The zip code advice is way off. The better the high school, the higher the bar.
My husband and I chose to move from a more affluent area to a more rural, middle class one. The kids were toddlers and it wasn’t strategic, but they had far less competition and were able to stand out more easily. There is plenty of grade inflation here and at the low performing high school nearby.
Where was the video, I didn’t see it in the article or any mention of colleges unless I totally missed it.
“If they want the most academically talented kids in their state”
How do you define academically talented, since you have said so many times it’s not something we know, only adcoms can make that determination. We know adcoms already use GPAs, rigor and test scores, what else should they use?
I agree that it’s the public colleges that hold more of a responsibility for economic mobility and CA and NY, the two states I’m most familiar with, do a pretty good job of trying to give access to lower income students and this includes the community college pathways. However it’s not like UCLA has a lot of low GPA students. When they looked at test scores, the 25-75% was 29-35 and 1300/1530. UCLA can’t use race and legacies are not really a factor so the only hook would be an athlete. Now that test scores are not considered, GPA and rigor are going to more important and that’s not really going to help the lower-income kids.
UCLAs 25-75 for this past year, with no test scores considered:
| Weighted GPA | 4.34 | 4.68 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unweighted GPA | 3.92 | 4.00 | ||||
| Honors Courses (domestic only) | 19 | 30 |
The honors courses are counted as semester so for the sake of discussion, if we assume the 50%ile of honors (which includes APs) is 24 or 12 courses from 10th-12th, who will have that many number of honors courses - the kids in the wealthier school districts. The UCs do have the guarantee admit of top 9% to try and get a more balanced SES class, my guess is that the kids who are in top-9% but don’t have 6-8 honors classes by end of 11th are not at UCLA.
All good points.
I absolutely agree that making sure that all kids have access to good K-12 education will solve almost all of the equity issues in college admissions. I could go on an unrelated rant about the way that requiring that schools be funded by property taxes is one of the primary ways by which income inequality is perpetuated and how generational poverty is being established alongside generational accumulation of wealth in a small proportion of the population.
The problems with regular testing have already been seen with NCLB. Schools have been focused on training their students to do well on these tests, instead of learning, recesses are being eliminated, subjects which are not he tests, like music and art are being eliminated, all so that the kids spend more time essentially preparing for these tests. Possibly worse than all that is the fact that inquiry and intellectual curiosity are being suppressed, since they cause time to be taken away from yet more test prep.
Then you have the fact that schools that do not demonstrate year-to-year “improvement” are penalized. So a school that has reached 100% of their kids passing will almost certainly be penalized the next year, since it will demonstrate no improvement. We had a long discussion with our district superintendent about these issues (I was part of an advocacy group when my kid was on elementary school).
In a decently funded school, in which teachers aren’t underpaid and overworked, which has the resources it needs to teach, and where all kids have access to the critical resources they need, income will have a lot less effect, and where teachers are also training to do a better job at assessment than they presently do, testing would not be needed. Kids from lower income families would be able to achieve as much (or nearly as much) as their peers from wealthier families.
In that situation, wealthy kid would likely still have advantages, but they wouldn’t be so extreme, and, because the USA has that very large set of great public universities, they would not have a huge impact on higher education either. So instead of attending Stanford, the smartest low income kids would mostly attend Wisconsin, UIUC, Purdue, or Alabama. That is a perfectly good outcome, which, in my opinion, is about as equitable as life can ever be. Yes, poorer kids would still have to work harder for the same results, but that is part of the inherent unfairness of life, rather than being part of massive unfairness that is developed and cultivated by a system set up to perpetuate income inequality.
All that being said, when colleges are looking to recruit talent from kids who have gone through this badly set up education system, they are missing kids who, despite their difficulties, are shining. These kids are simply not shining as much as their wealthy peers because they have access to fewer resources. A kid who set up a complex experiment with minimal resources is unlikely to have amazing results that can appear in a peer-reviewed publication. However, they demonstrate that this kid has the same skills and talents as their wealthy peer who did get a peer reviewed publication, because they could run their experiment at a university lab with top quality equipment and materials. Again, the problem is not that the kid is being ignored by Harvard, because that’s Harvard’s loss. The kid being ignored by their state flagships, such as UVA or Michigan, becomes a failure of the system.
TL;DR 1. Yes, solving the K-12 education issues would remove this burden from colleges. However, testing creates more problems than is solves. Rather, we should invest in equitable K-12 education, which would provide highly talented lower income kids the tools they need to have similar achievements as their wealthier peers.
TL;DR 2. Colleges are also not set up to identify poor kids who, despite bad schools, are actually shining in their own environment.
19 semesters of honors points would mean 4.75 honors points per semester, while 30 semesters of honors points would mean 7.5 honors points per semester (essentially a full or overload schedule with all honors point eligible courses in 10th and 11th grade – probably mostly dependent on availability).
The “top 9%” ELC does not apply to a specific UC campus, but only to some place in the UC system which has space available (in practice, this means UC Merced).
Note that it appears that UCB does not appear to be too impressed by very high fully-weighted GPAs that are probably mostly driven be availability of courses that are eligible for the +1 honors points, based on the following. UCLA may be similar in this respect.
From OPA – University of California Berkeley , choose the Academic Indicators tab. “Last updated on October 22, 2021” for the “last 3 complete application cycles”.
