<p>Ok, so once again, how do you determine SES without the FAFSA (as decisions are often made before it’s sent in), with a zip code and a high school?</p>
<p>Thanks, Ema. I wasn’t gonna call out the fact that we went to the same hs for your privacy 
lol</p>
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<p>Of course they’re admitting more non residents because they can pay more. Unless Michigan is OK with disappearing into mediocrity, they need to properly fund their departments and programs somehow. That said, it’s extremely important to realize these important points:</p>
<p>[ul][<em>]The increase in out-of-state students has not pushed any instate student out.
[</em>]Michigan has not decreased the number of enrolled resident students, nor do they have any plans to.
[<em>]Michigan is a need blind institution that does not consider the financial background of any individual applicant in admission.
[</em>]Non-resident students have significantly higher standards to which they are judged to the point where their admissions rate is more than 25 percentage points below instate students.
[li]Non-resident tuition subsidizes the education of residents to the tune of ~$6,000 every year.[/ul]</p>[/li]
<p>With regards to your comment about pell grant recipients though, I agree it’s a shame. Michigan chose the model of being 100% need-blind when it comes to individual applications, so I don’t really think there is any single policy that can be enacted to make Michigan more appealing to low income students besides offering more aid (which Michigan is emphasizing in their capital campaign starting later this year). I really hope that the future will lead to more pell grant applicants and a higher yield for accepted pell grant recipients, but I don’t think there exists an easy solution unless the upcoming capital campaign is an unmitigated success. Still, it’s something which definitely deserves attention.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, my daughter’s high school has 5500 students, all one school, all one building, all one principal. It’s 9 stories high and takes up 3/4 of a city block. It has the second-largest auditorium in NYC after Radio City Music Hall.</p>
<p>Although that’s not 8,000, the USNews High School rankings (never corrected publicly) were calculated the year before last as if it had 8000 students.</p>
<p>It is in a zip code with townhouses that sell for $8 million as well as plenty of housing projects but admission is selective according to the results of a test. There are many zip codes in NYC that have a similar variation in income levels, but the NYC high school process is not by zone, although there maybe a third of the city (?) has high schools that have seats reserved for students admitted by zones. Most of these schools are not very good, although some have good programs for which outside students can compete for seats.</p>
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<p>The only way that works is if the total number of seats increases each year in accordance with the increase in out of state students.</p>
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<p>To quote my esteemed, but not infallible (lol) colleagues: are you serious??? Every applicant has a Constitutional (and probably statutory) right to be treated in public university admissions in a manner that does not unlawfully discriminate. (Remember Grutter, Gratz and Fisher, to name a few, hello mini?)</p>
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<p>Sure, public entities can charge for providing copies of records and they ought to, but the charge must be reasonable. A charge of $75 for an email or one-page letter containing one’s evaluation scores is not reasonable. You, as a government employee ought to know that.</p>
<p>Ah, but then you are denying the work that went into the preparation of that communication. </p>
<p>" Every applicant has a Constitutional (and probably statutory) right to be treated in public university admissions in a manner that does not unlawfully discriminate."</p>
<p>Right. And since there is so little evidence of any unlawful discrimination, the number of actual cases is tiny.</p>
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<p>I’m not following you here. What “work” are you referring to, that has not already been conducted? An applicant pays a fee to apply, the fee pays for his application to be reviewed, scored and he is notified of an acceptance or “non-acceptance.” What additional “work” is required to send him a copy of that score, other than photocopying it or entering it into an email?</p>
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<p>Yes, withholding evidence does make it difficult to ascertain whether one is being discriminated against, that is true. It is also wrong.</p>
<p>Bay, suppose there was a score sent to each student. Some kids learn that their score was 6, some learn that their score was 5, some that their score was 2. The 5 and 6 got in, the 2 didn’t. </p>
<p>I’m curious to know what students can do with this information except gaze at it and know that their score was either high enough to get in that year or it wasn’t. But they already knew that. Maybe they could compare scores with friends. They could learn that their application was one point higher or lower than a friend who did or didn’t get in. How does it help? Does it tell them something new and useful? How would knowing that they have a 6 vs. a 5 tell them if they were discriminated against?</p>
<p>calreader,</p>
<p>They don’t have to do anything with it. That is how simple disclosure helps government accountability work. If they receive a score, they know (or at least are one step closer to knowing) that their application was actually reviewed. If the score matches up to generally accepted practices for that school, based on GPA/SAT/ECs, they know that the review was legitimate. If the score is say, a 10/10 and they didn’t get in, then something looks amiss. Same with a 2/10 getting in.</p>
<p>I don’t have any actual knowledge (how could I?) of how the scoring works. Is it ever possible that a 5/10 would get in over a 6/10? Under what circumstances would that happen?</p>
