<p>From the NY Times article:
But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree. </p>
<p>How likely is it for this to actually happen? Two students with the same HS GPAs and SAT scores and one goes to UC Berkeley and the other to a Cal State? There are reasons why some students are at Berkeley and others are at Cal States even if they are comparable in intelligence. </p>
<p>My two sons are a good case in point. the older one had SAT scores comparable to accepted students at UCSD and the younger one had SAT scores that exceeded those of accepted students at UC Berkeley but they were both hopeless slackers in high school with each having a GPA of 3.1. As a result, they are both at CSU Sacramento as a Geology and a Physics major respectively. If they had HS GPAs typical of Berkeley students they would be at Berkeley. I can not believe that the average STEM major at Berkeley is less likely to graduate than a STEM major at Sacramento State. They use the same textbooks such as Stewart for Calculus and Griffiths for E&M and cover the same material. However the average UG GPA for a Cal student is 3.27 while it is only 2.8 for Sac State students. Only 42% of Sac State students graduate in six years while it is close to 90% for Cal students.</p>
<p>My sons have shaped up some and are doing much better in college than they did in high school, but even though they may have the intellectual aptitude, neither still has the work ethic to excell in STEM majors at UC Berkeley. </p>
<p>The difference in outcomes is no surprise when you look at the disparity in HS GPAs and SAT scores between incoming UCB and CSUS freshmen. The author of this article is trying to make a sensationalist point using scenarios that are extremely rare, if the happen at all.</p>