GPA appears to be weighted, not capped. Calculate using GPA Calculator for the University of California – RogerHub
Admission rates only:
| GPA | L&S | CoE | CoC | CNR | CED |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.800-4.000 | 6.3% | 2.7% | 4.5% | 11.5% | 8.7% |
| 4.001-4.199 | 10.6% | 3.9% | 8.2% | 23.7% | 14.7% |
| 4.200-4.399 | 21.8% | 8.8% | 17.5% | 38.9% | 29.1% |
| 4.400-4.599 | 34.8% | 16.4% | 33.3% | 53.0% | 39.5% |
| 4.600-4.799 | 40.9% | 21.4% | 39.6% | 52.4% | 49.4% |
| 4.800-5.000 | 41.5% | 20.7% | 36.2% | 46.1% | 43.0% |
Unfortunately, many public flagships do not today serve many of those from lower to lower-middle income families. Here are some Pell grant percentages for beginning undergraduate students from College Navigator:
| College | Pell grant percentage |
|---|---|
| Stanford | 18% |
| Wisconsin | 14% |
| UIUC | 28% |
| Purdue | 14% |
| Alabama | 17% |
I believe the video is in the story? You click on the photo?
I think that it is more because many CA schools don’t offer weighted courses in 9th grade and very few in 10th. They may also mandate certain unweighted classes like fine arts, government and econ, and PE. At my kids’ school it was literally impossible to end up with more than a ~4.5 GPA at graduation: you had no weighted courses in 9th grade, at most 2 out of 6 in 10th grade, 5 out of 6 in 11th grade and 5 out of 6 in 12th grade.
UC’s only consider 10 and 11 year grades.
For UC recalculation of HS GPA:
So while many high schools do not offer enough honors courses in 10th and 11th grades to allow for very high fully-weighted UC recalculated HS GPA, there are apparently some that do, based on the existence of such HS GPAs exceeding 4.8. But it looks like UCB (at least) realizes that getting that high is mostly based on availability.
You totally missed it. Here is the link again…
Tap the little arrow icon. Here is the college references…
“The colleges include Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth and the University of California…just to name a few.”
Colleges know that SAT scores are performance predictive primarily for STEM majors (This is why STEM schools are going back to the requirement). Going TO is a huge win, they can let in hooked and institutionally important kids without fear of reprisal based on objective criteria (I would guess most of these kids are not STEM students), and STEM students who likely scored very high on the SAT/ACT will report their scores. Published test score data will actually increase.
Top colleges exist on money and recognition. Test optional, even test blind, benefits both goals. If students and parents view admissions through the simple lens of ‘can I bring money or some unique recognition to the school’, the admissions process makes complete sense.
You know this site I checked out , is just mostly BS. If you check out YouTube videos they are very amazing tutorial and study help on artificial intelligence. Why do not colleges make critical thinking and test in one subject of your passion. This platform is not really useful to community longer term and unfortunately very shallow check marks for college process. I feel college admission is focusing on shallow packaging marketable stuff than real deep critical thinking and true passions.
While your opinion may actually match reality, unless you somehow get a hold of a magic wand to change all 3000 school’s admission offices, it’s still something you have to deal with if you want to attend any of those schools.
Here’s some anecdotal evidence from my daughter’s experience who is currently at UCLA and attended a competitive Bay Area high school that offered MANY AP and honors classes (limited to the students in similar ways to what a poster above described). Talented students that she has met at UCLA that come from low performing high schools (metal detectors to enter school and horror stories of violence 
) took advantage of dual enrollment opportunities at their local community college and entered as freshmen at UCLA with very high weighted GPAs and many credits under their belts. As far as Berkeley, the handful of amazing students from my daughter’s senior year that are attending, did not have the highest GPAs (even though theoretically they had the opportunities to chase a higher GPA) but seem to be very pointy in their passions and interests. Berkeley admissions are known to be a lot more unpredictable (although recently it seems like most UCs fit the unpredictable admissions category) at our local high school. Maybe a little more holistic that some of the other UCs.
thanks a lot, I see it now, I was just looking at the article on the Hinsdalean and didn’t see the post above with the video.
yes so true but this is bs rabbit hole process has gone into. It will be interesting to historically find out real state about these *community help projects are in say 4/5 years after college admission is done. How many students are really perusing it. Change is very hard to bring in and that takes life time or years into the field. One time activity is mostly packaging
Top colleges only care that a major award was won. This brings recognition to the university. The veracity of the content that won the award is irrelevant.
I could make an argument that most businesses fail. Each time a business owner tries again, they make new mistakes, but not the same ones (hopefully). Similarly, most non-profits probably have a failure-related learning curve, and those people who continue to try and learn lessons from them end up succeeding eventually.
I definitely agree that “all the things people had on their resume that my kid didn’t have” are totally garbage, and “only the things my kid is good at should be taken into account”. But, that is not how the world currently works. And so, if you want a kid to go to college, they have to learn how to play the game well enough to get admitted. Then they can change the system from the inside.
it is not about trying things. or not. it is about college giving weightage to these activities with the sole purpose of getting admissions.
I get what you’re saying, but here’s a view from a colleague who used to be an AO:
AOs are aware that a lot of these activities (although definitely not all) are done primarily to look good to colleges. However, they differentiate between shallow “check the boxes” type of activities vs those that involve substantial work and/or had measurable impact.
A kid may have created a non-profit to boost her/his application - but if s/he had put in a lot of real effort, got dozens of others involved, helped the community, etc - it shows drive, determination and the ability to lead and organize. That’s the type of kid they want on campus.
