<p>No state university in California fits that description. Lowest URM percentage is 14.4% (CPSLO); highest URM percentage is 70.1% (CSUDH). UCs range from 17.8% (UCB) to 44.6% (UCM). (Numbers from collegedata.com .)</p>
<p>UCs appear to practice aggressive SES-based affirmative action in admissions; CSUs mostly admit by GPA and test score formula (and by major if the major is impacted at the campus); neither is allowed to use race or ethnicity as a criterion in admissions.</p>
<p>However, given the minimum GPA-defined eligibility criteria for the UC and CSU systems, the various campuses within each system are competing with each other for the students in each pool, so any admissions policy changes would mostly just redistribute the admitted students to different campuses (though differences in which campuses a student gets admitted to may result in differences in matriculation to UC versus CSU versus other). Campus admissions policy changes are not, by themselves, going to magically create more UC and CSU eligible URM high school seniors.</p>
<p>^UC still considers itself holistic or no? Wondering if this stilll gives them some leeway.
*But numbers alone do not define high achievement. The policy enables more students who fall outside the guaranteed pools to have their applications fully reviewed (as long as they meet the GPA minimum in UC-required courses by the end of 11th grade). Those judged to have the highest levels of achievement and promise will be offered a place at a UC campus. *</p>
<p>Yes, comprehensive review is used. However, those not meeting minimum eligibility requirements are generally rejected.</p>
<p>Note that the “as long as they meet the GPA minimum in UC-required courses by the end of 11th grade” phrase indicates the continued existence of a minimum eligibility bar (3.0 for California residents and 3.4 for non-residents).</p>
<p>The UC web sites do list alternate means of UC eligibility, such as fulfilling specific high school subject requirements with high enough test scores, and there is something called “admission by exception”, though that appears to be mainly for students in unusual situations like home schooling. In this case, the applicant’s essay has to be extremely convincing.</p>
<p>But note also that the threshold for guaranteed admission to some UC campus (not necessarily one’s choice) is now different from just UC eligibility as it was in the past.</p>
<p>“The reality is that if you give some members of a group an advantage based upon their race, you cannot blame others for wondering if a particular person of that race would have earned that position otherwise.”</p>
<p>Sure I can blame them. They’re losers for wondering and for trying to suss out the person’s true merit. The normal reaction to meeting a white, black, and Asian student from the same university is - oh, hi, nice to meet you, you, and you. The fact that someone’s mind would wander to “hmmm, what are their SAT scores, did they really belong here” is indicative of poor character. And 2400 SATs don’t make up for that poor character. </p>
<p>But that poor character will eventually play itself out in the real world when no one will want to hire them, or when they act condescending to URM coworkers. Shame is, they’ll blame aff action for that when really, it’s their own fault.</p>
<p>I was on S’s college campus this weeken supporting him in a particular activity. His friends are a mix of all types, from all places, etc. it wouldn’t occur to me in a million years to sit there and mentally pre-judge them. They’re kids. They got in. Great for them. Over and out. I prefer to wish people the best of luck, not engage in conspiracy thinking.</p>
<p>^And this pernicious thinking is reinforced each time any particular sub-group behaves less than stellar. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – whether based on actual proportion of reality or not. </p>
<p>For example: someone once mentioned to me how they feel that pick-up truck drivers are rude and dangerous. Now, each time I encounter an aggressive driver and happen to notice that it’s a pick up truck, that notion gets confirmed in my mind. In reality, are pick up trucks more prone to being aggressive or is it in proper proportion of all drivers? I can’t tell. But I know that I’m biased and can’t shake it.</p>
<p>I’m probably going to regret wading into this pool but …</p>
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The huge increase in Asian students at the top UCs after reducing the AA influence looks pretty compelling at first glance. Someone (Xiggi?) has done a detailed analysis of the increase in Asians and shown the biggest drivers of the chance are factors external to the AA policies … things like changing demographic patterns. I’m too lazy to find these posts on CC but they are quite interesting.</p>
