<p>Post 53:
I’m talking about prior to The Crash. I wouldn’t know if admissions for 09 and 10 have been, will be affected. But the generosities of the top 3 Ivies have made it possible to <em>prefer</em> low-income admits over non-development, non-legacy admits who had similar academic & e.c. profiles (for example, from the same high school.) and where there were no other category differences (such as ethnicity) with the exception of finances. Check out many of the acceptance threads over the prior 4 years on CC alone.</p>
<p>Newsflash, blue: There are poor kids who go to Lowell. I know some of them. My daughters have done activities with some of them. Those aren’t being rejected to Berkeley, if they’ve applied AND are competitive for Berkeley. </p>
<p>Yes, it’s a damn shame that everybody, including the rich, can’t get accepted everywhere their little hearts desire.:rolleyes: Another newsflash: a merit scholarship to JHU is hardly a major setback in life. There have been lots of discussions about this over the years on CC – the supposed “unfairness” of the greater options that the wealthy have in comparison to the poor. I’m not derailing the thread for this.</p>
<p>I do not support admissions tips for illegal immigrants no matter what their national origins, btw. Nor do I support their being admitted in the first place to a public CA institution, regardless of their level of achievement in CA schools. Nor did I support that several years ago. Dstark tried to ask the question as to numbers of those admissions, and unfortunately I do not have the stats, but their numbers should be zero, just as the numbers being housed in our prisons should be zero. They should be sent back as criminals to their countries of origin; and they risked the lives and safety of their families if those are here as well, so tough. CA is not a mega-charity. We’re a State with responsibilities to our own legitimate citizens first, responsibilities which we are not entirely meeting.</p>
<p>If you really and sincerely believe that lots and lots of Pell grantees are absconding with lots of money and never or rarely graduating, and further, that such a scandal is a major player in CA’s budget crisis, then you are suffering from a deficit in information as to the <em>breadth</em> of CA expenditures.</p>
<p>Again, there is huge waste in the public K-12 education system – I will maintain more so than in CA’s higher institutions. I would know. I have taught there, and recently, and I currently work privately side-by-side with the publics, so I continue to see the phenomenol waste – everything from "special programs’ (NOT the ones for Special Ed kids; I’m talking about non-academic “programs” within the schools, funded from the CA education budget). I would focus much more, if I were you, on the profligate waste & incompetency of RICH CA officials in bureaucracy than on the theoretical incompetence of poor ELC’ers at UC, which is a huge myth but a convenient scapegoat.</p>
<p>Not to mention that the commercial property owners have made out like bandits since Prop 13. Not to mention corruption in the Workers’ Comp. area. Not to mention the vast social services offered to vast sub-populations which do not begin to be able to repay, even eventually, the support offered to them by the State, since these populations are mostly quite uneducated and will remain so, and/or impaired in some other significant way from contributing economically to the State.</p>
<p>CA is going to have to stop defining itself as an infinite source of funds to every new needy group or desirous group that comes along. As to college grants, those are finite. They are linked to units completed (rather than years). I have no problem having the gov’t legislate a clause requiring a certain level of performance as a condition both of continuing funding to that student, as well as assurance that the grant will not convert to a loan if the student does not graduate in a continuous time period. No problem at all. But I wouldn’t hold your breath that that’s the primary reason for CA’s massive budget crisis. You’re grasping at straws here.</p>