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

Parents Forum
381

@ucbalumnus
"UMich is an exception compared to many other public flagships. Purdue, Texas A&M, Minnesota, and Virginia Tech all force engineering frosh to go through a weed-out process requiring a GPA substantially higher than 2.0. Washington does for most students (a few may be direct-admitted). Wisconsin admits to major, but requires a GPA substantially higher than 2.0 to stay in most engineering majors.

Some of those privates you mention are wealthy enough to maintain excess capacity to accommodate students changing major freely. At a public university, you would probably hear complaints about “wasted capacity” while more students are clamoring to study engineering. "

That is interesting as the UC LS seems to have no problem “maintaining excess capacity” to “accommodate students changing major freely” and I’m pretty sure they are public universities. Maybe even California public universities?

UMich admits to engineering school, doesn’t require anything more than academic eligibility. UWash admits at least some students to major and I think others then apply into majors, with each major having different requirements. I think Penn State, if I recall correctly, has minimum requirements for various engineering majors that must be met prior to Jr year? Some major require 3.0, some 2.0.

Seems odd that if the UC lib arts schools, UMich and Penn State engineering can handle it, that the UC engineering schools would be too inept to manage it.

382

@dstark

"You can change majors to engineering.
Just looked it up.

http://www.seasoasa.ucla.edu/ls-to-engineering/"

You can APPLY to change from LS to an Engineering major one time only with the prerequisites below. That is, of course, very different from places like UMich were you are accepted into the engineering school and then chose any major you would like. Or MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Brown - or UCLA L+S - where you are admitted to the entire school and choose any major you like.

This is (some) of the UCLA “fine print.”

"To be eligible to change your major into Engineering you must fulfill the following requirements.
(1) Enrolling in an “Engineering Course load” aka at least 1 Math and 1 Science/Engineering course from the listed prep courses per term while enrolled in a minimum of 12 units per term

First year students may apply after completing at least 2 quarters that meet this workload
Second year students may apply after completing at least 3 quarters that meet this workload

See Prep courses as defined below and the Change of major FAQ for more clarification
(2) Earning a 3.500 GPA in the Prep courses enrolled. Students who are applying for Materials Engineering or Civil Engineering are eligible with a 3.300 GPA in the Prep courses. Students who are applying for Electrical Engineering are eligible with a 3.400 GPA in the in the Prep courses.

Students applying for Computer Science or Computer Science & Engineering ONLY: There is an ADDITIONAL requirement. Please note that it may take more time to change your major to CS or CSE.(3) CS 32 or Pic 10 C must be completed or enrolled in at the time of application

Note: Only one change of major from the College of Letters & Science is permitted and subsequent requests to change to a different HSSEAS major will be denied.

What are my chances of getting in? Am I guaranteed approval if I have a 3.5 GPA?

It is impossible to convey the chances of being approved a change of major as the applicant pool changes each quarter. We receive different numbers of applications from the students in the College of Letters and Science and within the School of Engineering. Each cohort is assessed quarterly to determine available space and how many applicants can be accommodated. These figures change quarterly.

Due to these factors, we do not guarantee a change of major, however if there is space in the cohort size and a student meets all the criteria for their major of choice, then you can be confident that you have a strong application."

383

@Calidad2020,

Are you going to appeal to Irvine or Davis?

384

Engineering in general requires more resources, labs, etc. than your average liberal arts major. We had to pay more as full pay instate parents for both of our engineering sons (UVa, Virginia Tech) than if they had been arts and sciences majors. The economics of that made sense from both a personal and taxpayer perspective.

In general, most engineering kids (if not pursuing private or OOS public options, commuting from home , going to community college, etc. ) in Virginia would probably be looking at UVa or VT. If not accepted, they may end up at GMU, ODU, VCU, etc. if they want to stay instate. California seems to have similar avenues to attain an engineering degree if that is the goal ( CC, articulation agreements, other UC’s, CSu’s).

385

UCB L&S CS is not an open major; capacity restrictions mean that they require a 3.3 GPA in the prerequisite courses to enter the major (frosh admitted to L&S are not directly admitted to the major). Note that it has been capacity limited for most years since the 1980s, with the exception being between the tech bubble crash of the early 2000s until 2012(?) or so, when the GPA minimum was 2.0.

Some other popular L&S majors are also capacity limited (e.g. economics, psychology, art practice, statistics).

386

@Calidad, you and your daughter have an opportunity to make the best out of the admissions outcomes . Look for the best in the schools that did accept her (including UCSC) . If she is determined to be an engineer, she can thrive in many places. Focusing on the schools that did not accept her does not move you forward.

