I would imagine the MCA algorithm will get updated to make admission even more competitive at SLO, among other adverse impacts. While the admin appears poised to reduce next years’ class yield one can assume the impact will be felt over the next 4-5 years, including Class of 2018 grads who have significant AP credit and compete for placement in courses with the class ahead. Will be interesting to see if the miscalculations in human behavior were equally spread across all majors. Historically is appears SLO has been very accurate with projected yield vs. actual. Not so this time. Victims of their own success.
My daughter (15, high school soph.) and I took a housing tour while my son was involved in SLO Days. Every child on the tour was in the 2018 high school class or later. The guides were really pumping up the new dorms that would be available for the NEXT freshman class (Fall 2018). They also emphasized that the university is making a push to house more second-year students on campus in the future. But, in side conversations, they were also pretty sure that most incoming freshmen for Fall 2017 would be living in triples. It’s really just bad timing for the incoming freshmen, but we are preparing our son to just make the most of it. Lots of opportunities to meet a lot more people in very close quarters.
The algorithm per se, won’t be adjusted. They’ll just move where they put the cutoff for each major to offer less acceptances. FYI, that line moves every year, the best I can tell.
@eyemgh Where did you read that the algorithm won’t be adjusted? The increase in enrollment is direct result of the algorithm re-weighting to include more offers to applicants living inside the service area. Cal poly has been under the microscope lately. Just saying…
I was under the impression that the over-enrollment was more about having eliminated Early-Decision than it was about anything else. At a WOW event this Fall, the university president said as much. They had to “guestimate” 100% of their attendees this year versus previous years where the ED group lowered that percentage.
In a nut shell, the old matrix produced a profile which marginalized particular groups of CA students, students from the service area, etc in favor of higher income applicants, students from preferred HS and OOS students. Why do you think they were pushed into eliminating ED? I wonder how this miscalculation impacted Vice-Provost James Maraviglia side job as a consultant for EMG Marketing Group. (CPSLO is a EMG client). Even Vice Provost Maraviglia admitted that this years incoming class contained 30% more “low income” students than prior years. The precent of students from the service area increased by over 50% and is now more inline with other CSU’s
Yep, as @AMCdad said. The algorithm was changed to up service area enrollment in 2013 or there abouts. The over enrollment was due to eliminating ED and not knowing the yield they’d get in an RD only pool.
“Cal Poly Chief Communications Officer Chris Murphy said the incoming group will be the most diverse class in two decades.”
“…Faced with a predominantly white and male student body, Cal Poly is striving to make the campus a more diverse institution that better reflects the demographics of California and the state university system as a whole. In fall 2015, Cal Poly’s total student body was 53 percent male and 57 percent white compared with the CSU total of 44 percent male and 26 percent white…”
Key take-away: “institution that better reflects the demographics of California”
Yep. That’s why they eliminated ED. It negatively impacted lower socioeconomic families, typically families of color, because financial awards didn’t come out until much later. As a result, most had to choose RD. Eliminating ED leveled the financial playing field.
The algorithm does not favor race (which is illegal in CA), but does so indirectly through non-academic adders for Partner Schools and for students who have one or both parents who didn’t finish HS.
As for race per se, there’s more than just eliminating ED. Cal Poly has made it a priority to reach out to minority students having long felt it was too homogeneous for a full collegiate experience. They have new administrator(s) specifically tasked with upping minority applications.
I believe the reason for the lack of diversity has been pretty easy to explain. Once more than white kids started attending colleges, most of all races still went to the schools closest to home. SLO county is not diverse. That then became a self fulfilling prophecy in the “I’m not going there, because there are no minorities there.”
Nope. While “service area” enrollment is up, those aren’t UMR kids. SLO County is even less diverse than"the old" Cal Poly. The 2010 census reported that 83 percent of SLO County inhabitants are white.
Slippery assumptions @eyemgh. Tread carefully. I think you’re confusing URM with low income. So where did these URM kids come from…?
It’s long standing fact that CPSLO manipulated admissions algorithms to include demographic factors favoring a particular profile. Get ready, you’re going to see alot more CALIFORNIA kids, previous locked out because of their zip code or high school, and alot fewer privileged OOSers and white boys from Orange County.
Key take-away: “institution that better reflects the demographics of California”, because you know, CPSLO is a CSU.
Cal Poly does not specifically give advantage to underrepresented minors or low income students. They give advantage to students who attend Partner Schools and to students whose parent(s) did not finish high school. Those do happen to have a correlation with both minority status and lower socioeconomic status, but those categories per se are not given advantage.
Where do they come from? Where they live. If we’re playing simple statistical probability, from counties with higher percentages of minority students.
Separately, students are given advantage for being from the service area.
