<p>^ The OP’s question was: “Do state universities have the right to be selective?”</p>
<p>Conversely, should state universities not be selective and allow anyone access?</p>
<p>“Do you think state universities owe it to the citizens of that state to provide a way for their children to go to college?”</p>
<p>This language implies everyone should have a right no matter what their qualifications…sounds like socialism to me.</p>
<p>Umm, yes, of course they do</p>
<p>"I think one way to accomodate all the students is by setting a benchmark like what they have in Texas, where all students who graduate in the tenth percentile of their class can get into any state-funded institution. "</p>
<p>ChemEGrad: The OP also said the above. Part of the problem may be that the OP’s position itself is not clearly stated or consistent. However, this statement certainly does not imply that he/she is in favor of open admissions. It appeared to me that when he suggested accommodating all students, he really means accommodating all GROUPS of students from disparate backgrounds. I personally don’t even agree with the 10% rule as practiced in Texas, but you do have to admit that admitting 10% at the top of each class is not the same thing as admitting everyone. I think the OP’s real position is to provide a sliding scale (again, I don’t personally agree with it) that gives a relative leg up to poor, rural, etc. applicants.</p>
<p>Part of the goal of the graduate programs is to provide future professors for the schools in the state. Thus bringing in the best students in the world is a way to provide a steady supply of good quality academic talent to all the schools in the state and to some industries that need PhDs for research etc.</p>
<p>barrons: I don’t disagree, although in my direct experience you can’t count on graduate students form a particular school or state staying put for a faculty position: the overwhelming majority end up going someplace else anyway. In fact, whereas national searches are used to try to attract the best faculty applicants, the “local” candidates can be de-valued somewhat.</p>
<p>Maybe but that is part of the justification of having grad programs and each state contributes some to the pile so everyone has an adequate supply. I would bet that the highest percentage of UC PhD’s end up working in California over any other state. And second is not even close.</p>
<p>Yep, don’t diasagree</p>
<p>education is a privilege, not a right. the state offers the privilege of education to those who have put the work in to earn it. therefore, by nature it is selective. saying “do state uni’s have the right to be selective” and making the argument that “i pay for it via taxes” doesn’t work at all. you pay for the space program as well…but you don’t have a right to be shoved in the shuttle craft.</p>
<p>even with that in mind, there are public colleges which are pretty much open admission in every state. so what’s the problem? the reason a state has a prestigious flagship university is because it only lets its best and brightest citizens attend it.</p>
<p>But that’s just it. There are more factors that play into admissions in flagship universities than, “only the best and brightest get in”. I know at my state flagship, it’s considered one of the biggest party schools in the country. The best and brightest get that kind of reputation? I don’t think so. This has just as much to do with the disparity in economic, social, and financial status in any given state than it does in mere ability and work ethic.</p>
<p>jaso9n2,</p>
<p>i don’t know what school you’re talking about, but regardless of whether or not it is a big party school, doesn’t mean the students there aren’t smart. even if they aren’t the best and brightest, they’re probably the best they could get to come to the school. </p>
<p>example: wisconsin-madison is a huge party school, but its students are certainly on a whole brighter than any other public student body in wisconsin.</p>
<p>I think the term “party school” needs work. It is applied very broadly and does not always fit. UW is certainly one of the most lively fun places Thursday night through Saturday but most students there are very serious about school too. Work hard–party hard applies. Same for UVa and many others. Other schools require little or no effort and they party nearly every night of the week. That’s a true party school and places like Chico State and Texas State fit that image.</p>
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<p>You are exactly right - but that only goes to prove my point, which is that merely being a taxpayer for a particular program does not automatically give you the right to participate in that program. You also have to fulfill the conditions of that program (whatever those conditions are).</p>
<p>To give you another example, I have to pay into Social Security whether I like it or not. In theory, I can start collecting from that program as soon as I reach the threshold age. But what if I die before I reach that age? Then I collect nothing. More importantly, what if I think I’m going to die before that age? Can I just opt out of Social Security just because I don’t think I’m actually going to collect anything? I cannot. I have to keep paying in whether I like it or not. </p>
<p>{Granted, there are tenets for my surviving spouse or children to collect Social Security if I die, but what if I don’t have a spouse or children?}. </p>
<p>The only way that I can legally stop paying into the system is for me to use the political process to attempt to convince the politicos in Washington to pass a law that lifts the payment mandate. Of course, I am certainly not going to hold my breath waiting for such a law to pass. </p>
<p>I’ll give you another example that may be more topical to this discussion. Some people here may not realize that many private schools in fact receive tremendous amounts of public funding in the form of taxpayer-funded research grants. In fact, I strongly suspect that some students at private schools enjoy more “public education funding per capita” than many other students at public schools, particularly if the private school in question not only wins numerous research grants, but also has very few students (and hence, has few students in the denominator of the ‘per capita’ calculation). </p>
