<p>To be excluded also means to be prevented or restricted from entrance. If the standards used for admission do not exist in meaningful numbers within certain racial groups, then they are in fact effectively excluded from entrance to UCLA.</p>
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<p>I am refuting UCLA’s (pre-holistic) standards for assessing “achievement.” The racial composition of nearly every other university in the top 100 proves that there are ways to assess achievement that both predict a student’s success in college, and result in the admission of students of every race.</p>
<p>how do we know that UCLA’s problem isn’t really that its top admitted students would rather enroll at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or even (horrors!) Berkeley or USC? Maybe the strongest students admitted to UCLA aren’t appearing in UCLA’s statistics of enrolled students because they are enrolled students somewhere else. </p>
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<p>There is some question about whether UCLA’s recent admission practice may be restricting the entrance (I presume you mean “admission”) of Asian-American students. That’s an issue worth looking into. I think one professor who is familiar with the UCLA admission process, namely the one mentioned in the thread-opening post in this thread, has asked for information about this issue that so far has not been forthcoming from the UCLA administration. </p>
<p>California may indeed have some severe problems in K-12 education that differentially influence “the ability to succeed in college” of various students unequally among ethnic groups. But it’s hard to make the case that UCLA treats anyone unfairly by regarding “the ability to succeed in college” as long as it is one of the more selective campuses in a statewide system that includes many higher education campuses with open admission policies.</p>
<p>“What you tell us in your personal
statement gives readers the context to better understand the rest of the
information youve provided in your application.”</p>
<p>“Describe the world you come from for example, your family, community
or school and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams
and aspirations.”</p>
<p>^^ This is where UCLA gets “information about life challenges, environmental, family and personal situations of students.”</p>
The UC apps are online and there is no counselor’s recommendation form for them to read. Even if they did, I think few public HS counselor’s would have any idea of the personal challenges of the students due to the very high student to counselor ratio. I think any personal data, including challenges, is supposed to be in the personal statement section of the online app.</p>
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No, they’re not ‘excluded’ by UCLA. They’re not restricted by UCLA from admission. The ethnicity isn’t a factor - their academic performance (along with some other non-racial criteria) is. There’s no effort, concerted or otherwise, to exclude a segment of the population based on their race. And the question on this thread is actually the opposite of whether certain racial groups are being given a preference when by law they shouldn’t be.</p>
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So do you think a college should lower its admissions standards in order to attract ‘meaningful numbers’ of certain racial (or other) groups? If so, how much should it be lowered? Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep the academic standards at the current high level and keep admissions open to any ethnicity? Why discriminate based on race? It makes no sense.</p>
<p>The college essay format does not give students the chance to enumerate every adversary situation that they face. Students are taught to show one facet of life and not to tell every detail (yes, students have to write an interesting essay). For example, a new immigrant may choose to show in the essay how he/she struggled with English and how he/she improved it and choose not to show that his/her family and himself/herself were struggling to make a living. An abused student may just ignore the fact that he/she was brutally molested, beaten, detracted from academic activities by the abusive parent and just focus on how he/she he appreciated the opportunity to work in a community of poor people and learn positive experience in the essay.</p>
<p>I think this type of prompt for every UC applicant is used more to access character, personal quality, and motivation than to evaluate personal situation of students. If UCLA wants to collect life challenges and personal situation of a student then a different question should be asked (something like: Please list the adversary situations that affect your academic activities during your high school years - a plain question that a guidance counselor can answer on behalf of the student if the counselor has such an opportunity, and in fact never has).</p>
<p>Well what you “think” coolweather is not correct. Refer again to my post 63. These are the invitations for students to discuss circumstances, and discuss they do. These opportunities are embedded in Prompts #1 and 2, both, and the student might refer to these in a contextual way in the Additional Comments section. It doesn’t matter what you presume the committee does and doesn’t look at, should & shouldn’t look at. They do very much look at personal situations, and it is figured directly & explicitly into the review process.</p>
