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

Parents Forum
421

@ucbalumnus so UVA NC State (A+T) are not state schools? Ok. Even U Mich, who has the same issue, does better - with as good or better results.

When did I say it was easy or cheap? The UC budget in general is not cheap. If engineers can only fix easy problems we are in trouble.

The main problem, as evidenced by the responses on this board, is institutional cultural resistance. The UCSD GPA data show that UCSC engineering, at least, is enrolling less qualified men (at least in terms out of outcome). It is clear they could enroll more of the same level women and maintain or increase their GPA, graduation rate and time to graduation.

Why don’t they? That is the question. Why have their female enrollment numbers fallen?

That is the question.

Why was UCB COE CS&E unable to find one single more qualified female student despite a 4x increase in raw applicants in a short number of years. Why, in fact, did they admit less women one year when the raw number of female applicants doubled?

That’s the question.

Why you are so hyper-actively resistant, that is the question.

Anyway, I’m done here. Anyone remotely interested has the seen the arguments over and over and can make decisions for themselves.

Your (and others) arguments always boil down to: “yeah we should, but it’s too expensive or too hard.” Frankly, I don’t buy either.

The UCs have a gigantic budget. They have, supposedly, the smartest, most capable deans and adcoms and Regents and you name it, but it’s just too hard?

If that is true, we need wholesale changes at the top.

422

Shouldn’t it be obvious to you that if both female and male applicants increased similarly, with similar strength of applicant pools, and no thumbs on the scale or changes in the major’s capacity, the number of female and male applicants will be similar (just that it becomes more selective for both)?

Anyway, enjoy stewing in your poorly informed anger.

423

@ucbalumnus I’ll make one last point -

It should be obvious to you, as it would be to anyone with higher reasoning abilities, that if UCSD female engineering admits have better grade point averages, more higher GPA students, better grad rates and shorter time to graduation that perhaps your “scale” is badly calibrated? (Interesting that you have yet to address that particular stat. Doesn’t fit your prejudice?)

The “thumb to the scale” phrase is very telling and, indeed, I think critical to understand the institutionalized cultural and structural biases that keep gender and URM diversity from coming to the UCs.

The subtext to the idea that women applicants need “thumb to the scale” is the idea that they are not “weighty” enough applicants. It is particularly funny in light of the UCSD evidence (that you have studiously avoided) that clearly suggests that UCSD engineering “scales” are not very accurate in their weight measure. They are leaving at least a little GPA and graduation success “on the butcher block” by not increasing their qualified female admit yield. Why is that?

The “butcher scale” metaphor is very apt. As anyone who has bought meat knows, not all cuts are the same. You can get a pound of wonderfully marbled Wagyu or you can get a pound of stringy brisket. It’s all a pound and it all comes from a cow. But it is not the same quality. (Interestingly, brisket takes longer to cook than Kobe beef, maybe that’s why UCSD men in engineering take longer to graduate!)

The issue is not the “weight” of the applicant, it is the ability of the UC system to discern the quality of the applicant.

UCSD has demonstrably done a poor job of it (while allowing the representation of their best students to fall). I don’t know about the other UCs. But there are plenty of quality applicants out there who need no “thumb to the scale.”

Some schools, like UofT, have added video to their engineering application because they were getting too much hard-to-digest chuck roast, even though the scale said it was a pound of beef. Most schools with nuanced and intelligent applications have seen the handwriting on the wall and are moving away from the “human calculator” to the “human engineer.”

I would not care that the UC’s were not only behind that curve, but even somehow resistant to it, if they were not funded with my taxes.

Keep posting. I’m sure at 75k they will upgrade you to Post-Graduate Confidential and give you a pin.

424

The UC’s are funded by your taxes but that is certainly only one very small part of where the funding comes from. Your taxes and instate status have given your child the opportunity to apply to instate colleges and receive instate tuition if accepted. She does have an acceptance to UCSC. She could have applied to Cal Poly or could take a community college route with hopes of transferring to one of the campuses you consider more desirable. If any of those California options don’t work for you, you are free to take your money elsewhere.

I understand that you are angry and frustrated, but I think you have been incredibly rude and condescending to ucbalumnus. There is no excuse for that. Good luck to your daughter with her decision.

425

@sevmom Lol. Thanks for the “call out.” You may be Sev’s mom, but you ain’t mine. Do you really think “school marming” me is an effective discussion technique? Perhaps there is as little “excuse” for sticking your nose into other poster’s discussions as for my interaction with Ucbalumnus? My grandma sure would have thought that was rude, but she was pre-internet! Grandma would have tsked-tsked you half way to Needles! (now, is calling me “rude” a “personal attack”? You’ve got 5,000 posts, you probably would know. I haven’t yet figure out the line.)

Likewise Grandma would have thought that perhaps you were none to clever (and a bit rude) for not being able to follow the conversation, and bringing my daughter back into the discussion when we are clearly discussing another matter entirely.

So, to bring things back on track, answer a few simple questions:
Why do you think that the UC engineering deans, the UC President and the Regents have been unable to significantly increase the participation of women and URMs in the UC undergraduate engineering programs, despite claiming for years now that they are committed to improving the gender and URM diversity?

Why do you think UCSD school of engineering female undergraduates have a higher GPA, higher graduation rate and faster route to graduation every year except one since 2002? (Not to mention women undergrads in general at UCSD.)

Why do you think posters like ucbalumnus are so frantically resistant to the idea that anything can be done to improve the situation, despite admitting there is a structural issue that restricts female enrollment at all the UC engineering schools to 25% or less - and has done so for the past 15 - 20 years?

Let me know your thoughts! Thanks!