<p>Take my brother. He went to Caltech, a private school that is not only a large research powerhouse that wins numerous government research grants, but also has very few students. I don’t know the exact figures, but it would not surprise me in the least to learn that he was able, through Caltech, to access more public funding, per student, than many public school students. For example, he worked on several major research projects and used a number of highly sophisticated scientific apparati that were funded through government grants. A student at a public school like, say, Long Beach State wouldn’t have access to any of those research projects or scientific equipment, despite the fact that his taxes paid for them. Again, just because you pay taxes for something doesn’t mean that you automatically get access to it. Through Caltech, my brother got access to taxpayer-funded scientific projects to which the vast majority of taxpayers, including myself, did not get access. Such is life.</p>
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<p>Well, I’m not sure that’s an entirely meaningful distinction. After all, I would bet that the highest percentage of Stanford Phd’s end up working in California over any other state too. The same is true of Caltech PhD’s. </p>
<p>Once again, your argument is that for the state to support all universities in that particular state, not just the public universities. As I have stated in other threads, public universities have no monopoly in producing regional economic or social benefits. Private universities also produce important regional benefits.</p>
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<p>Well, this is actually a normative statement. Any obligation of a state university to educate its own citizens for a bachelor’s degree (but apparently not PhD’s) is an arbitrary choice. We can argue about whether it’s a good choice or not, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s still an arbitrary choice. State universities could also have arbitarily decided to not prefer its own residents at all at the undergraduate level (like what happens now with PhD admissions). It’s arbitrary. That’s my point. </p>
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<p>See my previous post. This is an argument for the state to provide subsidies for state residents to attend any university in the state, whether public or private. For example, many Californians attend Stanford, and I would surmise that the vast majority of them stay in California after graduation. So if the goal is to maintain a bright cadre of students in the state of California, then why not provide a state subsidy to these Californian Stanford students? Why should they get the subsidy only if they attend UC? </p>
<p>Heck, to pursue this logic further, I would argue that if you want to maintain a cadre of sharp cookies in your state, then you should also be motivated to steal away the best minds from *other *states. For example, many of the Stanford students who are not from California choose to stay in California after graduation. Again, the same can be said for Caltech. A large percentage - in fact, probably the majority - of the undergrads at Stanford and Caltech are not Californians. I think we can all agree that the average Stanford and Caltech undergrad is pretty darn sharp. Hence, Stanford and Caltech are magnets that pull many of the the best minds from otherstates to boost the intellectual capital available in California. UC, on the other hand, brings in only a small percentage of OOS undergrads. </p>
<p>But, again, the point is, if the goal is to boost the resources available in the state, then, from a funding standpoint, there is no reason to prefer public schools in that state over private schools in that state. Public schools are not the only schools that can boost regional resources. Private schools do a pretty darn fine job of boosting regional resources too. </p>
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<p>Uh, ‘legally emancipated’? I don’t think I understand this point. The vast vast majority of undergrads will be legally emancipated by the time they will graduate from college. Heck, a significant percentage of them are already legally anticipated even before they matriculate at college. After all, the age of legal emancipation is only 18 years of age. </p>
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<p>Yeah, the PhD programs are much smaller. So? What does that have to do with the topic at hand?</p>
<p>What we are talking about is whether public schools have the right to be selective with regards to their state residents. The fact that state PhD programs are small does not impact the nature of the discussion. After all, if you’re a California state resident, and you want to get into a Berkeley PhD program and you get rejected because the program would rather admit somebody else from OOS or from another country, then the fact that the Berkeley Phd program is small doesn’t help you. At the end of the day, what matters to you is that you got rejected from a public program that you wanted and that your family had been paying taxes to support. The salient question in this thread is therefore whether Berkeley has a right to do that. It has nothing to do with the size of the respective programs.</p>
<p>I think the fact that many state universities are offering very nice scholarships and discounts in-state almost require them to be selective. My state’s flagship university is probably not on par with the likes of Berkeley or Michigan, but is enrolling many students who would consider Emory and Vanderbilt high match schools because of four year/full-ride scholarships. Students who once considered it as a shoo-in with 3.0 unweighted gpa’s and no honors/ap classes are having to look elsewhere for a match.</p>
