For the state's high school seniors, this was the toughest year ever to get into the University of California, with seven of the nine undergraduate campuses reporting the lowest admission rates on record and for the first time more than 10,000 applicants being offered a spot on a waiting list.</p>
<p>A-plus students are now the average not the exception at most UCs, data released Wednesday show. At all but three UC campuses, the mean grade-point-average of admitted students is above 4.0.
<p>How in the world can this statement be true…?!!
“These students do not take up space from a California student,” Wilbur said.</p>
<p>It is all well and good to say these full-freight students from overseas contribute to the schools diversity, but to suggest they do not take a seat from a California student seems to be a gross misnomer.</p>
<p>What Wilbur probably meant is that they have a certain number of slots reserved for international students, and that because of this, those students were not competing with California students for admission, but with other internationals. Which of course is kind of begging the question, as it assumes that the number of international slots is written in stone.</p>
<p>Here’s what I’m getting from that statement:
Full fare OOS and Internationals are not crowding CA students out - the system could be handling 3,800 more kids than they let in, if they had the funds to do so. I don’t know the numbers, but if perhaps 2 OOS full-price kid covers the negative costs of one in-state kid, enrolling more OOS students could actually increase the number of spaces for in-state kids. Ironic but possible.</p>
<p>it’s fairly easy to be a B plus student from an average california public hs and be an A student to the UC’s if your B classes were honors or AP so you get a full grade increase when the UC calcs your gpa.</p>
<p>Seems to be a massive problem if you have to waitlist so many students. That’s putting the lives of a lot of students on hold and it appears to be the first year so there’s no experience on how many they will take or what a student’s odds are. It would be interesting to see the profile of students that were accepted outright.</p>
<p>But those students had the option of applying to private colleges, many of which will give merit aid which makes the cost comparable to the UC. They also have the option of community colleges. There are many great community colleges in CA and some offer dorms etc.</p>
<p>I’ve read that slots at community colleges are tight too. My daughter is attending community college as a dual-enrollment student and starting this last year, courses close up very quickly. In the past, you could enroll about six weeks before classes started and be reasonably sure of getting the courses that you wanted. Now it’s more like ten weeks.</p>
<p>I work with a few paying full-fare or close to it at private schools - I think that things vary widely on privates discounting to the price of UCs.</p>
<p>HS grade inflation is, at most, a minor contributing factor to the A+ average of the accepted student pool. The problem is shrinking freshman classes at the UCs, in combination with the echo boom peak. There are more students throwing themselves at fewer slots. This enables UC to become more selective for precisely the same reason that, say, Yale can afford to be selective. Supply and demand.</p>
<p>ebeeeee: We also have the CSU system, which unfortunately is having the same problems the UCs are having. CSU is also wait-listing this year, also for the first time in most cases. This is even more shocking to me than the UCs; CSU is supposed to be the place where any student who’s willing to do the work can get be admitted and get the degree. Never thought I’d see that day that CSU would be considered selective.</p>
<p>As to the the community colleges, yes, those are available to every California student. The problem there is actually getting into classes, especially the general-ed classes that students need to transfer into, say, the UC system. In the case of some gen-ed classes last year, the wait lists were larger than the class lists. I’d expect that the problem at the CCs will only get worse next year, with this new development at UC/CSU.</p>
Not really since the students they’re referring to were not the ‘average’ students at their high schools by any means - they were at the top end of their class. They also typically have non-average very high SAT/ACT scores to go along with it. According to its charter this is the segment the UCs are attempting to serve - the top 12.5% of California HS students. </p>
<p>With the increased competetiveness at the UCs not just due to lower numbers being admitted, but also because more are applying, the stats of the incoming students at the UCs other than UCLA, UCB, UCSD are rising as well. It’s getting more difficult for students to be accepted to UC Davis, UC Irvine, etc.</p>
<p>in terms of calculating GPA for UC, they do give extra points for a limited number of honors courses (not for every honors course you take - it is capped), but they also do not count all courses in the GPA - i.e., they exclude some “fluff” courses - so it is a meaningful GPA. Perhaps the signal the UC’s are sending to taxpayers in California is: if you want us to admit all the qualified students in the state, then we need the money to do it - otherwise we will cut enrollment, placing some students on waiting lists, and we will accept more full pay OOS and international students. The flagship UC’s have benefitted greatly from the generosity of some international donors - it makes a lot of sense for them to admit overseas students. (Look at the funding for some of the new building on the Cal campus - much is from Asian donors - it is a boon to the taxpayers of California that they are the beneficiaries of such largess.) You can’t have your cake and eat it - if you don’t want to raise taxes, then tuition will rise and the UC’s - the treasure of the state of California - will increasingly have to do what comparable private colleges do - raise tuition every year and admit students who can pay the full cost.</p>
It’s good that qualified students have a spot at a UC campus, even if it’s not their first choice, and with the increased competetiveness it should result in students with higher stats (along with any that are qualified according to the UC formula) attending the traditionally less competetive campuses.</p>
<p>whyme1: Thank you for posting the following stats:</p>
<p>“According to a Contra Costa Times article, the average SAT for admitted students on all campuses this year was 1794, GPA 3.84%”</p>
<p>This clearly shows grade inflation at the high school level, and poor mastery of core subjects. Unfortunately typical for most California high schools. As has been said, the UC’s fully weight GPA’s and give bonus points for being in the top 4% of your school, while discounting (by 20%) SAT/ACT scores, and giving no weighting to AP scores. I will state here that many schools pass out A’s in their AP and Honors courses like candy, and those same students do miserably on the SAT/ACT/AP tests. UC doesn’t care. Their goal is a cross section of California students and that’s what they get.</p>
Their goal isn’t a cross section of students. Their goal is the overall top 12.5% of California HS students and the top 4% of the students at each individual HS. Whether grade inflation is going on at some HS campuses or not they’re still looking for those percentages. Of course, some students benefitting from grade inflation might do better in admission than others but I don’t think one could find a large collection of HS campuses in the country where there wasn’t some kind of grading disparity. It’s hard to find one where that doesn’t happen ‘within’ a campus - i.e. the grade depends on the luck of the draw of the teacher the student gets since there seems to be little in the way of grading or eben material consistency controls on HS campuses.</p>
<p>Also, if someone’s comparing the SAT scores of incoming UC students to some other colleges they also need to keep in mind that the UCs don’t superscore like some do which makes their published scores lower.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that the caliber and selectivity of students at the UCs, especially the top 3, and now more and more some others, are pretty high.</p>
<p>ucsd<em>ucla</em>dad: At most schools there’s at least a correlation between GPA’s and test scores. The average test scores (or middle 50th percentile) at any UC compared to the corresponding average GPA for that campus is embarassing.</p>
<p>^^ You say ‘at most schools there’s a correlation’ yet the GPA comes from the high schools rather than the UCs of course. Any college in the country is getting the same scores (whether they admit the students or not) so it has nothing to do with the UCs. Again, the only difference is when some colleges superscore the SAT which will make the perceived scores higher but not the actual ones. Do you think that the GPA/SAT disparity is substantially different in California versus other states - i.e. do you think it’s primarily the California public school system that’s practicing the inflation on a wide scale? (Legit question - I don’t know the answer)</p>