387

@ucbalumnus Nonetheless: LS allows students to pick their major, some, have minimums and prerequisites.

UMich allows students in engineering to pick their major.

Penn State allows students in engineering to pick their major, with some varying grade requirments (as far as I remember, had a friend’s son attend there a bit ago.)

UWash is combo…

Not sure how UofTenn Chattangooga, Tenn State or the other publics with high gender diversity do it.

388

Re: #386

For many of the popular state flagship level schools, it is more like “be picked by their major” in a competitive admission process rather than “pick their major”. Many students consider it to be less than desirable to have to go through another admission process to get into their desired major after enrolling.

If you want the engineering division with high student demand to admit all frosh as engineering undeclared students, then you need to consider the following options:

a. Potentially high GPA thresholds or high level of competition in the admission-to-major process, at least for the most popular majors relative to their capacity (probably majors like EECS, ME, BioE). It is almost certain that a significant number of students will not get their preferred majors.
b. Admit fewer students to the engineering division, so that the more popular departments will not run into capacity limits (or, if they do, the capacity limits will not make the GPA thresholds or level of competition in the admission-to-major process very high). But then fewer total students will be able to study engineering in aggregate, meaning that some capacity will be unused.
c. Expand the engineering departments where demand heavily exceeds capacity. This would be the most expensive option, and probably least feasable in an era of budget cuts that you favor, particularly since engineering faculty and facilities are more expensive than for many other subjects (math, English, history, etc.). Expansion also needs to consider campus capacity limitations.

Which of the above would you choose to do if a school where engineering majors had high demand exceeding capacity went to an admit-as-engineering-undeclared model that you like?

389

UVa and Virginia Tech both admit to engineering but the actual discipline within that is determined after taking initial courses that all engineering students take. You are exposed to engineering ( with engineering exploration type courses) before having to commit to a particular major. Many 17 or 18 year olds really have no clue about a particular field of study so I had no problem with my kids taking initial college classes and being exposed to different types of engineering before they had to commit to a particular field of study.

390

@sevmom I haven’t been looking at this as a dad for a while now. As I’ve said many times, my D has great options and we will figure this out.

I am looking at this as a taxpayer and citizen.

My question, even back in November was: “why, if the UC engineering deans, the UC president, UC engineering students, and, it seems, many California business and parents, want us to produce a more diverse crop of engineering graduates from the UCs, are we failing miserably at doing that?”

That’s really it: Why do we systematically admit and enroll classes of 20-25% women 7-10% URM (and 30-40% OOS/International) when Dean Sastry, President Napolitano and many others have said repeatedly that our lack of gender and URM diversity is bad for our schools and bad for our state.

When UCSD undergrad engineering GPA over a 10+ year span show clearly that women do better than men at UCSD Jacobs undergrad judging by GPA. So it stands to reason a few women might raise the mean GPA a .1 or .2… It also stands to reason that PERHAPS - and only PERHAPS the criteria for admissions contains one or more structural impediments to women getting into engineering - and that that may not only hurt the women themselves, and the state long-term, also hurt the program itself.

That is the gist of my argument.

We hear that UCB COE can’t possible accept students to an open-major, or even a partially open major situation, like UMich, UWash, Penn State (and UCB LS) because… I dunno why really.

And some people seem to believe that the consistency or the gender ratios over time are normal (possibly, I don’t know enough to be sure - would love to hear from a good stats person.)

But I think it is odd, even shameful, that our deans are so inept as to not be able to enact reforms they themselves advocate.

391

@ucbalumnus Are you a UC admin or something?

And what do you get for 50,000 College Confidential postings? (I mean really?) Upgrades? Early boarding privilege? A tag for your luggage.

I really like this convo because everyone can clearly see who is invested in the status quo and terrified by the suggestion of change and who actually is just a regular CA taxpayer interested in exploring solutions.

It’s hard to understand where the fevered resistance comes from and why certain posters get so frothy about it, but
seeing so clearly how fierce and rabid resistance is even to the suggestion of change, we all get to see what our girls are up against. For some reason some men involved in engineering get very unsettled by the idea that perhaps the gender inequality should be lessened.

Change will come slow, and clearly the UC’s will be at the end of the train, but I guess them’s the breaks.

392

Re #390

Why don’t you consider the questions in #387 instead of going off on ad hominem attacks?

BTW, UC Merced appears to have plenty of engineering capacity to follow your preferred model with no or minimal restrictions on choosing an engineering major, at least for now. So perhaps your daughter should have applied there.

