<p>They cut tutoring services (that were once free and available to ALL students) so now you only get tutoring if you’re hispanic black or other minority. Heh. this was about 2 months ago.</p>
<p>They also just cut a bunch of workshops that also helped students understand the material, outside of their classes. Also done this year.</p>
<p>They say it’s a budget issue but it ain’t. …Some things don’t make news coverage as much as the new pauly pavilion…</p>
<p>I’d say call up Judith Smith if you’re a concerned parent, but really, UCLA isn’t going to do anything about it.</p>
<p>Student groups like savecovel.com have tried to petition, but yeah… See above. Any professor who speaks up on the students’ behalf is getting silenced from the top, and the students’ protests are pretty much just ignored when it comes to these types of decisions. UCLA has become pretty commercialized as of late…</p>
<p>we’re not talking about the lower-tier UCs, because they don’t have this problem. We’re talking about the higher tier ones where whites and asians alone typically make up anywhere from like 70%-80% of the students. (e.g. at UCI for example, i believe that 50% of their students are asian)</p>
<p>you might say ‘well then they just have to work harder’ but to make things truly fair, they need to be established through different criteria. not all families have a strong support network for education, nor do they have the resources to help their children with their academic needs.</p>
<p>while you could argue that some people are in these situations and get through them anyway, it’s such a small, minute amount of people it isn’t seriously worth considering. Look at UCLA’s black students, which constitute less than 5% of the student population, and have for many years, in addition to the fact that a majority of them are on athletic scholarships iirc.</p>
<p>it’s a complicated issue, but important one nonetheless.</p>
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<p>you’re assuming that the quality of education at UCLA is better, or more rigorous, than the quality of education at UCR. While this might generally be true for most systems, unless it’s something that one specifies in and the other does not (e.g. UCLA for linguistics) you’re likely to get the same education at both schools. Both will have high quality faculty just due to the overabundance of high-quality PHDs in the field. Just as you’ll get PHDs from MIT at UCLA, you’ll also see MIT PHDs at UCR. </p>
<p>Those PHDs at UCR may not have the same level of published research at UCR than the ones at UCLA do, but this has little to do with teaching ability and is only important for things like grad school.</p>
<p>What are you talking about? UC-Riverside’s white and asians are about 60% of the population. UC-Santa Cruz’s white and asians are about 70%. UC-Merced white and asians are about 60%. I would say they are just like UCLA/Berkeley, diversity-wise. And why is this a problem? You want to admit the best students you can without factoring what races they are.</p>
<p>^^You’re wrong about disadvantaged students not making it to a UC because they didn’t try as hard. This isn’t even debate worthy. It’s okay to think this way for you because you might not have seen what I and many others have actually seen. It reminds me of the way I once argued with my dad over so many things he would tell me only to turn 18 (earlier in life than most kids) and realize he was almost completely right about everything. Your reasons might make complete sense in YOUR mind but still, they are wrong. The more anyone argues with you on here, the more you take it as a personal attack which continues to make you even more hostile and stubborn about your ideas. Just let it go.</p>
<p>The level of stupidity in some of the responses in this thread is amazing. Maybe I’m getting old now, but I would like to inform anybody reading this thread that the idiotic responses in this thread do not accurately reflect the UCLA student body.</p>
<p>You people who are condemning affirmative action as “unfair” are just ignorant. Firstly, a school’s number one goal isn’t to accept the highest scores/gpa/etc. They are attempting to cultivate a diverse student body. You might not understand right now, but accepting the smartest and highest achieving students isn’t what admissions is about.</p>
<p>Anybody who thinks that a school would accept a student that was unprepared simply due to racial factors is naive. Just because a rejected student might be more prepared than a black student that was accepted, does not necessarily mean that the black student is unprepared.</p>
<p>Wifey:
"It’s just about whether or not they want to do it… not that much to do with their family background, IMO. "</p>
<p>This is probably the funniest quote I’ve read in a long time. I’m not sure if you are just ■■■■■■■■ or not. Do you think someone’s family background/upbringing has nothing to do with their perception of education? I know if I was born to an underprivileged family I wouldn’t be able to justify paying tens of thousands of dollars to go to several more years of school to obtain a degree that probably means nothing in this day in age.</p>
