Audit shows UC admission standards relaxed for out-of-staters

Parents Forum
261

@northwesty Berkeley accepts less than 20% of it OOS applicants and 18% of those SIR.

They leave 15000 OOS applicants on the table. Even if only 10% of those SIR, they easily have a pool of another 1000-1500 OOS students they could roll in. Internationally, they admit 10% and about 10% SIR. Right now they leave 13,500 on the table. If only 5% of those SIR it’s 670, for a net of another 1500 - 2000 OOS/International students, just with the current numbers.

It seems pretty obvious that of that increased pool, a good percentage would find the extra $ that UVA or UMich charge. I mean, I can tell you where my D would go if given the option between Westwood and Ann Arbor for the same coin.

262

ucb: other public Unis…

  • charge higher tuition/fees for their flagship;
  • charge higher fees for expensive/vocational majors
  • with rare exception (UVa?), do not provide need-based aid to OOS’ers

Definitely will reduce yield, but if the sole purpose is to raise $$, let’s raise net price. If yield goes down, admit 2x as many. If I recall, UVa only has an OOS yield of ~30%, which is half that of instate, so they admit 2-3x more.

263

Part of the reason for this situation is that CA is so huge (and thus has a very competitive student pool at the top) and has many UC’s at different perceived levels, which leads to much angst. If she lived in, say TN, she’d have the option of one in-state flagship-type uni that is the level of UCSC (if you’re being charitable). So she’d have the same options of one UCSC-like in-state option or going OOS but much less angst.

If she lived in NYS, ID, AR, MT, or many other places like that, paying state taxes for many years would give her in-state options that are worse than UCSC.

So yeah, OOS and Internationals may be taking a few more slots from stellar publics (though it seems like, across the whole UC system, the net effect is 3000 fewer in-state admits at Cal), but in many states in this country, you wouldn’t even have in-state options as respected as UCSC (much less Cal/UCLA/UCSD).

264

Perhaps, but those state taxes would have been a whole lot lower than on the Left Coast, enabling CaliDad to save more each year.

265

@Calidad2020,

Life isn’t fair. We play the hands we are dealt.

Does your daughter really prefer Irvine or Davis over Michigan or Washington? Really?

My son did not get into any medical schools. His applications must have been really crummy because he is incredibly bright. :slight_smile:

There is this method where you add the mcat score + 10 times the gpa and see where the applicants have a shot. My son was qualified almost everywhere.

So what he did instead of blaming schools and talking about unfairness is he went after some jobs. Jobs that required a phd or a md. My son does not have a phd or a md. He got a job and now he works besides people with phds.

Life is not linear. Life is more like a roller coaster. Hopefully not too many downs. How we handle disappointments can make a life.

I do understand venting but I prefer my son’s attitude.

Good luck…I am sure your daughter will find a great school that’s to her liking.

266

One thing’s for sure: UCSC likes their OOS applicants. http://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/_files/factsheets/2015/fall-2015-admissions-table2.pdf

267

@bluebayou, this is true, top marginal CA tax rates are extremely high. However, the states that are next in terms of highest top marginal tax rate are OR, MN, IA, NJ, NYS, and VT (and DC), all with the top marginal rate above 8.5%. Of all those states, only for MN residents can you argue that they have an in-state option that is definitely better than UCSC (they get to attend UW-Madison at in-state rates).

BTW, I can tell you that non-CA people have no clue about the relative prestige of UCSC. They’d think that its on the same level as UCSB, UCI and UCD (and UCR). In fact, they’re likely to confuse UCSC with UCSB (and vice versa).

268

deleted

269

@dstark, that’s kind of unfair. I’ve been reading through this thread and it sounds like @CaliDad2020 is helping his daughter to move on but is also pointing out some obvious flaws in the UC system that appear to be pretty unique to this state. I’d vent too.

I’m not sure I’m understanding your point about med school. Is there some systemic flaw that puts your son’s medical school applications at a disadvantage? From what little you’ve said, it sounds like both the MCAT and his GPA are within his control. If you are saying that he suffers from a structural disadvantage because he hails from the great state of California, then I get it.

270

@3girls3cats,

Vent and then…
I am saying after a disappointment, move on. Move forward. Anger doesn’t do anybody any good, including the person who is angry.