393

I can’t see how focusing so much energy on UCB COE is helping you . There are certainly initiatives that have been made to make engineering more inclusive to women, URM’s, etc. Some schools have special programs, mentoring, etc. but some of this takes time. And engineering is certainly not for everyone. Each state/ school/ flagship has their own way of dealing with things.

394

As the official data suggested, the male applicants for Berkeley EECS was 4 times over the females in 2015. If the girls love engineering so much, why don’t they apply? You seize your own opportunity. Nobody is going to just hand it to you.

395

RE #391

It is interesting that you think “Are you a UC admin” is an attack. And it is interesting you don’t answer a simple question.

I, too, probably have boards where I have 50k posts. And they are boards where I have a professional interest.

It is also interesting that every suggestion, the UCB COE can’t do. UMich can - but UCB is not rich enough. Penn State and UWash can, but they are… uh, different? UCB LS can, but…

You still avoid (and even confuse) the central issue. You keep (intentionally, perhaps, maybe with less-than-honorable intent??) mentioning my daughter, even after I have clearly stated what I, personally, am interested in exploring is the lack of gender and URM diversity in UC engineering schools. My daughter did not apply to Merced because SHE is not interested in the model of applying to the engineering school with a chance to pick her major. SHE knows what she wants to study. I am interested in the effects of that model.

If you had honestly been trying to follow the discussion you would have realized that what I was asking was why UCB L&S could so effectively increase it RAW NUMBER of female CS majors, as well as it’s SIR/Yield when UCB COE CS&E could not increase its raw numbers, even in the face of almost 4x the number of female applicants over a few years.

Now, let’s see if you can follow the discussion. Let’s go back to the beginning. I’ll type s-l-o-w-l-y.

I’m not the one who came up with the idea that the gender and URM diversity in the UC engineering schools was a problem, or needed to be ameliorated. I was not even aware of how bad the numbers were until recently.

Yet…

As early as Jan 30, 2001, UC Chancellor Berdahl flew to Cambridge to sign off on a statement admitting to the gender and URM diversity problem (this one among faculty) and promising to address it. (BTW, that was 15 years ago. This year’s entering class was 4 years old.)

“CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Presidents, chancellors, provosts and 25 women professors of nine top research universities met all day Monday at MIT in an unprecedented dialogue on equitable treatment of women faculty in science and engineering. “Institutions of higher education have an obligation, both for themselves and for the nation, to fully develop and utilize all the creative talent available,” the leaders said in a unanimous statement. “We recognize that barriers still exist” for women faculty.
The 184-word statement was approved by… Chancellor Robert Berdahl of the University of California at Berkeley…” http://news.mit.edu/2001/gender

In 2005 UC Chancellor Birgeneau wrote an OP ED piece in the LA Times about how 209 had “backfired” on UCB. He concentrated on the URM effect, but he said this, based on his own experience at MIT:

“In my view, it is unrealistic to think that one can judge a person’s likelihood of success at Berkeley without taking into account his race and gender. I spent many years on the faculty at MIT. For decades, women were significantly underrepresented in the undergraduate student body there. So MIT aggressively recruited young women and in the admissions process explicitly took into account negative environmental effects on their SAT scores. We found that it took at most two semesters for these women to catch up to their male peers. Most important, by the time of graduation the failure or withdrawal rate of these women was significantly less than that of their male classmates.” http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/03/29_oped.shtml

In 2005 a big audit highlighting the continuing issues with gender and URM diversity in engineering at many schools including the UCs. https://faculty.diversity.ucla.edu/gender-equity/women-in-science-and-engineering/DiversityReportFinal.pdf

In 2010: The UC regents issued a diversity statement affirming ”The University of California’s acknowledgement “of the acute need to remove barriers to the recruitment, retention, and advancement of talented students, faculty, and staff from historically excluded populations who are currently underrepresented”. (Regents’ Policy 4400 University of California Diversity Statement, September 2010)

And again in 2010 there was a report about declining numbers of women and URMSs in Silicon Valley and the education system: “Others point to the public education system, noting that recent achievement test scores for black and Latino students have been even lower in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties than for the state overall. “It certainly is a self-reinforcing cycle,” said AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the school of information at UC-Berkeley.” http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_14383730

In NOV 2011 Dean Sastry expressed commitment to increasing gender and URM diversity. http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/cal-engineering-dean-supports-diversity-plan-13701

In FEB 2012 UCB COE hired a new dean to “promote equity” - “UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering is striving to increase gender and ethnic diversity among its students following allegations of discrimination last semester, although efforts are progressing gradually.” http://www.dailycal.org/2012/02/15/engineering-school-seeks-to-build-diversity/

And in 2015 Dean Sastry wrote to tell us what was working… “These examples offer some illustration of the wide-ranging initiatives and pilot programs we are bringing together in a cohesive pipeline to boost the number of women in engineering. I look forward to reporting on further progress, and I welcome your comments at dean_sastry@berkeley.edu.” (and I do encourage everyone to write.) http://engineering.berkeley.edu/2015/06/more-women-engineering-whats-working

And how was the enrollment over that time?

