CSUs have become less capacity strained over the last decade, so most of them now admit to most majors at the CSU minimum (2.5 recalculated HS GPA). But a few campuses are highly popular and more selective (e.g. CPSLO, SDSU, SJSU).
The non impacted campuses list “State of California” as their local area for admission preference.
The local area preference is presumably due to the CSUs being mostly broad access universities serving lots of local commuters.
We are discussing state public universities, not private schools. I don’t determine what Cali parents like or dislike; the fact remains they view some schools as undesirable.
Much of the world’s public universities manage this with transparency and get a diverse student body. See, eg, McGill. Clearly it can be done.
Perhaps you prefer something like Arizona, where the highly concentrated population means that it can have two flagships in the two largest metro areas, with both being very large, so that they can admit frosh who know that they can get admitted with a 3.0 HS GPA.
But you may then complain that they have to offer remedial courses because many frosh need them.
For a start, the counseling department telling the students to apply to a non-competitive CSU and to Merced if they are applying any higher in the UC system.
But beyond that, I don’t know enough about the UC system to know why this student fell through the cracks. Let’s ignore testing completely for now. Was she denied or waitlisted at all the UCs because she was compared to the students in her high-performing town, and not given extra consideration for the family’s low income?
Who said it did? I’m saying the obsession over everything else is worse now after t-blind.
I do believe you are mixing up thought streams here… I did not say transparency changed after T-blind… please, I do not want to defend things I did not say. Having to defend things I didn’t say or intend is tiring.
Thank you for sharing! Wow, she sounds great and I can see her situation having less stress with t-blind. Best of luck to her 
Well I do agree that we won’t see it 
But targets are available in athletic pathways. And some schools (MIT/Georgetown/GTech/etc) are avoiding lawsuits so far… But yes they don’t want to give up any control over shaping their class. The slippery slope concept though should mean gpa is next?
Ok, that’s not serious but I do think picking testing as the scapegoat seems like a convenient vs blatantly obvious choice (I say this since almost all entries in the application are correlated to income, some more than testing)
worriedmomucb:
But what exactly would transparency look like?
Good question. Reveal some institutional priorities? I mean maybe my test score can be a sigma or two down if I play a mean cello? I’ll have to think about this as nothing is coming up right now 
A good counselor absolutely should. My daughter’s counselor, for example, absolutely did. But, as with everything, not all school counselors are created equally. Or, more likely, they may be very competent, but are stretched waaaayyy too thin to give this kind of guidance to all students. But I agree that all counselors should advise students to do this. Well, of course, the other thing is a counselor can recommend this, but not all students will do it. Which is of course their choice. And some do make this choice thoughtfully, deciding that they would rather do two years at CC then TAG into a UC. Which is a great option and saves a lot of money, too. But, yes, counselors should be explaining all of these options to graduating seniors.
Maybe, but I think part of the issue is that priorities change. Your cello may be in high demand one year, and not at all in demand the next. I think that would create an even greater sense of uncertainty and frustration for students. And yet it would be hard for universities to entirely do away with such priorities when building a new class.
The most recent data I could quickly find puts the student:counselor ratio in California at 572:1. The vast majority of those counselors are social emotional counselors who also have responsible for college counseling. As we all know the social emotional piece of their jobs takes precedence, as it should, and is more than a full time job due to demand. Many of these counselors don’t have any training in college counseling either. Only the well resourced public schools can have dedicated college counselors, and even then, the C:S ratio can be quite high.
The point is…these counselors are not able to meet with each student and help them with college lists and tell students to have a CSU on the list, or Merced or whatever. They can’t help with PIQs or applications, etc. They can’t help the kids who aren’t going to college with career planning, or trade school research, etc. It’s just not possible.
So many Texas schools publish a chart of their admissions guarantees. If you want to attend ( guaranteed) Texas Tech, for example, you need either 1) top quartile class rank and SAT of 1180 or 2) 3rd quartile class rank and score of 1280 ( with variations in the middle which I don’t recall). More public universities used to do that in Texas and it seemed to help some.
Well yes, so they’d have to report each year. If Brown and Duke need a cellist this year, maybe top cellists should apply ED there if there is fit. But if Harvard and Yale have three more than they really need, and that is an applicant’s main EC… well, maybe they don’t spend their REA there. It’s not that one is trying to figure out what EC to do… that each student should do for themselves. But if they know what the schools need/want, then they know how to plan their applications across the schools where they have fit.