<p>Well, technically he could argue that urms are on the whole discriminated against in college admissions. </p>
<p>I could exclude most of an ethnic group without explicitly barring attendance. Like if Harvard added a requirement that students be fluent in Chinese, or if they added a requirement that half their students must be water polo players (not many available swimming pools in poor inner city). </p>
<p>Now, I believe that the entire K-12 education system is discriminatory against urms; I don’t think it’s the colleges fault. But his argument is perfectly plausible and fabrizio and token’s assessment, while correct in strict dictionary definition terms, is incorrect in the big picture.</p>
<p>^^I don’t know the exact number, but for African Americans it should at least be in the triple digits. </p>
<p>This problem really came to a head in 2007 when UCLA enrolled fewer than 100 blacks in their freshman class. It’s really shameful that the university that produced Ralph Bunche, Jackie Robinson, Tom Bradley, and Arthur Ashe, among many other illustrious African Americans, couldn’t find a way to enroll 100 black freshmen. It pointed to a serious systemic problem that needed fixing. The school was in danger of rendering itself irrelevant to a large chunk of the California and US population. And so far, “Holistic Admissions” has been the answer to that.</p>
<p>If today’s Ralph Bunche, Jackie Robinson, Tom Bradley, and Arthur Ashe attend Harvard or Yale from southern California, are they worse off? Remember, we are looking at numbers who ENROLLED at UCLA when UCLA’s overall yield of admitted students is less than 50 percent.</p>
True, and what’s a top public to do to attract a higher number of URMs to accept when those high performing URMs might be offered full rides at prestigious private universities? This exacerbates the problem. </p>
<p>In addition, admissions standards at the top UCs have changed considerably over the years whereby it’s gotten much more academically competetive. The bar has been cranked higher and higher for ‘everyone’. Many of the URMs and non-URMs who attended UCLA, Cal, UCSD, UVA, and other top publics 30-40 years ago would either not be offered admission today in the first place or if they were offered admission would have rejected the college in favor of attending a top private on a full ride. Regardless of the race, if one has a choice of paying to attend UCLA versus a free ride to Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and many of the top prestigious LACs, which one would they likely choose? It’s not so simple of an issue. The solution needs to start well before the age of applying to college.</p>
<p>No, it is not a simple issue, but imo the resolution can be only be achieved by defining the mission of UCLA and working toward that goal. If UCLA wants to be the u of choice for students who value only high GPAs and test scores, and who are not interested in the value that a diverse student body might add to their educational experience, well that it pretty easy to achieve and is exactly the direction in which UCLA was headed post-Prop 209 and pre-holistic admissions.</p>
<p>No, but UCLA is. And the state of California is worse off too when these talented people leave and stay in the Ivy/East coast.</p>
<p>It was becoming a vicious cycle: few blacks are enrolled so even fewer are interested in enrolling. And the result is that one of the nations great universities with a long history of producing distingusihed African Americans gets reduced to a white man’s/Asian’s school.</p>
<p>It was clear that something had had to change to reverse this downward spiral.</p>
<p>What makes that clear? I thought the latest figures from California’s own studies of its higher education system show that more Californians of ALL ethnic groups are completing higher education degrees in California state-run universities than ever before, so brain drain doesn’t appear to be the issue. And, as several participants have pointed out, every which ethnic group defined by federal regulations continues to enroll at UCLA (not to mention all the other California state-supported universities). What is going “downward” here?</p>
<p>“This problem really came to a head in 2007 when UCLA enrolled fewer than 100 blacks in their freshman class. It’s really shameful that the university that produced Ralph Bunche, Jackie Robinson, Tom Bradley, and Arthur Ashe, among many other illustrious African Americans, couldn’t find a way to enroll 100 black freshmen. It pointed to a serious systemic problem that needed fixing.”</p>
<p>I agree, there is a serious systemic problem, but it is not in UCLA’s admission policies pre-“Holistic” admissions–it is in the African American community, specifically in its attitude towards education.</p>
<p>What was going downward were the numbers of hispanics and especially the number of African Americans enrolled at UCLA. As I said, 2007 was the nadir with fewer than 100 black freshmen enrolling. The school rightfully didn’t want to hang the functional equivalent of a “Whites and Asians Only” sign up in front of the campus, so they changed to holistic admissions to reverse the trend - which it has done.</p>