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

Parents Forum
501

I’ve posted for years that all tuition at the big two/three? should increase (all departments). It makes no (economic) sense to charge the same relative tuition for Cal/UCLA as for Merced. And not only should Eng be increased even higher, but so should the other ‘vocational’ majors. (Arch, Biz.)

They’re successful politicians; by definition, they are masters as spin. As the GEICO commercial says, ‘That’s what they do.’ (But I admit that I am a cynic.)

Or look at it another way: if they really did care, they’d do something about it. The fact that they don’t speaks volumes, at least to me.

502

@CaliDad2020 my oldest is a boy and not engineering inclined so I don’t have first hand knowledge of their female oriented yield programs. He did get honors acceptance at one UC and Regents at another. One notice came in a plain #10 envelope that I thought was going to be a rejection notice. The other was a little notice on the side of the admissions page. If that’s how they treat their favorite prospects…

Our experience with the UCs has shown them to be extraordinarily bureaucratic, cold, and impersonal. I imagine most of their employees worked at the DMV in a previous life. On top of that, UCB is $150 million short of even being able to pay their bills next year. I can’t imagine they have much time to worry about low female engineering enrollment in that environment.

503

@bluebayou your last sentence is exactly my starting premise:

There is a “structural sexism” in the admissions/acceptance/recruitment set-up/criteria of the UC engineering schools that maintains a 75-80/25-20 gender split (and worse for URMs.)

And while stats seem to suggest no worse, and probably slightly better GPA, Grad rates, retention rates and time-to-graduation rates for UC women in engineering (most certainly at UCSD Jacobs undergrad. I haven’t found as easily accessed info for the other schools.) no one in the administration has the will, intelligence, political saavy or all three to enact the adjustments needed to affect change.

So we are stuck with a “structural” admissions issue that stifles female enrollment at many stages of the process - and will keep the gender unbalance unresolved until enough people point it out publicly.

And I agree with you. I think at heart the UC engineering admins (for the most part - not all obviously) are fine with that.

504

I believe there is an agreement between the Regents and the Legislature that the OOS tuition surcharge will increase by 5-8% per year for the next five years.

505

“The first, easiest and most obvious is yield.”

No, the first/easiest/obvious thing to do would be to admit more women using easier standards. That would be quickest path to a better gender balance. Much easier than trying to increase yield.

On the surface, that appears to be what MIT, Caltech etc. do. But Cal can’t do that.

Yield is a much harder knob to turn. My guess is that extremely well qualified aspiring female engineers are unicorns that every school is desperate for. So the Cal admitted gal engineers (on average) likely have more/better options than the Cal admitted guy engineers do. Hence the lower yield.

The data superficially would suggest that those unicorn gals are also getting acceptances to MIT and Caltech at much higher rates than the guys do.

506

*Ynotgo This is fine as far as wealthy international students go. But with Michigan and UVA massively expanding their financial aid to OOS students, this means that many of the best students will go elsewhere. Michigan indeed admitted it had hiked OOS tuition too high and has since massively expanded its financial aid programs. I fear the UC system could be overestimating the attractiveness of a UC education–except to the very wealthy.

507

@widgetmidget But if you are selling your seats to OOS/international to raise money, why does it matter if it’s the wealthy? The 2 - 3K a year difference is not going to make or break the quality of your incoming OOS/International applicants, especially if you use the extra revenue to lower the number of OOS/international students.

UCLA and UCB are around 40% OOS/International. Some other UCs much less. While the budgets are not so simple in terms of redirecting revenue, in the big picture, more OOS/international students could be redirected to other campuses, more IN STATE students can be admitted to UCB, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB.

As far as Michigan, they may have hit the top, but they still have plenty of applicants - and charge 6500 more a year than the UCs. From an article last year: http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2015/02/u-m_out-of-state_residents.html

"Despite annual hikes and the fact that U-M is one of the most expensive public universities in the country for non-resident students to attend, applications from non-Michigan students are pouring in at record rates.

“With the out-of-state tuition, we can be a little bit more responsive to market forces. We had a remarkable increase in the number of applications and the quality (of the students) is also pretty remarkable. But the fact of the matter is that we have to be restrained by the market also. We can’t price ourselves out of the market,” he said."

Add to that many of your other competing universities for international students: BU, NYU, UVa, USC, UPenn, Cornell, Brown, Columbia, UChicago, Duke, Northeastern, CMU etc. charge as much or even more and I would bet the UCs - certainly the “top 4” engineering programs (and probably all UCSB, UCSD, UCLA and UCB degrees) could absorb a 3k increase with little, if any, effect.

Remember, UCLA and UCB get close to 100k applicants. Adcoms and Deans from UCB COE to UCLA have stated they could easily fill two classes with qualified students. A look at the results thread show just a few of the many qualified students that are waitlisted or denied. There are more good students applying to the UCs than there are slots.

If your OOS/international admits are about revenue, then you should maximize the revenue.

508

CaliDad: I make no assumptions wrt to Engineering Admins, and what they do or do not believe. My point is that the argument is lost at the UC Regents and Legislature – if they don’t’ care about the potential disparate impact of female Eng students at Cal, the Eng Admins have their hands tied.

Its a systemic issue, partly by 209 and partly by UC policy; but importantly, it is not just focused on one major or one college.