(I’m trying to stretch the athletics analogy here. Ivies allow some slack in stats for their atheltic recruits while NESCACs don’t really, so it’s hard to say what works for whom. But if a lacrosse player can get into Princeton with a 32 ACT, a sought after cellist should too. It would be that once the cellist got a 32, she can concentrate on her playing instead of her test scores. Just like if a point guard got their 32, they could keep working on their crossover. Anyway, none of this is thought out enough).
You could math it out if ambitious or curious enough to do it, but my suspicion is that, at least in California, you would still have far too many students for available spaces in the flagship(s). Which, again, I think is the reason they do have the 9% guarantee so that top do know that they have a guaranteed spot at a UC (albeit not flagship). I am not sure how California would be able to get more specific in its guarantee than that. Again, I have not mathed it out so can’t give any numbers to validate my claim.
Yes, it could be like sports recruiting. Although I am not sure whether most colleges have the resources for a full recruiting process for ECs that are not money makers for the school. But, yes, you could recruit musicians, dancers, anything else you want.
Aside from a recruiting process, I am not sure how more of an “open call” for X would work. Would that not perhaps encourage more lesser- acadmically-qualified applicants to apply? And, heck, possibly even accepted to the great consternation of those who are looking for rack and stack admissions? Harvard puts out a call for a cellist and gets an amazing applicant who is very musically accomplished but has a 3.7 GPA and 1380 SAT and the outcry is raised among the 4.0 students who are also competent cellists that Harvard admissions is not transparent and inherently unfair and that they can’t understand why they didn’t get the nod over the selected cellist. You will never satisfy everyone, imo.
Yes, and so it goes. Athletic recruiting and standards for student athletes are not without controversy. Even right here on CC
In an earlier post, you mentioned that student “stumbled a bit” freshman year, but was a NMF, so grades must be good. It’s my understanding a 3.5 GPA is considered competitive for NMF, and some have grades below this threshold. Grades are not necessarily at typical admission levels for the listed UCs. While this is one possibility, there are many others. There is not enough information listed to know why this student was not initially admitted. The 13 criteria considered for admission are listed at How applications are reviewed | UC Admissions . Perhaps you have an idea which criteria might be lacking. I would not assume the admission decision primarily relates to income level or income of zip code.
That we can agree on for sure; we can never please everyone. But an awful lot are unhappy now.
Maybe the advantage of a McGill is those musicians aren’t competing for general admission to the school, just auditioning for the music department, presumably. If they want to study history, their musical skills do not factor into admission. There are reserved slots for music majors based on musical ability ( like the athletic slots here).
Yes, I’m modeling it after athletics recruiting. It’s the first thing that came to mind.
And the thought was trying to explain how transparency can reduce stress regarding testing. Not that it would necessarily reduce stress regarding admissions overall. It is a finite number of seats so there will be the same number of “disappointed” families.
In athletic recruiting as far as I can tell, certain things become important (skill in sport, coaching, fit in terms of academic freedom, etc) but other certain things are reduced (gpa/sat requirements). So my point is that one can reduce the academic demands/stress a bit (including testing) by meeting institutional priorities.
Harvard puts out a call for a cellist and gets an amazing applicant who is very musically accomplished but has a 3.7 GPA and 1380 SAT and the outcry is raised among the 4.0 students who are also competent cellists that Harvard admissions is not transparent and inherently unfair and that they can’t understand why they didn’t get the nod over the selected cellist
Well, if Harvard picks a softball pitcher that is hurling at 70mph with a nasty rise but has a 3.7gpa, no pitcher that is sitting there with a 4.0gpa is going to complain about that with her 60mph rise. And I can say that when we get up there in musical talent, you can hear the gold medal winners vs the others.
For the one recruited it can, but not for other students who cry foul when someone with lower grades and/or test scores gets a seat at a highly selective school when they did not. And so we end up in essentially the same spot: some benefitting for the system as it currently functions, and others not benefitting and feeling like they haven’t been treated fairly and objectively. Would this nonetheless achieve greater transparency? Maybe a bit, but even with a recruiting process, there are always other factors that go into the decision and, as they say, “it’s complicated.” And when things all complicated, they can feel less transparent, and someone is always going to believe its somehow unfair.
And then once the new recruit (pitcher, cellist, etc) takes their place at Prestige U, you will have people speculating about the recruit’s “lack of academic preparation” because they got in based on non-academic factors. And then we get to about 150 posts back in this very thread.
For many NCAA D1 sports, a recruited athlete will receive a verbal offer by the college coach very early (ex. 6/15 after sophomore year or 9/1 in junior year). Most of the recruits will not have taken the SAT/ACT, yet. Instead, the college coach will tell them what score they need to achieve (as well recommended grades and courses) to keep their spot before they submit their REA or ED application on 11/1 of their senior year. This admissions process is unique to recruited athletes.