<p>The second point raised in the past was even if all the AA and diversity preferences were eliminated (include legacy, sex, geography, etc) then the acceptance rate at the Harvard’s of the world would move at most from 5% to something like 8%. The schools would become much more homogenous in almost all dimensions and 90+% of families would need to find a new boggy man to blame for their kid not getting accepted.</p>
<p>IMO it will be a very sad day if the schools I attended stop valuing diversity on campus … and will greatly diminish my donations … even if these policies somewhat lessen the chances of my kids getting to attend the same schools … I believe it makes a much better experience for those who do have the priviledge of attending.</p>
<p>People should be able to take the exams multiple times (someone can have a bad day), but all scores (at least those from 11th and 12th grade) should be reported and considered by admissions officers.</p>
<p>The College Board has often produced studies showing the correlation between SAT scores and college grades. It ought to study what better predicts college grades – the highest or the average SAT score.</p>
<p>There is a 1 standard deviation gap between whites and blacks on IQ tests such as the WISC and Stanford-Binet. Little of the SAT score gap, which is comparable in magnitude, is due to test prep, which has not been shown to increase scores substantially.</p>
<p>I have no idea whether that is factually true, but I’ll take your word for it. Given that, so what? So because blacks on average are “below” whites, there’s no value to my white kid from interacting with smart black kids on his college campus? Why is it critical that they are “just as smart” - if they’re smart enough to handle the demands of that type of school, why isn’t that good enough? I guess I just don’t have those precious-flower children who will just fall apart if they are forced to mingle with people with below 2350 SAT scores. Some people on CC do have such children, and it’s obnoxious.</p>
<p>I finally had a chance to read the Dale & Krueger 2002 paper mentioned by the NTY article you linked to (#753). The study does conclude as you quoted, that for URMs,
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<p>However, for other groups it is not the selectivity of the school that matters for earnings (as I think you inferred from the NYT article), it is attending the school that offers the best fit for the desired future field of employment.</p>
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<p>The takeaway is not, that for non-URMs it doesn’t matter for earnings if a student attends a less-selective school. The takeaway is that for non-URMs, if a student intends to be an engineer, the student is better off going to a less-selective school with an engineering dept, than a more selective school without one, i.e. an engineer should go to Penn State (SAT avg 1038) instead of Bryn Mawr (SAT avg 1370)</p>
<p>3girls3cats, my experience is similar to yours. I had 2 HS valedictorians out of three roommates and was so scared that I worked day and night for the first six weeks. I finished 12 weeks of problem sets (math, physics, statistics) plus read novels for my lit course – can’t remember what the 5th course was. When I had gotten A’s on 6 weeks of quizzes, I became a little more confident I could do the work.</p>
<p>But, life has changed. Many kids know the game. When we were unpacking my son into his room at an elite school on the first day of his freshman year, he walked into the room next door to introduce himself (and we followed). There was (I think) a black kid, an Asian kid, and a Jewish kid in that room and one asked my son, who is 6’4" and was probably 220 lbs, very early in the conversation, “Did you get recruited for sports?” My son said, “I hope they didn’t admit me because of my athletic ability.” He asked if my son was a legacy, which he is not. He then said, “Well, you’re not a minority, you’re not an athlete, you’re not a legacy. You must be one of the really smart ones.” [It turns out that he is].</p>
<p>People may not like it, but that kid on my son’s hall and NotYourBusiness need not be racist. They may merely be acting as Bayesian statisticians. You start with prior beliefs about the distribution of some underlying characteristic (IQ, academic preparedness, …). You can assume the same distribution of that characteristic in the different groups (or not). Knowing the selection process and characteristics that are considered (grades, SAT scores, race, legacy, athlete, …), the fact that someone with a particular set of characteristics (white, not a legacy, athlete, or minority) has been selected should cause you to revise your distribution of beliefs about the underlying characteristic, as the kid did. This could be entirely non-racist or non-legacist or non-athletecist. Or, you could start with prior beliefs that are racist, legacist or athletecist (“the mean of the distribution of IQs for athletes is 15 points lower than that of the popluation as a whole”). But, assuming your prior beliefs are that everyone is drawn from the same distribution, conditioning on the fact that someone has been selected and on the selection rule should alter your beliefs about the probability distribution of the underlying characteristic. It’s just Bayes rule, which is the same thing that is followed by your spam filters, when they learn which of your emails to reject. </p>
