<p>It is not a bad thing per se. However, it is not ideal. Take my Howard as my example. As an Asian, would you be attractive to go to Howard. Be honest. I know you wouldn’t. The racial mix at Howard isn’t ideal for many, many students. If Howard would have been 30%-40% Blacks, it would have been much more attractive than it is now. </p>
<p>How would you like to attend a school in China that’s Australian-dominated student body? Or how would you like to attend a British university that’s American dominated student body? How would you like to attend a Japanese university that’s Mongolian-dominated student body? How would you like to attend an Australian university that’s an Indian-dominated student body? You see? There is nothing wrong with that. However, it doesn’t seem attractive anymore. Personally, I would feel like I’m in a wrong place. </p>
<p>Look, this isn’t an issue about racial discrimination. This is an issue of desirability. A school as world-famous as Cal has got to have a good mix of racial backgrounds. If Asians would dominate Cal, it would loss its attractiveness. But than again, this is just my personal opinion. </p>
<p>And, lastly, I’m currently in Asia and it feels great to have this kind of experience. But I would have been very surprised and disappointed if over 50% of the people living here --whom I would interact everyday-- are Americans or Australian or Africans, etc. Got my point?</p>
<p>One of the problems with the clumping of all Asian groups is that Asian URMs get ignored.</p>
<p>Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Indian Americans, Korean Americans, Thai Americans, Japanese Americans, Pakistani Americans, etc. have, to a certain extent, made ourselves very visible and have over represented ourselves in the UC-system, and as a result all the URM Asian groups get screwed.</p>
<p>Unlike visiting a foreign country, the purpose of going to college is not to meet a representative cross section of the population. The primary purpose of going to college is to obtain higher education. Everything else should be secondary. And yes, I would go to Howard if it was as highly regarded academically as say Berkeley.</p>
<p>I guess there are two ways of looking at this. Private schools are more predictable in the sense that 95% of the time, only students with strong academic records are considered for admission before delving into the personal backgrounds. However, they could also be unpredictable in what they look for in the personal backgrounds after their initial screening.</p>
<p>Berkeley is predictable in the sense that students with very strong academic records are admitted with a high fidelity. I’m talking about 4.3+ and 2250+. However, for a large majority of the applicants (GPA: 3.8-4.1 and SAT: 1700-2200), it’s a lot less accurate what exactly Berkeley is looking for. I wouldn’t say that Berkeley tends to admit students with lower academic records than those with better ones. However, there is a noticeable clump of students whose academic track records are much much higher than the admitted average but still get rejected. This happens for in-state applicants and OOS applicants, especially in L&S.</p>
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<p>Uh, that doesn’t even take much effort. It’s not hard to get an A in a community college class, especially for social sciences. Whether they have to take weeder classes here or elsewhere is a moot point I brought up just as a side rant. Let’s face it, transfer students have a much easier time with getting their degrees: they don’t have to take the SAT, they take easier classes at community college, they don’t have to try in high school, and their admissions is easier. Why is their admissions easier? For one, some departments have very high admit rates for transfer students. For example, biological sciences at Berkeley admits around 56% of transfer students. Next, the pool of transfer students is not very competitive to begin with. So, a 56% admission rate in a pool of transfer students is vastly easier than a 22% admission rate in a pool of overachieving high school seniors.</p>
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<p>Why yes, it’s totally a problem to go into a highly paid and respected profession other than education administration.</p>
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<p>Indeed.</p>
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<p>How about let’s get back to the basics. What would be really desirable is an intellectually rich student body, whether it is composed of Asian student or White students or striped students. If 99% of Asian applicants have much much higher GPA and SAT along with strong EC’s, then does it make sense to turn away the majority of them just to make room for applicants of other races who did abysmally in school, scored below 1500’s, and had no EC’s or personal challenges?</p>
<p>I really think there’re already plenty of whites and others. Perhaps some majors are very Asian. But I can tell you the classes I take are not at all dominated by Asians. The EECS courses are, however. In a huge school like Berkeley, I think we all only experience a small part of the population. Obviously there are plenty of Asians, but I think it’s fine enough that we can keep things how they are.</p>
<p>Oh and tastybeef, yeah your experience then is the same as mine. The unpredictability does tend to happen with the “high” but “not highest” scorers. I have yet to hear huge massive complaints about students with 2300+ SAT’s, pretty much perfect SAT II’s, and valedictorians of their classes getting rejected from most UC schools. I did hear UCLA is become a little more subjective, and a valedictorian from a rather strong school got rejected from LA. I agree that Berkeley should remain faithful to numbers as a public school, even at the lower levels…in fact, ESPECIALLY at the lower levels, where differences among numbers actually tend to mean more than, say distinguishing a 2200 SAT-er from a 2300 SAT-er. </p>
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<p>Yeah like, seriously, do you people all go around and say: HEY his skin color is different, what a breath of fresh air! Come on, all Asians aren’t the same. Neither are all studious students. There’re plenty of different people around, and just because a ton of Asians study well, I don’t think we need to make it harder for them. As it happens, Berkeley is one of the few schools that seems to admit all those very high scoring Asians without much question.</p>