Of course it would be highly selective but it is very workable. If you only use UCLA and UCB as analogs to UT Austin you have a better ratio of seats to population than Texas does and they make it work based on class ranking. Is this perfect, no but the system as it works right now is seen as very broken by many and they have good reason to see things as they do.
Capped weighted GPA, Test Blind, short PIQ questions, etc. makes the system feel like there is no desire to measure excellence but rather a goal to create a system where admissions can be molded to fit non-academic priorities. This is becoming a big issue, especially for doughnut hole families in the Bay Area who are starting to feel like the system is being set up to discount everything that their kids worked to achieve but giving them no affordable top tier options.
Hm. Okay last post on this idea from me as I’m not sure I’m expressing it clearly
If you know that softball is your main EC and the main hook into Harvard, but you see that your riseball is not up to snuff, as disappointing as it is, you move on… but move on knowing why.
If a non-softballer had better grades but didn’t get in, how could they complain about the 3.7gpa 1400SAT pitcher when they already know Harvard’s institutional priorities includes one pitcher? That spot was never available for a non-softball applicant. They’d be disappointed and they could disagree with the institutional priority, but I don’t think they can fairly call foul.
The following method fails for schools that don’t admit into majors, but another way to think about it is to bin via majors and have applicants judged within majors. E.g. EECS needs a 740 math score, while physics majors need a 750. Once you get it, you don’t need to take test again, as you’ll be judged on other things from that point on. No need to squeeze out the 800.
(Yet another take: Yale said that they want to look at SAT scores, but once that hurdle has been crossed they don’t look at the scores again and move onto other factors… so what if they told us how they do that initial screen? The point is that revealing certain things can reduce stress associated with the academic screening process including testing).
Ok, Seacrest out.
Oh please don’t give up on my account. I certainly didn’t mean for my comments to have that effect. I get what you’re saying, I just think there’s no winning in a sense. No matter what you do, no matter how you reason it, someone is always going to dislike it and feel it isn’t fair. In every game, someone loses. In competitive admissions, too, only the stakes are much higher than in a game and the investment for some/many is so great. And it’s really hard when you don’t see the expected return on your investment, especially when you see others getting that return and you may even suspect they didn’t invest as much as you and don’t deserve it as much. That stinks no matter the reason and some people will always seek to argue that the reason is faulty and unfair. But really no one is entitled to admission to any university, except maybe community college who have a mandate to accept everyone. And certainly not to highly rejective schools that have far, far more qualified applicants than they have spots and must figure out how best to allocate this scarcest of resources.
So it’s not you. I just don’t think there’s an answer that will satisfy everyone. Although I appreciate when people put forth ideas.
McGill is large relative to its provincial population, so the numbers game does not require it to be hyper selective. McGill is about 3/4 as large as a UC campus, but is in a province with 1/5 the population of California (and much of that province prefers French speaking universities).
In addition, Canadian provinces have much more consistent courses and grades in high schools than US states. No external standardized tests are needed for domestic applicants, although standardized achievement testing is used for a portion of high school course grades.
Given this thread is about testing . . . in my opinion obsession with tests and lack of transparency in the application process have not become worse with the spread of TO. In case you are wondering, this is my observation and not in response to anything in particular that you claimed.
Maybe with the exception of Santa Cruz, all the UCs you mentioned are tough admissions, and Santa Cruz is far from a true safety. Without seeing her transcript and knowing more about the “mistakes,” I don’t think we can even know whether she had a solid expectation of admission at any of them. As @Data10 said, she may not have had the grades. It doesn’t sound like she qualified for either the statewide or local guarantee, which are top 9 percent locally or in the state. You can look up the school and see the admissions rates at the link below. I assume you are talking Santa Clara County, unless you are talking about the SoCal South Bay, which would be LA County.
More generally, the student seems to have underestimated the selectivity of the UCs and overestimated her own admissions chances, in-state and out. This is pretty common. It is easy to get caught up in the frenzy, and often families see older peers getting accepted without understanding all the facts/hooks, so they assume it is easier than it is. Sometimes this happens even when counselors (if there are counselors) try to convince the students to include safeties and expand the search.
At the highly competitive schools with which I am most familiar the counselors are good, but they spend a shocking amount of time trying to talk parents and students down from too high expectations, and trying to convince students that there are excellent schools beyond the name brand elites. This seems especially common when students have high test scores, and when families set their sites only on the famous elites. Not saying that happened here, but it does happen. As crazy is it may sound, some families want to consider Berkeley a safety.
UCSC is a good school in an interesting town, and I wish the student well.