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<p>OHMomof2, I believe your logic is correct. By knowing that the kids’ father is someone famous or mega-rich and that they’ve been admitted to Brown or Harvard, you should have a distribution of belief about their underlying capabilities. It should probably still be pretty broad, but the information should change your beliefs a little bit. It doesn’t mean that the kid isn’t really bright, hard-working or ambitious, but knowing those two facts should mean that they are a little less likely not to be than you would have thought without that knowledge. No? Similarly, knowing the kid is from N. Dakota would change one’s distribution of beliefs about the kids’ academic ability. The distribution would be quite broad but the center might be shifted down. Not geographist, just Bayesian.</p>
<p>I agree with most of what you wrote, but belief that there is a 15 point white-black gap in IQ based is not “racist” if that is what studies have found.</p>
<p>“Some people on CC do have such children, and it’s obnoxious.”</p>
<p>My twin boys each got 2370 on their SATs (first sitting!), and I wondering if they should retake. The problem is that the next two test days coincide with the World Peace Conference in Gstaad (where they are representing the United States), and the Under-18 World Chess Championships in Rio de Janeiro (they’re 1-2 in the world currently).</p>
<p>I hate to have them miss either of these extra-curriculars, but with the trend against holistic admissions I’m concerned that their Tier 1 slots might be taken by students who have focussed their entire lives on maxing out the SATs. Any advice?</p>
<p>Thanks for the clarification on the numbers, you are correct that the percentages of all URMs are much higher than I thought in the CA system thanks to a substantial percentage of latino/hispanics attending these schools. Nevertheless, the statistics on college data, tell a different story for AAs in the CA state university system. Per the 2011 census, 6.6% AAs in CA population. AA Student population at the major research universities in CA: Berkeley 3.8%, Davis, 2.4%, Irvine, 2.0%, San Diego does not report, Santa Barbara 0.4%, UCLA 3.6%, Santa Cruz 2.1%, and Riverside 6.6%. Other than Riverside, AA’s substantially under represented at all of these other universities by a factor of 40 - 90%.</p>
<p>Although there may be a difference, the reason why there is such a difference is still not settled upon. I find it troubling that there is a continued insistence on a ‘mostly genetic’ reason (with the usual citation of <em>The Bell Curve</em>), when there is still much disagreement. I would not want my public policy based on claims made in <em>The Bell Curve</em> when they are still quite controversial. </p>
<p>It’s interesting that some want to trod out the ‘historical argument’ with respect to holistic admissions–that holistic admissions is one way to exclude Asians, just like holistic admissions was one way to exclude Jews in the past–but when such historical arguments are brought up about the problems with IQ tests and race/ethnicity, for some, they are not taken as seriously.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, I don’t disagree. If one’s prior beliefs come from data, I wouldn’t classify them one way or another. If you feel that athletes are dumb and thus the distribution of their IQs is lower without data, then it could be athletecist.</p>
<p>Academic mismatch exists. It’s not a racial issue. A friend’s non-minority son is (IMHO) suffering from mismatch in his chosen STEM major at an elite university. He dreams of going into research. From his mother’s reports of his current academic struggles, I think he’ll have to find a different career. </p>
<p>In my opinion, his rural high school did not prepare him adequately for his challenging major at an elite university. He probably got an admissions bump because he was a “rural val.” He was smarter than the average bear at his high school–and then he entered the big leagues. </p>
<p>He had a range of college acceptances. Had he chosen a less prestigious college, where his SAT scores were at or above the 50th percentile, he might still be in the running for graduate school in his chosen field. </p>
<p>He’ll probably graduate with a STEM degree, but he won’t make the cut into grad school. Potentially, a student who wanted to be a medical researcher might have to settle for a lab tech position. Is that not something to think about? Is a History degree from Brown worth more than a Chemistry degree from Georgia Tech, for a kid who wants to work in STEM research?</p>