If the UCs were getting enough contributions, there wouldn’t be an out of state issue. :wink:

If being qualified was what mattered, and grades and test scores were solely what counted, my son would have been accepted to tons of schools. He would have had the highest mcat test score in many schools. The highest.

It didn’t happen. He moved on. He did have structural disadvantages. He wasn’t owed anything. That is the way it goes.

A friend of mine graduated with a chemical engineering degree at Berkeley. It was awhile ago. Still he was telling me stories about some of his fellow students who came from overseas or their families came from overseas. They worked so freaking hard. This was their chance to move up and they were taking no prisoners.

Didn’t sound good to me. He didn’t like that aspect of the school. Sometimes, not getting into a school can be a good thing. :slight_smile:

271

“@northwesty Berkeley accepts less than 20% of it OOS applicants”

UVA accepts 23.7% of OOS-ers. W&M accepts 27%. They are smart kids and probably in the same ballpark as the smart kid OOS-ers who get admitted to UCB. But UVA’s and W&M’s OOS-ers are more qualified than their IS-ers. That’s not the case for UCB and UCLA.

Mostly because CA’s population is five times VA’s.

272

The number of public medical school seats in California is small compared to the state population or number of undergraduates who are interested and nominally qualified (by GPA and MCAT score) to be possible admits.

273

That was my point. I asked dstark to outline clearly for me the structural disadvantage his son faced, not just that it was unfair he wasn’t admitted to med school.

The college applications process is anything but fair but there is a real distinction between disappointment that you can’t get into a dream school and that you can’t get into a state school rated higher than your 7th choice…for which you are more than qualified. I would be less sympathetic if this poster was insisting on Cal or UCLA or UCSD. He is not.

274

I agree, @3girls3cats. He is also talking about UCD and UCI, which admit over 60% OOS and over 50% international but only admit about 33% of instate apps. Presumably, the yields are low for OOS and internationals, but still, the OOS admit rate is almost two times higher than the instate rate at Davis.

275

@dstark My D will move on, of course. But to ignore the situation without remark is simply being a patsy. And I don’t think that “just taking it” is the optimum route to take - not to mention it might be interesting and helpful for students in similar situations to know what the reality is.

Here, again, is the situation that had me interested even before my D’s admissions experience: The UC’s have a constant, intractable, persistent low level of female and URM applications, admissions and SIRs to their engineering school.

So, I wondered, why is that? Even in the face of 209 the UC’s in general don’t have that trouble. Even programs like UCB LS Comp Sci has been able to raise it’s SIR yield and % of female matriculation to somewhat reasonable levels. But UCB COE, UCLA Samueli, UCSD Jacobs, UCI Samueli, UCSB etc. have barely been able to move the needle at all and in many cases has regressed. ME at those schools hovers between 15 - 19% female. The URM levels are nearly invisible. The female URM levels… Well, don’t ask.

So, I was interested to see what type of response my D, a 9% with a demonstrated deep commitment to engineering would get. And she got shut out of every UC ME program save UCSC. Which was surprising, and disappointing.

AND then the audit comes out days later that suggests that OOS and international students with LESSER or certainly not substantially greater stats are getting into those programs.

Then I take a deeper look and see that UCLA and Berkeley have a 30% OOS/International student rate compared to 17% at UCSC or 4% at Riverside and I have to wonder why, if the UCs need the tuition money, it can’t come from more kids at Mercer or Riverside or UCSC rather than UCB or UCLA or UCSD. And add in things like UCLA Mech E being 16% women. Comp Sci%E 15% female… And you look at 2006 and find ME is… wait for it. 15% female. And you look at 2005 and it was 14%. And 2004 14%. So UCLA can manage to take, as a %, twice as many non-CA residents than it can female applicants. And yet EVERY YEAR they magically manage to take 15% +/- women EVERY YEAR, despite a law saying you can’t look at gender and despite rising raw numbers of applicants and rising raw numbers of students admitted to the major. You have to wonder how this statistical anomaly has persisted so consistently for so long. (and I would bet a good stats person could look and see if that number seemed artificially stagnant or not.)