UCB COE:
2008. 144 Frosh women admitted: 26%
2009: 109 Frosh women admitted: 23%
2010: 100 Frosh women admitted: 21%/women receiving degrees: 17%
2012: women earning UG engineering degrees: 18%
…
2106: ?? Frosh women admitted: 26% (total women in Eng.)

So, despite more than 15 years of Deans, Presidents and Chancellors declaring there was a problem and pledging to do something about it there has been NO significant change in the % of female (or URM) admits or graduates from UCB COE.

That is the issue.

So, if you don’t like my ideas to help ameliorate the situation our Deans, Presidents and Chancellors (as well as students and faculty) have identified and failed to address, how do you propose helping to keep our top UCB officials from looking like liars and buffoons? What is your recipe to enact the changes they have clearly stated need to occur?

396

No, I am not an administrator or other employee of UC.

Never said that they cannot do it. But what I am pointing out, which you ignore, is that emulating schools like Washington, Texas A&M, Purdue, Virginia Tech, etc. (and even L&S CS) in this respect by admitting all engineering students as engineering undeclared is not without undesirable effects, namely forcing students to compete for their majors in a weed-out process. To reduce the level of such weed-out competition, either the total number of engineering students admitted has to be reduced (which is presumably not what you want), or the most popular departments need to be expanded (which costs money that you do not want to fund).

In terms of female (and/or URM) students, do you think that making enrolled engineering students compete for their majors in a weed-out process would help increase the number of female (and/or URM) students?

There is no “easy” or cost-free recipe. If you want to specifically improve the situation at UCB, then you need to increase the capacity of the popular engineering majors there to relieve the student demand pressure against the capacity limits so that changing to a later-entry-to-major without turning it into an aggressive weed-out process can be done. But that would be expensive. (And, while that may help with various problems, it is not guaranteed to address the women (and/or URM) issues.)

In the context of the whole UC system, it is a good thing that they are putting in a lot of engineering capacity at UCM, where there is room to expand relatively inexpensively. But that obviously does not satisfy you or others who want to see that capacity at UCB.

As was discussed previously, the following was linked by another poster:
http://rkwan.me/blog/ucb-eecs-lscs-admissions
For both EECS and L&S intended CS majors, the female admit rate was higher, but the male yield rate was higher. It does not appear that there is much magically different about the various frosh application paths here. The large increase in the L&S path is that frosh admission to L&S is not by major, so the students intending a given major can expand their numbers into the large L&S pool more easily. But the expansion in interest in L&S CS means that students now have to make a 3.3 GPA to get into the major. Note that expansion into the division-level application pool is much less possible in the CoE, which is a much smaller division (in which EECS is already the largest major by far).

397

This announcement came out in January but I’m not sure if it’s been mentioned in this thread.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-engineering-dean-announces-major-expansion-plan

UCLA has a appointed a woman as dean of the engineering school, plans to enroll 20% more students and increase permanent faculty by almost 30%. Definitely a “top down” strategy to address concerns.

398

This statement sounds like if we want to address the gender or URM inequality issue we need to increase our population first.

399

@momsquad I had seen a similar article and if it goes through it is a step in the right direction. (although it will be interesting to see how long it takes to implement. They don’t have 2016 enrollment figures yet, but they are still 70 or 80 shy of the high enrollment of 3311 a few years ago.)

@ucbalumnus

Here, if I ran the circus, are a few things I would look to do:

  1. Easiest: Increase the OOS/international tuition by at least 2k (easily more if we want), most certainly for the engineering degrees. (At UCLA alone, that would be about 1000 students x 2000 = 2 mill of free money a year.) Insist that money go - dollar for dollar - to pay for additional Cali kids - or use the money to decrease OOS/international and increase instate proportionally if they can’t up the raw enrollment number. (UMich charges 44.5K average for OOS/International and has tons of applications/acceptances. I do not buy the theory that increase in tuition would affect demand enough to affect quality of entry. In fact, if we increase tuition and accept less OOS/international, we would likely increase quality of OOS/international.)