<p>Many states do provide money to attend privatre schools through state scholarship programs. However with direct state funding comes direct state control. You think Stanford would make that deal–I don’t. Private means not funded by the government and that is the way it should be. Privates have a role and so do publics. The states make decisions about funding state schools based on their priorities and overall plan for the state. Some states believe funding graduate programs is important and many do not and have very small graduate programs mostly designed to provide advanced education for teachers and the like.</p>
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<p>Does it necessarily? And if so, why? Again I would point to the public PhD programs. Berkeley’s PhD students are funded by California taxpayer money. Yet I am not aware of much significant control that the state of California exerts over those programs. </p>
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<p>But many of them are funded by the government. Stanford and Caltech receive many millions of taxpayer research dollars every year. That’s government funding right there. Many of those students at those private schools are able to take advantage of those dollars by joining those research projects. My brother worked on several quite large large taxpayer-funded research projects while he was a student at a private school (Caltech). I would say that he, as a private school student, got far more exposure to government-funded R&D than most public school students do. </p>
<p>Granted, government research funding at private schools has controls and oversight, but no more so than any other research grant does. The rules for grants are the same regardless of whether a public or private entity wins them. It’s not like Stanford or Caltech have to submit to ‘special grant rules’ that Berkeley does not have to submit to just because the former 2 are private schools.</p>
<p>Back to the Georgia situation one more time. UGA considers class standing and does not weight for honors level high school grades, therefore making it harder for students from outstanding high school who took honors level courses and are not at the top of their class to be admitted. Fortunately, Georgia Tech looks at SATs, grade point, and weights for honors level courses so that for students from good high schools, it may be easier to get into Tech than Georgia. Generally speaking, I don’t think that anyone is doing a student a favor by accepting the student into a school where the level of the school is well above the level of the student. And, truthfully, if I lived in South Georgia, I would be unhappy about UGA being filled mostly with students from suburban Atlanta. So, if you think of Georgia as having two flagships, one selects based primarily on capability and one selects based primarily on geography. I would certainly not denigrate the education that one can receive at many of the other state schools in Georgia as one can see by which of their graduates get into which professional and grad schools.</p>
<p>The state controls the UC budget and appoints the Board that oversees it. That’s control.</p>
<p>State universities already provide IS students with an advantage. Obviously, the tuition for IS students is much lower, but also the admissions is sometimes MUCH easier. Take UNC, UVa, and UGA for example. All three are top state schools, and all three are MUCH more difficult to gain admissions to for OOS students. UNC accepts around 50% IS students, but just a little over 10% OOS students, and the other two schools are just as lopsided. I feel like these two things are enough of an advantage for the taxpayers of the state.</p>
<p>Imagine how much the quality of top state schools would drop if they had to accept less qualified IS students (which they already do have to do). If their quality dropped, no one would want to go there any more than the next IS school, and the state wouldn’t really have a flagship school anymore, just a bunch of mediocre ones.</p>
<p>Also, admissions offices always take your high school performance in context of your school. If a student attends a private school that offers 20+ APs, they are expected to take as many as possible. However, if a student attends a poor, rural school that offers no AP or honors classes, they aren’t penalized for not taking any. Factoring race into admissions would be ridiculous in my opinion. Not only would it be completely unfair to whites, asians, and other non-minorities (or ORMs), but it makes the assumption that blacks and other URMs couldn’t gain admissions otherwise. Honestly, I think AA is racist.</p>
<p>I just don’t really see the argument here. I mean, all tax payers have the opportunity to get an education and an institution that they help fund. I mean if Georgia residents that aren’t admitted to UGA can go to Georgia State, Georgia Southern, Valdosta, or community college. Obviously the Georgia students that work hardest in high school will be able to go to the best state school, and the ones that don’t work as hard don’t deserve to go to the flagship u., even if they’re parents do help support it, because there are other options that their parents also help fund. If you think about it, taxpayers aren’t helping fund UGA, specifically as much as the University of Georgia system, and basically all Georgia students will get into at least one UGA system school. </p>
<p>Also, I just visited UGA this weekend, and let me tell you, they are DEFINITELY trying to improve their diversity, and they really are trying to court URMs. They–like all schools–just aren’t willing to sacrifice admissions standards to diversify their campus, and they shouldn’t. I would be so ****ed if I worked my ass off in school and got rejected by my dream school while the same school admitted a less qualified student just because they’re a minority and I’m not. I can’t help that, and it’s COMPLETELY unfair.</p>
<p>I just don’t see at all why anyone would consider admitting a less qualified applicant over a more qualified one, in any case…</p>