Thanks, @AboutTheSame.
@calmom You are correct that those numbers are impacted by students who go part-time, but having worked in the CC system, I can tell you that that doesn’t fully account for it. Why are there so few who are making it in two years? There are many, many reasons. To offer merely one example, I typically have five students a term who drop a course after getting a B on their first assignment. They know they can’t transfer to a UC with many Bs, and the classes are cheap, so they just drop. Yet they took a seat in a class away from someone else, didn’t they? And there’s really no repercussion for that. In fact, it’s incentivized by the system. Even for those going part time, they should reasonably expect to meet their goals within 4 years, shouldn’t they? 4 years at CC, then another 4 after transfer for the part-time student, perhaps. 8 years total. But we’re not even close to that level yet. Also, the median age of CC students has gone down significantly in the last six or seven years, since we stopped letting people take classes for fun and required them to declare a major right away and only let them take courses in their major. Look, I teach in the CC, by choice. I love the mission of the CC, and I think that I change lives every single day. But I also think it’s true that CA has gotten away with seriously underfunding the UCs and CalStates because people say to themselves, “It’s okay, good students can go to CC and transfer to a UC.” And I think it’s worth pointing out that that doesn’t actually happen as often as people think it does, and that they should look at the bigger picture here.
The articles I’ve read about AB705 do not support the notion that it functionally eliminates remedial coursework. Rather, it is intended to promote students getting right to transfer-level courses when they will succeed in them.
@“Cardinal Fang” I said “functionally” because the letter of the law doesn’t require the elimination of programs, but from my vantage point, that is what is happening at many colleges–certainly it is at mine. There will be no more remedial English courses after Jan. 2019 where I teach. We are scrambling to figure out how to adapt in this short period of time. I think it’s going to hurt a lot of students, both the underprepared and the college ready.
Looks like the intent is to enroll the students in need of remedial courses in support courses alongside the regular courses.
Anecdotal evidence only, but I personally know kids who are certainly HYPSM (did I do that right?) contenders who were denied outright or wait-listed from either Cal or UCLA or both this year–we’re talking kids with top GPAs, test scores of 34+ or 1500+, and great ECs. Ten students I know of, some in STEM and some not, were accepted at Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Cornell, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Amherst, Williams, and University of Chicago. So yes, Ivy-League caliber students are definitely being denied at the top UCs. I think it’s the sheer numbers of those applying. I heard that UCSD had the second highest number of freshman applications of any college in the country this year, after UCLA. So even for the top students at a school, admissions to the “top” UCs can be just as difficult than an Ivy or top-ranked LAC. All that makes for some unhappy California parents and students.
Yes, but the determination of who “needs” the support is very political. Most students who would have placed in remedial coursework will go straight on to regular courses. Those with a high school GPA of less than 1.9 will get the support. That’s only 43% of the people who typically test into that the remedial level.
re. post #213:
@ucbalumnus, we typically weight college courses (Calculus I, Linear Algebra, Mechanics, College English, etc.) an extra point on homeschool transcript. We also weight AP courses an extra point. Honors courses get a .5 weight. So for the particular student that had a 4.8 weighted, the high school work was all AP and college level, IIRC (I’d have to go look at the transcript). That’s how the weighted GPA was 4.8. Does that help?
Would Californians feel less frustrated if the UC system was operated like a magnet school program? In-state residents who meet a threshold test score/GPA would enter the lottery of their target campus. Each campus would have a different threshold test score/GPA, and they would published it in advance so applicants only apply to the campuses for which they qualify. In fact, the UC app could automatically generate options in a drop-down menu based on transcripts directly submitted en masse by guidance counselors after junior year. Lottery winners are then chosen randomly, without regard to race or ethnicity. This will dis-incentivize, or at least minimize the impact, of both tiger parenting and the privileges of white wealth. So the tiger kid who got extra tutoring and extra help at cram school and the white kid who had expensive and rare ECs are on equal footing with the URM and first generation who had neither.
Anything that factors in test scores does not put URM’s and first generation students on an “equal footing”.
