sure? I thought PE meant Physical Education. After all, Private Equity shouldnât have anything to do with college admissions, right? Physical Education, on the other hand, is usually a high school graduation requirementâŠso needed for college admissions. 
If you include Irvine in your group of âtop UCs,â it doesnât make sense to exclude Davis (higher ranked than Irvine on every list I look at) or SB (comes in higher or lower than Irvine depending on the list, but in the same ballpark).
Examples of some rankings:
| UCB | UCLA | UCSD | UC Davis | UCSB | UCI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US News (US) | 15 | 15 | 28 | 28 | 35 | 33 |
| Forbes (US) | 5 | 7 | 21 | 37 | 24 | 61 |
| QS (World) | 10 | 29 | 62 | 118 | 163 | 268 |
| Times (World) | 9 | 18 | 34 | 59 | 69 | 92 |
And if you consider all of those together as the top 6 UCs, I would guess that most high achieving CA kids are going to get into at least one of them, under our current system.
Do you know high achieving CA kids who applied to all of those 6 and did not get into any?
(We definitely know some kids who applied to all of these and did not get into any, but they were not among the highest achieving kids in our high school.)
(Edited to add a table.)
Very common in the high performing bay area schools.
I could be receptive to that argument though I think that the current views among the kids and parents that I see have UCI joining the original âbig 3â and measurably ahead of Davis and UCSB in âprestigeâ though both are very good and UCSB is also rising.
I donât know anyone high stats totally shut out of the 6 though the Public school Val that I mentioned got shut out of UCB, UCLA and UCI. She ultimately ended up at UCSD but as I said top 1% kids shouldnât be in that situation in their home state. It sends a bad message to kids in those schools.
I do know another high stats kid who got into Washington, Wisconsin, and Michigan while getting shut out of the 6 UCs mentioned. He ultimately got into UCSB off of the waitlist. His stats were high but he was CS so itâs not as shocking.
I personally think that a guarantee into one of the 6 mentioned for high stats CA kids would be acceptable (I also personally love UCSC) but the current statewide guarantee directs high stats kids into a school with an 89% acceptance rate. It means nothing to high stats CA kids.
Those examples you posted seem pretty much like what we are seeing at our high school. Other than CS majors, we are not seeing the high stats kids shut out of the 6 schools listed. (And the job market in CS is not so hot now, so we may see a shift going forward in the number of students applying for that major⊠I hope!)
UCSD is not a poor outcome for a valedictorian, so I am not sure what is shocking about this example. Most lists rank UCSD higher than UT Austin, which has been mentioned in this thread as a positive example of a university with guaranteed admission for top students.
If you are in the bay area, you are probably at a different HS from us⊠Irvine is not seen as a top choice among the kids and families that we know. It is respected, but definitely not considered more desirable than Davis or SB. 
Yes, this has been a strange assumption for me, too, although based only on my daughterâs school. Every decent student gets into a UC. They might not get in every UC they apply to, but if they apply to at least a few, they almost ALL get into at least one. I do not see ANY high achieving student at my daughterâs school getting shut out in the manner described/assumed.
Iâm not saying that it doesnât happen, Iâm sure it does. But I am not sure it is quite the epidemic it is being made out to be. But, again, this is basically a sample size of one Bay Area public school.
Is it? This really surprises me, too. Definitely not the case at my daughterâs (Bay Area) school. UCs are very popular. At least in terms of applying. Not all choose to attend in the end.
Edited to add: I just looked up the numbers to make sure I wasnât imaging things. This for my daughterâs school and includes applications and acceptances to all UC campuses in 2022:
Sure, not all students were accepted but 1. Not all students included here are âhigh achievingâ and many likely knew they had a lower chance of admissions and 2. Some students may have only applied to one or two campuses and not gotten accepted to those but, had they applied to 4 or 5 campuses, would have been much more likely to gain at least one acceptance.
You clearly have a n of 1 and a dated perspective. I actually work for a large, PE firm, and bro culture would never fly. In recent years, more than half of our income analyst classes are woman. 42% of our partners are now woman. And no, HR is not lazy and just hire referrals. We recruit at the top schools, because it is an efficient filtering mechanism, but no one backdoors their way in. Too much $$ on the line if we donât deliver performance to our limited partners to take slackers.
Actually I donât find those statistics encouraging. About one-quarter of those who applied ended up enrolled at a UC.
Yield of those admitted was about 60%, so apparently many took other options rather than the UC offer.
Your school is a very good school and it looks like your kids do well in UC admissions, much better than the peninsula schools which I am more familiar with.
I did a quick comparison to Paly and my daughters Private which are similar in profile. Your schools does better for admits to UCLA and UCB than either of the other schools; much better than Paly which is an incredibly rigorous public school.
Yields are also very different. Using Davis as an example the yield from your school is 40% to 20% at Paly and single digits at my kids school. Irvine, Davis, and Santa Barbara all yield under 20% and often in single digits. They arenât considered great options.
Agreed, All three schools end up with about the same overall admit pct but yields vary widely. Yield at my kids school for the UC system is about 40% and at Paly it is about 33% which highlights that most applicants arenât getting into schools that they consider desirable and they then vote with their feet.
Given the stats of Paly and my kids private you would expect better outcomes.
Part of the reason I even responded in the first place is THIS WEEK I happened across an - admittedly small- pr. eq firm that had no women staff except the EA. I was so struck by this when I saw it on linkedIn I even checked the website (knowing many people donât do linkedin profiles). Was same list, no women, various ages from entry level on upâŠ
I donât doubt in the slightest some are wonderful, inclusive places today. I also am very very dubious of the claims that all are or that all are behind the surface.
Yes, but that is their choice and not a result of a broken admissions process which is apparently admitting them at a rate of nearly 70%.
How could I forget Linsanity?
My husband is a (long suffering) Knicks fan - he was all over Linsanity.
Yea. I think I was responding to an interchange between @hebegebe and @L_NewEngland about private equity firms and the apparent lack of diversity in them. I expanded that to talk about quantitative hedge funds and venture capital funds. I am glad for @KBdadâs experience with a big PE firm. These bigger firms really are corporate America (and other countries) and it would be hard to see how they wouldnât have moved in the direction he describes. Smaller PE firms maybe not so much. Venture firms, which are usually a lot smaller, are far from 50/50 female to male. According to a Kennedy School study, âCurrently in the United States, women make up approximately 11% of investing partners at VC firms, and only around 13% of venture capital dollars go to startups with a woman on the founding team.â
Iâm going to sign out here on this topic. I just wasnât sure why we were on it.