And, of course, the UCs have acknowledged the gender and URM issue again and again, but the numbers do not substantially change and simply results in a lot of finger pointing. http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2013/07/18/university-of-california-not-producing-enough-engineers-dean-charges/

276

CaliDad, I tried to send my first-ever PM through CC. Cannot figure out if it went through. Agree w/much of your analysis about the slow train wreck that the UC admissions process has become, but please, please reach out to Michael McCawley, director of admissions, for UCSC, and see whether your daughter can visit campus in April, perhaps sitting in on an engineering class or meeting a professor. He has a great rep on campus. UCSC IS a good school for undergrad. engineering–and I guarantee that even if your daughter’s stats are above average she will meet other students there with similar or higher stats. The school is actively trying to promote women in engineering. Good luck!

277

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/ucsc-1321

Check out the above link and see what it says about female engineers.
I agree with @PajarodelCampo.

@Calidad2020, Why do you think the out of state student percentages are so low at Merced and Riverside?
Because the smarter out of state students don’t want to go there. They think the same as you. :slight_smile:

Your daughter had a very small chance to get into UCB, UCLA or UCSD for engineering. You need to give that up. :slight_smile:

The Irvine campus looks like an industrial park. UCD is in the middle of nowhere. (I do like UC Davis). The campus is still in the middle of nowhere.

278

UCB L&S CS, like all other UCB L&S majors, did not admit by major and still does not.

Back in the mid-late 2000s, L&S CS was not a particularly popular major (about or slightly less than 100 graduates per year in the mid-late 2000s), so that L&S students could declare the major after completing the prerequisites with a 2.0 GPA. Now, it is a much more popular major (over 300 graduates per year in recent years), so the minimum GPA was raised to 3.0 a few years ago, then more recently raised to 3.3.

UC is supposed to take in the top 12.5% of the graduating high school seniors (now defined as top 9% statewide and top 9% in local context). However, this is for UC overall, not any particular campus. The overall UC system size relative to California’s population is similar to that of the size of the “top two” publics in MI, VA, NC, relative to their state populations. So the equivalent student in those states gets to go, roughly, to one of the “top two” publics. In California, it is “top nine”, so those specifically aiming for the “top two” (or even “top three, … five, …, eight”) may be disappointed. But your daughter did get into a UC as intended at the macro level.

If there were only two UC campuses, each with 94,000 undergraduate students, the admission situation would more closely resemble that in MI, VA, NC “top two” publics. The fact that there are nine UC campuses means much more student choice in terms of public schools which would, in many other states, be considered “flagship level”, but also means that there is much more of a hierarchy of both selectivity and perception, which causes some students (probably particularly non-resident students) to think of the less selective ones as being “unworthy”.

279

@dstark Well, UCSC, UCM and UCR still only accept a limited % of OOS/International students - Riverside and Merced’s international admit rate is <50%. If we are going to lower our standards to attract OOS students why not lower them there first? Even if you only swapped 100 students’ tuitions (something easily done) from UCLA Samueli or UCB COE to UCSC, UCM or UCR (not the same student, obviously, just the tuition dollars - which all look exactly the same.) you could enroll more resident students in UCLA Samueli or UCB COE. Which means more students staying in state, getting an education that can lead to a decent career means more tax $$ - kind of makes common sense, esp. if you are lowering or not seriously raising the standards.

Might not be my daughter but it woud be someone’s daughter - maybe even someone’s URM daughter - and could help normalize those embarrassing diversity numbers that Dean Sastry and everyone else has claimed they want to fix.

You can argue it all you want (although why you are so invested, I’m not sure. Do you work for the UC’s or something? I mean, if your kid was recently shut out of Med School they must be a bit older, no?) but there is a very obvious and unnecessary inequity in the UC system. It is not slanted toward aiding the resident student and their tax-paying family, it is slanted toward OOS and International applicants at the more “prestigious” programs. I wonder why that is.

280

@3girls3cats, well this was what I was getting at earlier. Because CA is a massive state and has so many UCs of different perceived prestige, getting in to “7th best UC” causes angst even though it is better than any public in NYS (which is a huge state in its own right).
It’s as good or better than any public in NYS+New England (and that’s being a little charitable to UConn and UMass), which has almost as many people as CA.

So if someone in CA feels that getting in to UCSC is unfair, how should a kid in NYS feel when she doesn’t even have a school with UCSC’s reputation as an in-state option?

BTW, do CA people really differentiate between UCSB/UCI/UCD/UCSC (outside of HS)? People from outside CA definitely don’t. And if Cal/UCLA/UCSD were unlikely anyway and those other 4 are about the same, does it matter all that much whether it’s UCSB or UCSC?