No she wasn’t in the 9%. Her school is one of those ultra competitive schools where the majority of the kids are above 4.0’s.
She put a tremendous amount of time and effort into the process of applying to the military academies and getting a congressional nomination. She was one of only 5 in our district selected for a nomination for USNA and also earned an ROTC scholarship so she is no slouch. Those were huge wins. DD is an accomplished hard working competitive, well rounded and self motivated person.
For us it wasn’t as much about not getting into a UC but that she didn’t get into ANY of her match schools at all including UW which was a big surprise. For a highly competitive kid only getting accepted to schools with an 80% acceptance rate is a blow. She’ll thrive wherever she lands but that much rejection when you put in so much effort is a tough pill to swallow.
@sdsmile I can understand your frustration and your daughter’s disappointment. This is why I hate systems that use class rank as a factor. The high schools are not comparable so the rankings are unfair.
@Sdsmile – 9% in the statewide context is determined by academic index – GPA and test scores --so it doesn’t matter how competitive her school is. You can use the calculator on this page to figure that: http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/freshman/california-residents/admissions-index/index.html
You do need to calculate UC weighted GPA, not the GPA on her high school transcript. As others have pointed out, it could be a little lower than you think. But playing with the online calculator, I can see that a student with a 4.0 GPA and 30 ACT would be top 9%. So would a student with a 3.8 GPA and 28 ACT. As would a student with a 3.7 GPA and a 27 ACT.
But that ultra-competitive school may be the reason that results are so disappointing. If your daughter isn’t top 9% of her class, that means that wherever she was applying, there were always other kids from the same school who had better GPA’s applying to the same very competitive schools. And even though colleges don’t really have formal quotas, when it comes down to it no college is going to take all that many students from the same high school.
@Sdsmile, I have no doubt that she is an impressive kid and will go far regardless of where she goes to college.
The UCs are simply very tough to get in to (especially at the top but also in the middle) these days.
With OOS publics, @websensation has the right idea of applying to honors programs that give big merit awards (many are automatic). Keep in mind that good OOS publics see CA kids the same way the top UC’s see OOS kids: as a source of revenue. I don’t know if UW is need-blind or not, but if they aren’t, they may reject plenty of CA kids who would get in if they were WA residents and are not full-pays.
@galentjill – in California there are two paths to the top 9%. One is “Eligibility in the Local Context” which does take into account class rank. When my daughter was in school that had to be top 4%, but now it is a top 9%.
The other is “Eligibility in the Statewide Context” – which is entirely numbers driven, from a combination of GPA and tests scores. High test scores can counterbalance lower GPAs. For example, a student with a 32 ACT could have a GPA as low as 3.2 and still qualify as top 9% – and that is the UC weighted GPA, so it does give bonus points for honors and AP courses. So it doesn’t really matter what type of school the student attends – the students at the more rigorous and demanding high schools are also likely to be able to score better on the standardized tests, given the quality of their high school education.
@calmom Thanks! That makes more sense.
Yes. I didn’t understand the differences in how weighted GPA’s were calculated so it probably was lower. @calmom she has been saying the same thing all along. They are competing against each other and so many apply to the same schools. Personally I’d rather see her somewhere she will thrive with her natural gifts than have to be fighting to compete so hard ALL the time. In the grand scheme of things there is far more to being successful in life than grades and which college you go to. Now to convince DD of that…
@ccprofandmomof2 You make a good point of it not being as easy to go from CC to a UC or top CSU as people are making it sound. We have a family friend who did much better in CC than HS, but was still not accepted anywhere.
Re the ELC at a competitive HS: Our kid who was an NMF, perfect GPA, and is at UCLA wasn’t in the top 9% at his school according to what we received from UC. Didn’t hurt him any.
@youcee, he would still be top 9% in the state.
@Sdsmile, it was her major. Applicants often do not understand that: sociology, psychology, biology, kinesiology or any other common and extremely popular major can be as hard to get into as engineering. UCs/CSUs receive thousands of apps for a few hundred spots in these majors.