<p>The whole criticism on racial diversity in this thread is ridiculous. I agree with pretty much everything “beyphy” has said. I’m not even really sure what the point of of this discussion is anymore. Asians and Whites probably make up the majority of the population at the top universities, and this isn’t good or bad, it just is.</p>
<p>You’re right, this was my mistake. I saw UCM’s enrollment statistics a while back as 30% hispanic, and thought that the other lower-ranked schools held similar demographics.</p>
<p>from the trends i’ve noticed, when they’re not equal (e.g. not UCLA), asians tend to dominate a school’s enrollment (e.g. UCSD), and then white tend to do so when asians do not (e.g. UCSC)</p>
<p>so lumping them together kind of doesn’t give you the full picture. Although they’re all roughly 70%, UCLA has roughly equal asians and whites whereas UCSD has 50% asians, 25% whites, and UCSC has 50% whites, 17% asians.</p>
<p>the most balanced school for demographics that i’ve seen so far is UCR, which seems to have the best diversity of any of the schools i’ve seen at least.</p>
<p>That being said, a difference in 10% doesn’t make two universities equally diverse. According to data i got from UCB’s wikipedia page, asians only make up 12% of california, but make up at least 40% of the population at the top 3 universities; and if you substitute UCI for UCLA, they make up nearly %50; compare this to hispanics, whichmake up 36% of california, yet, make up 12 (UCB), 14 (UCLA), and 13 (UCSD)% respectively. Don’t you think there’s something at least slightly odd about these numbers?</p>
<p>i know that this goes contrary to your intuitions, and i don’t blame you. We’ve had this tradition in the United States that people should be rewarded for their hard work, and this is what, i think, you’re arguing. The problem is that the ‘best students’ tend to be whites and asians. The question we have to ask ourselves is why.</p>
<p>Either we conclude that whites and asians are simply hard working whereas their hispanic and black counterparts are simply lazy (which seems extremely unlikely when we’re talking, at this scale, about millions of people) or we conclude that certain things like family education and resources, which of lot of black and hispanic minorities lack, influence education, and hence, we should do something to make it equal. There might be other explanations for this, but these are the ones that i at least am arguing (if you know of any studies for this, or other explanations i wouldn’t mind hearing them)</p>
<p>My overall point is, is the playing field equal for everyone? i don’t think that it is, and that the numbers show this. And if it isn’t, should we do something about it? I think that we should, and in fact, we do.</p>
<p>UCLA =/= UCR in terms of rigor, just like UC Berkeley =/= UCI in rigor -__-. Common sense. I personally think it’s better to go to CC and transfer to a top UC rather than going to Merced or whatever. But that also depends on what you want to do. I have friends at UCR who say it’s hard but are able to keep going, but I have friends at UCLA who just flunked out because they couldn’t handle it.</p>
unless you have some evidence to support this, it’s just a BS claim. “Common sense” tells me nothing other than you have preconceptions of what each university offers which could just be based purely on your perception rather than actually on facts.</p>
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<p>this is just anecdotal, so it provides little support. Again, you’re assuming that the cause of your friends dropping out was the rigor of UCLA whereas it could have been a number of things such as family problems, lack of personal dedication, etc. For all you know, your friends who dropped out of UCLA might have also dropped out of UCR. Hence, This doesn’t prove that UCLA is any more difficult than UCR in terms of workload of rigor. </p>
<p>If this were the case, no UCR admits would go to any reputable professional schools simply because they wouldn’t be adequately prepared. (and who would go to a university which didn’t adequately prepare them?) What’s really the case is that the students, on average, aren’t as dedicated at a school like UCR, and even though the faculty of the two schools are fairly comparable, the average students are not. At best, UCR isn’t as competitive, and perhaps the curves are more generous at UCR than they are at UCLA, and hence, your friends might not have flunked out of UCR for this reason, but this doesn’t mean they get easier amounts of work.</p>
<p>@bephy, i would like to personally thank you for your arguments and I truly appreciate the time and effort you put in to get your message across. But honestly, I think it’s a waste of time trying to convince these people of such things, because only experience can cure stubborn ignorance.</p>