426

@calidad2020 The structural issue is that the UC campuses are getting 80,000+ applications and using $15/hr application readers to make decisions. Short of putting a quick thumb on the scale for female applicants, I don’t think there is any easy way to fix the problem you have with the system. The UC schools are never going to have LAC type admission committees that sit around and wax poetically about the merits of various candidates. And I doubt they have the time or money to go through the data as thoroughly as you have to identify the hidden characteristics of the successful female engineers. It’s all about GPA.

427

@Calidad2020,

You screwed up.

Your daughter has well below the average stats for UCLA, UCB, and UCSD. She should not get into those schools as an engineering major even though she is bright.

She should have applied to Cal Poly or SDSU if she never wanted to go to UCSC.

I like @ucbalumnus posts. There are a lot of facts in his posts.

428

I’m sure ucbalumnus can defend himself. He has asked you (more than once I believe) to stop the ad hominen attacks. It is within my right to comment on how I view your posts as I am a participant in this discussion as well and was just getting tired of your attacks. Sorry you do not like what I had to say. You have brought your status as a taxpayer, your daughter’s situation , into this discussion so I am not sure how you now view it as something that is not open to discussion. I have not found posters to be “so frantically resistant to the idea that anything can be done to improve the situation.” Women and URM’s are being admitted . There is always room for improvement . Why is sometimes the yield for women lower? I don’t know. Maybe more women than men that are attracted to engineering/ computer science would prefer a smaller environment.

429

At my university, one of the departments (in a discipline with a good number of women) had never hired a woman faculty member. The claim was none were qualified; they had never had a woman candidate even qualified enough to bring to campus. Finally, the associate dean made himself a member of a search committee, and they hired a woman, now tenured through her hard work and very careful mentorship. Universities can be very conservative. I know that is not the hype, but sometimes it is just an old boys’ network.

I suspect that two things need to happen. Someone at the top needs to be active in forcing the acceptance issue, and the department needs to provide support for women students in a potentially hostile atmosphere. Our engineering school is doing much better attracting and retaining women after it got a woman dean who is very supportive undergraduates in general.

430

Some schools are offering programs in mentoring in the form of living/learning communities. One example is Virginia Tech’s program, Hypatia. http://www.eng.vt.edu/residentialprograms/hypatia

431

@notveryzen I believe much of that is correct. What it doesn’t explain is how the UCSD female engineering undergrads can consistently get better GPAs than the male admits. And, since women have better GPAs across subjects both HS and UCSD, it seems to me that the UC engineering perhaps overweights SAT math - which typically are 30 +/- points higher than female applicants. That is why we end up with so many “human calculators” in engineering, rather than “human engineers.”

I do think, if the UC engineering departments (and CA taxpayers) really had the will and focus to address it, the gender and URM imbalance could be ameliorated rather quickly with no cost to quality. But I seem to be a (very) vocal minority…

432

@sevmom you didn’t answer the questions. I could care less what you had to say, aside from it makes me laugh that you think a graduate of our flagship university needs your help in an online anonymous forum.

I don’t really think you have much to add. But I would love to know why you think UCSD women do better than men in engineering but that UCSD has admitted less women this past year than in 2001?

433

Race, ethnicity, gender, and religion are excluded from the criteria the UCs are allowed to use for admissions. They cannot put a thumb on the scale. (http://admissions.berkeley.edu/selectsstudents for example) Private universities can and do use gender as an admissions criteria.

To achieve a better racial balance, the UCs look at things that are a proxy for being Latino or African-American. They can look at income, they can look at essays for family hardships, they can look at zip codes and high schools. There are a lot of proxies you can look at in place of race. There are not any proxies I can think of for legally selecting females over males. They have to go by the holistic evaluation, which doesn’t include gender.

Private universities, Harvey Mudd and MIT for example, can decide what gender balance they want and adjust their admissions to match. For example, the top STEM girls from our HS often get into MIT and Mudd, while the top STEM boys get into Caltech and Harvard/Princeton instead (but rarely MIT for boys). I don’t want to argue the right or wrong of how private universities do it, but they do things publics (and UCs specifically) can’t do.

Really, moving toward gender balance in engineering should also be considered at the high school (and middle school) level. We have an engineering program at our HS that is specifically 50% female/50% male. But, at lots of schools there are very few girls who take things like AP Computer Science, and the high schools should be recruiting girls into those classes. Look at https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/research/2015/Program-Summary-Report-2015.pdf : Last year 38,000 boys took the AP Computer Science test and 11,000 girls took it. One can gather from those numbers that a lot fewer females apply to engineering than males.

434

You really can’t lump all women or all men in together. Not all women have lower math SAT’s than the average man, most men in engineering are not “human calculators.”

435

@dstark It is interesting to me how much posters would prefer to attack/debate my daughter’s stats than debate the state of engineering at the UCs. It speaks volumes of the posters, I would suggest.

436

@mamalion I am cautiously optimistic about UCLA given their hiring both in the adcom and engineering dean position.

I am much less optimistic after having heard from some of the interested parties on this board. Some very interesting responses.

It is interesting that major HR people from big engineering firms have expressed to us how important it is to have more diversity in engineering - suggesting that the “human calculators” some engineering schools are producing are not effective in today’s workplace.

Some schools will be at the front of the wave, other will get caught in the washing machine.

437

I would submit that the tone of your posts “speaks volumes” about YOU.

I have no idea what goes on at UCSD . You are saying women do better than men. Obviously, some men do better, some women do better on an individual basis.

438

@sevmom as long as you don’t ground me, we’re all good!

439

Bingo! (the sorting hat starts in Middle School.)

Approximately 60% of current Calc BC students are male, which is no different than it was a decade ago.

Approx 75% of AP Physics C students are male.

440

No, I won’t ground you. I don’t have that power on these boards! :slight_smile:

Yes, many more boys than girls in things like BC Calculus and AP Physics, in general.