Of course not. Transparency has never been a concern of the UC bureaucracy. UC used to provide much, much more info online, by campus, but used the excuse of budget cuts to eliminate the online site. As a perfect example, the current Legislature is ‘shocked, shocked, I tell you’ to find out that UC has been providing need-based aid to OOS’ers for the past decade, despite the claim of admitting them to increase $$. Yet, we the people, have known that for years, courtesy of cc.

509

This has been proposed periodically and shot down because it goes against the magical thinking of UCOP that all campuses are created equal and provide equivalent standards of education. The top 3 campuses are already biased toward students from wealthier families due to the high cost of living where they are located. Interestingly UCSB comes in second place to UCB for this reason: http://i.imgur.com/IK7H80K.png
Plenty of kids with acceptances to all campuses choose UCR or UCI just so they can live at home and save on expenses. Some of this is strategic, they feel they can more easily maintain a high GPA in a less competitive climate for pre-Med curricula.

510

Oh yeah, i get that mom, but I just keep throwing it out there – some day it will stick.

Actually, I think the fact that the top 3 are biased toward students of wealthier families is due solely to competitive admissions requirements. The top ~half of the class (based on GPA/test scores/AP courses) is the cream of the crop of California HS students, which tend to be middle-upper class students.

But an easy solution is to raise tuition say, $5k, and use some of that money to increase the Blue & Gold plan to also offset dorm costs for those under a certain income threshold.

I love your term: magical thinking.

511

While on that subject:

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/04/13/berkeley-will-eliminate-500-staff-jobs

Edit:Here’s an interesting contrast…

Clearly Cal needs to invest more in sports! Academics? Blah!

512

@CaliDad2020 I spent a few years as an Admissions Officer at Brown after graduating. We used to make the same argument. Indeed, I remember one year we reported that we could fill the entire class with valedictorians. My proudest year was when we went completely need blind and full need for all domestic students (and for the majority of international ones too). The overall quality of our students improved, not just in terms of stats but in terms of what they brought the university. Michigan is now almost there. Their admissions director is quoted in HigherEd as saying they now “routinely” meet the financial need of OOS students and their goal is to do so with less reliance on loans in future. UVA already is there. UM’s last President said that one major change is that everyone now acknowledges that Michigan is a “state assisted” as opposed to “state supported” university (she went on to deny they were privatizing the university by “stealth” albeit the current President hasn’t made the same commitment!).

All this is just saying that I hope UC does not over-rely on its ability to draw students. There is immense competition for the best students and a large number of universities with deep pockets.

513

@bluebayou

The engineering adcoms have some impact. The COE influences it’s own admission scheme and admissions criteria.

They don’t need the regents to tell them they could and should improve yield (although I agree that the Regents and legislature come in for plenty of blame too.) Dean Sastry has admitted repeatedly since taking the job that UCB COE could and should do a better job of recruitment and retention. They know the score - and they know they could at least ameliorate it marginally it if they really wanted.

I talked to a few parents last night of kids who are making college decisions. They confirmed what was reported above. The accepted kids have seen very limited and poor outreach from the UCs. Not much attempt to increase yield. Which is probably not a problem for most schools/majors (although the LS schools might want to look at male yields there), but with a 75/25 gender imbalance and a 50/30 yield imbalance (assuming that ratio applies across majors) and a vow to better the numbers, a little outreach could go a long way in engineering.

514

A lot of outreach is performed by the local Alumni clubs. I’ve read that that the Cal Orange County and Long Beach clubs are pretty active in that respect.

But again, increased yield will just lead to a lower admissions rate. There are only so many lab spaces.

So, the obvious conclusion is that they don’t want to ameliorate the situation. (I would submit that they really can’t do much, so we’ll have to agree to disagree.)

515

@bluebayou I agree for sure they don’t want to. That was my original point/suspicion.

They are perfectly happy how it is and as long as everyone sheeps along with herd, they will not change a thing.

516

“A lot of outreach is performed by the local Alumni clubs. I’ve read that that the Cal Orange County and Long Beach clubs are pretty active in that respect.”

I know UCLA definitely does this aggressively. After my kid was accepted by UCLA last year, a current student sent him a touchy letter. They then followed up with few phone calls trying to convince him to go. UCLA Engineering also guaranteed him the research opportunity under the direct supervision of a faculty of his choice after three quarters at UCLA. They even offered him some funds to cover expenses associated with the research project. When my son turned them down, they contacted him multiple times asking why he didn’t want to enroll. Perhaps other UCs can follow UCLA in their effort to increase the yield.

517

In addition, I know that Berkeley Mechanical Engineering offers full-ride scholarship (both tuition and room & board for 4 years) to its prospects. I checked on the website, and it seemed like many of the recipients were females. It’s probably their effort to attract more females to SIR.

518

Why are posters still arguing about UCB engineering programs? UCB has a deficit of $150 million a year!

500 people are going to be laid off. Very little funding comes from the state. 13 percent. That’s it. Down from 50 percent. The taxpayers are no longer really funding UCB.

I doubt Berkeley is going to expand the engineering school.

I guess nobody read the post @Gator88NE wrote.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/04/12/uc-berkeley-to-cut-500-positions

519

State located–not state funded

520

The budget defict is 6 percent of Berkeley’s operating budget. So the operating budget is around $2.5 billion a year.
The state pays 13 percent of the operating budget.