  2. Expand the pool of those that can be admitted to a “will decide later” engineering pool. I am not convinced that it will have a major impact the enrollment numbers/engineering budgets. I think if UMich, Penn State, UWash and others are smart enough to figure it out, UCB and UCLA can too. The fear of “an excessive weed-out process” seems over-done since the application system is already an “excessive weed-out process” - why let dead-wood float just because they got in? Isn’t the admissions supposed to be about selecting for success?

  3. Look at the admission criteria and be sure that they are selecting for success not to create “maximum barrier to entry.” As I noted, if you look at UCSD engineering GPAs, women outperform men every year since 2002 except one. Women at UCSD overall have a higher 4 year, 5 year and 6 year graduation rate. UCSD adcoms are doing a better job of selection in the women they are admitting than the men. Why is that? What in the criteria that they are using is not as good an indicator of success as they assume it is or will be? Many studies have show that GPA, for instance, is as good, if not better an indicator of success in college from a GPA/graduation rate perspective. Do the UC engineering Adcoms use a flawed model when admitting students?

  4. Cut back on administration expenses/excesses. The regents of the UCs have done a terrible job. They have mismanaged the pension funding, http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-spending-20151011-story.html The number of administrators has increase at a dramatic rate, cost-per-student for “student services” has increased by almost 1000 per student in the past few years. Frankly, the system has been mismanaged. The UCs have a huge budget. They need more accountability.

  5. Increase the 4 and 5 year grad rates. Too many students take 5 or 6 years to graduate, filling seats and costing them (and the schools) money.

I have an additional suggestion that is politically tricky, and open to abuse/“mission creep” (and, given the Regents, President and Dean’s spotty records, might not be worth the risk). In reality the UC tuition for instate could easily be increased and the financial aid levels increased in a way that would allow families that can afford it to pay an extra 4 or 5000 per year tuition. That would still make the UCs attractive in contrast to OOS and privates for many middle-income families. The important and difficult issue would be maintaining the affordability for in state families at other income levels. But schools like Pitt, Wm+Mary, U Vermont, UofI urbana have higher in-state tuition rates. Harvard and Stanford have done this with their tuition/aid relationship and it seems to work for them, but I admit it is something that can easily be messed up and might not be worth the risk in a system as unruly and already mismanaged as the UCs.

400

You write as if Michigan, Penn State, and Washington are all similar in this respect. Michigan has enough capacity in all engineering majors (perhaps with funding help from the 43% non-resident students paying lots of extra tuition) to allow undeclared engineering students to declare any engineering major if they complete the frosh level courses with a 2.0 GPA: http://www.engin.umich.edu/college/academics/bulletin/rules/registration#declaring%28orchanging%29major . On the other hand, most Washington engineering majors have too little capacity, so that the weeding for those not directly admitted to the major is aggressive: https://www.engr.washington.edu/current/admissions/admitstats . Penn State is somewhere in-between: https://advising.psu.edu/entrance-major-requirements-college-engineering-entering-penn-state-summer-2015 .

Here is a simple explanation of what the choices are:

Suppose you have three rooms, one that can hold 300 people, one that can hold 200 people, and one that can hold 100 people. If you admit people to each specific room, then you can fill each room exactly to its capacity. This is analogous to UCB and UCLA.

But if you admit 600 people to an ante-room and tell them to choose a specific room after entering the ante-room, how can you be sure that they 300 of them will go to the 300 person room, 200 will go to the 200 person room, and 100 will go to the 100 person room? If 150 and 50 go to the 200 and 100 person rooms, but 400 try to get into the 300 person room, how will you determine who to let into the 300 person room, and what will you do with those you do not let into that room (and do not want to go into one of the other rooms)? This is analogous to Washington.

Alternatively, if you let only 400 into the ante-room, then there is much less chance that too many people will choose any of the rooms. But then you will be leaving 200 of your capacity of 600 unused and wasted. This is analogous to Michigan.

Which model do you prefer?

No one here disagrees on a macro-level. However, it is a difficult political problem. I mentioned before that one of the ideas was to eliminate the UCB College of Chemistry administrative structure (not the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, which would move to the College of Letters and Science and College of Engineering under such a scheme). The reaction against it was fierce among those who have an actual or perceived stake in it. It should not be surprising that any wasteful spending has constituents (either those served or employed by it) who will defend it loudly, hoping that it will be so much hassle to cut it that the budget cutters will move on to something else. This is not unique to UC, as it happens in any large organization (e.g. government budget, though much of the “pork barrel” there is now done in the form of special interest tax deductions and credits to make it even more difficult to cut).