The removal of ED was to attract more minority applicants to Cal Poly. One third of the class was chosen during ED. Many families that needed assistance were left out of that pool. It is certainly not always the case that those families are minorities, but many of them are.
As for race, you made my point exactly. SLO county is overwhelming white. State schools tend to reflect their surrounding demographic. Cal Poly, through both the MCA and through eliminating ED is seeking to be more diverse. It’s an uphill battle to attract minorities to a school where there aren’t many minorities. That said, it’s been discussed as a school objective since my son started there in 2014. I wouldn’t be surprised if it predated that.
OOS rates are unlikely to change. They’ve been targeting roughly 15% from OOS for some time to make up the budget gap created by Californians deciding to under fund education by cutting taxes. That hasn’t changed, nor will it any time soon.
I don’t know of any lockouts based on CA zip codes or schools. No one has ever offered any evidence of such actions. Occasionally a parent of a rejected student will concoct such a conspiracy theory, but it’s usually because they weren’t strong enough for their chosen major or they forgot middle school math on their application.
@eyemgh exactly!!! Initial information indicated that “service area” acceptances rose by over 50%. Based on demographics of the area, guessing mostly white kids. YET, the incoming class is 30% more diverse. AND the average GPA jumped to over 4.0. I can understand why eliminating ED resulted in a higher average GPA. But just dropping ED doesn’t explain the the higher yield #s from the regular pool… The university has blamed the increase in yeild on dropping ED as “one” factor, but never said it was the ONLY change to admission protocol. The local SLO residents and local school districts were at odds with CP for years to include more Service area residents. CSU came under fire for allowing CP to stray from CSUs mission. The school itself received national noticed for “whiteness”, “affluence” which exceed some Ivys. High school college advisors across the state have claimed for years that naviamce data does not support the theory of MCA cut offs in the regular pool, citing a trend to deny high stat kids, kids from private schools, etc. I suspect that once CPSLO publishes the full demographic data for this years incoming class, we’ll have a clearer picture of the geography. I do know the CSU board and the town of SLO is watching closely…
Worth mentioning is CP stated preference for ACT exams combined with vice-provost’s JM affiliation with ACT. Although the college never official disclosed the algorithm, ACT scores were always presumed to be weighted heavier. Eliminating preference for ACT and giving more wieght to GPA would go along way towards explaining the higher yeild numbers…
Other factors come into play as well. I hope that CPSLO is finally forced to fully disclosed the complete algorithm.
They can’t systematically reject high stats kids from private schools and still be overly white and affluent and have the average test scores and GPAs that they do. How can the CENG average 4.16 GPA and 1467 SAT without high stats applicants? That assertion simply does not make any logical sense.
I’m convinced that the rare student who gets rejected that should have gotten in based on the MCA score they THOUGHT they had, forgot to include their middle school math. It’s a stupid system, that got even stupider this year, but there are plenty of posters from last year and this year to support that hypothesis. In competitive majors a drop of 250 MCA points is a fatal blow.
That explains a few of the Naviance outliers. The other issue with Naviance and CP, assuming you believe Naviance data to be valid (there’s plenty of evidence pointing to its flaws) is that test scores and GPA are only about 80% of the academic proportion of the algorithm. Once you add in the non-academic adders, those two factors are diluted even more. It’s easy to construct a hypothetical candidate with an unweighted 4.0 and perfect SAT who could have a lower MCA than a student with more pedestrian stats.
I’m a firm believer in Occam’s Razor, that the simplest explanations are usually the correct ones. You can choose to believe there are more convoluted stratagems. Until I see evidence, I’m sticking with Occam.
There was an earlier thread explaining part of the lack of diversity. Well academically qualified URM candidates (those with good MCA score) tend to receive generous scholarships from higher ranked private schools that can afford it, legally and financially (e.g. USC). When those things are factored in it becomes a financial no brain-er for those candidates. I am not making any judgement on whether that is right or not. I do believe CalPoly, like other public schools in CA follow the law, which prohibits using race as a factor.
A critical missing table for apps: by region, gender, ethnicity.
to be clear, I don’t think CP intentionally uses race as a factor. However, the “pre-2017” algorithm clearly favored particular demographics. By intentionally manipulating admissions criteria to increase yield, CP unintentionally discouraged diversity.
If you’re going to claim “intentionally manipulating admissions criteria to increase yield” you should offer some evidence. Then, and more glaringly, explain why it’s only 33%.
That was about getting more applications from URM. It will certainly have some impact on overall yield, but that’s not the primary intention. They had no idea what to expect. The gross over enrollment should be proof of that. This: “a trend to deny high stat kids, kids from private schools,” something you regularly claim CP does to boost yield, is what I’m asking for evidence of.