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Assuming that a general “score” is applied to each applicant, it could easily happen that the 5 gets in over the 10 because the “5” has applied to a program or school within the university that has more room than the program that the 6 aspires to. Some schools have different individualized admission standards. A kid with a 580 SAT in Math probably can be accepted to a humanities major at Berkeley, but I doubt that kid would have much of a chance to be accepted for engineering. </p>
<p>I think you have a mistaken understanding of the law and the notion of discrimination. It is illegal for a public institution to discriminate for reasons based on race, gender, or other prohibited categories. (In California, for example, that would extend to discrimination based on sexual orientation). But it is NOT illegal for a decision to be unfair or to “discriminate” based on factors that are not tied to a protected category. That is, it would not be unlawful for the university to accept student A with a lower “score” over student B with a higher score because the admissions readers really liked A’s poetry. It is not illegal if there are several different admissions personnel making decisions, and one is particularly fond of students who play the viola, and another one has an affinity for students who want to study Italian, and their preferences creep into their decisions. </p>
<p>I am not sure that they have determinative “scores” in any case – I think that they do ask the admissions readers to assign a score, but that might be a pre-screening tool rather than one that impacts the final decision. That is, it could be that if they admissions readers are told to assign a score of 1-6, that any student who scores a 3 or below is automatically rejected, whereas those with scores of 4-6 are assessed further using the “holistic review” described at [How</a> Berkeley Selects Students | UC Berkeley Office of Undergraduate Admissions](<a href=“http://admissions.berkeley.edu/selectsstudents]How”>Selection Process - Office of Undergraduate Admissions). Berkeley lists 6 separate broad criteria areas, and specifically says that these “carry no pre-assigned weights”.</p>
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<p>So now we are worried that applications are being summarily rejected without having been read? Is there even one documented case of this?</p>
<p>How could there be, sally?</p>
<p>Calmom,</p>
<p>I understand how discrimination laws work, so yes I also understand that a reviewer’s bias for viola players would not be actionable under those particular laws. But being required to disclose scores will help keep reviewers honest and the system non-corrupt and that is very important from (at least this particular) taxpayers point of view.</p>
<p>I still don’t think I have heard a convincing argument <em>against</em> disclosing the evaluative information. It’s been a long thread maybe I’ve missed one. Can anyone sum up the reasons why the information should not be disclosed?</p>
<p>Because the process is holistic.</p>
<p>^^ROTFL. Yes, well we shall soon see what the supreme court says this year about holistic and public university imperatives in Texas.</p>
<p>So are scores not used in holistic admissions in state uni’s? I thought someone already stated that the apps are scored and ranked. How do uni’s that don’t score their apps decide who to admit out of the 40,000 or whatever who apply?</p>
<p>You don’t get govt accountability from a document stating your score. I get a document every so often with my city-assessed home value, Does that tell me anything other than I am looking at a number on a piece of paper? Does it mean they even looked at my home or its condition or value? NO. </p>
<p>Accountability presumes all sides can fairly operate and fairly assess that operation. This thread proves many here don’t have the core understanding- they assume something “could” include this or that, could be fair or not, could be done, could be understood by the next guy- and when there is rebuttal, we get something like, yeah, there was corruption in IL or “I think” this or that.</p>
<p>I think we have to face that many do not know how it works and want to know. But, think they know how it works and are disgruntled. So where the freak is this thread headed?</p>
<p>You don’t get accountability from keeping information secret. I assume we can all agree on that.</p>
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Because it would tend to impair the ability of the evaluators to do their job well and could sometimes require the disclosure of confidential information. </p>
<p>Because it is a selection rather than a rejection process, it is going to be much easier to state the “reasons” why some applicants are accepted rather than why some are rejected. For the students who are in the gray area (not automatically accepted, not automatically rejected) – then the “reason” for rejection might be nothing at all. That’s because rather than looking for affirmative reasons to reject, they are looking for affirmative reasons to accept. </p>
<p>In other words, based on my previous hypothetical, a student might be accepted because the ad com liked the fact that she plays the viola in a youth orchestra. That does not mean that any students were ever rejected because they didn’t play the viola. Viola-playing is not a criteria for Berkeley admissions – it’s just something that helps one hypothetical student along the way under the holistic admission standards. </p>
<p>Your concerns about keeping the system non-corrupt are not based on any evidence of corruption. The UC admissions process in my experience has been highly predictable. I am not saying 100% predictable, but I’ve never seen any evidence of any sort of corruption in the admissions process. </p>
<p>In any case, the published stats of admitted applicants are enough to assure the public that the system is non-corrupt. That is, any student who has a GPA or test scores in line with the median score ranges reported for the school should have a chance at admissions. “Corruption”, if any, would show up in the pool of admitted students, not the pool of rejected students.</p>
<p>No, Bay, but information can already be procured when it needs to be. There is no large group clamoring for public institutions to report details of every admissions decision. It WOULD add bureaucracy and, I believe, end up costing taxpayers both at the front end and when the lawsuits inevitably start to roll in. Call me cynical, but the genesis of the Fisher case makes clear that there are people with agendas behind a lot of these “issues” right now.</p>