UC President Mark Yudof and the chancellors of all 10 UC campuses submitted a “friend of the court” brief Monday to the U.S. Supreme Court declaring support for the University of Texas at Austin in a contentious case challenging the use of race in undergraduate admissions.
The case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, involves a white student who claims that the university racially discriminated against her due to its policy of considering race in the admission process. The UC’s amicus curiae brief establishes the UC’s support for UT Austin and its acknowledgement of race in undergraduate admissions.
Currently, however, the UC system does not acknowledge race in its own admissions decisions due to the 1996 passage of Proposition 209, which made it illegal for state-funded institutions to consider factors such as race or ethnicity in admissions or hiring decisions.
“The facts tell us the educational and societal benefits from a diverse student body cannot be realized fully at the nation’s largest highly selective university system without the judicious use of tools that take race into account during undergraduate admissions decisions,” said UC President Mark Yudof about the UC in a press release. “Telling that story is the appropriate thing to do in the context of this legal case.”
The brief, titled “The Limited and Disappointing Results of the University’s Race-Neutral Admissions Initiatives,” describes the UC system’s failure to maintain a racially diverse student body due to race-neutral admissions policies instituted under Prop. 209.
Although the UC has adopted numerous strategies to address the issue of race in higher education, none have “enabled the University of California fully to reverse the precipitous decline in minority admission and enrollment that followed the enactment of Prop. 209, nor to keep pace with the growing population of underrepresented minorities in the applicant pool of qualified high school graduates,” according to the brief.
This sentiment was echoed by Hans Johnson, Bren policy fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and expert on demographics and education projections.
“Many people within the (UC system) have struggled with Prop. 209 and want to ensure that underrepresented groups have a place in the University of California,” he said. “It has been a challenge since Prop. 209 to have the undergraduate student (population) fully reflect the diversity of California.”
Joyce Schon, an attorney for BAMN, an activist organization that promotes affirmative action and racial equality among other causes, said the UC is correct in its assertion that racial disparities can only be addressed through the acknowledgement of race in the admissions process.
“We agree with the UC president and chancellors that taking race into account is an essential component for increasing diversity in the UC system, especially at the flagship schools, UCLA and UC Berkeley,” she said. “However, these administrators should stop using Prop 209 as an excuse for wholesale denial of thousands of Latina/o, black and Native American students for an equal opportunity at UC.”
BAMN has filed an amicus curiea brief of its own in support of University of Texas at Austin and its use of race in admission decisions.
View the University of Texas at Austin court brief here as well as the UC amicus curiae brief:
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go to http://mep.berkeley.edu/hot/archive/bakesale for more info and resources on affirmative action
The “Heaven’s Gate” people would be jealous of the fanatical devotion these lefties have to multiculturalism and diversity!
Race-based admissions = wonderful
Race-based bake sale = horribly evil
What a bunch of ****ing hypocrites. This is exactly why I will never donate a cent to UC, no matter how much money I make in my life.
I don’t think it’s possible to avoid an ideological conflict on college admissions because there’s simply no ‘neutral’ way of defining who gets into a university. While grades are easily comparable, they don’t correlate well with future professional success (whether you look at innovation, wealth, etc.). To make a popular culture metaphor, it’s not like comparing runners at the 100m-dash, it’s more like deciding who gets the Oscar for best director.
Or, to say it otherwise, each one of the thousands of students who come close to the cutoff at the UC could find some reasonable measure by which they would deserve a place more than someone else who got in.
You could also say college admissions are like deciding draft picks in pro sports. Some #1 picks fail while some late picks become superstars.
I respectfully disagree with your assertion that the role of college admissions is to pick future successful professionals. Admissions teams should only pick future successful college students. That means students who have demonstrated academic achievements and capacity to learn, without committing any crimes or plagiarism in the process. If you use your metaphor for 100m-dash versus Oscars, then you are saying college admission should not be like Olympic trials where only the top finishers make the team, but rather like Oscars where Academy peers vote for the most popular students? In that case why bother with an admissions department since the Oscars has no panel of judges?
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That means students who have demonstrated academic achievements and capacity to learn, without committing any crimes or plagiarism in the process. ” First, I would argue that we don’t value academic performance for the sake of academic performance, but because society implicitly assumes it benefits from people being educated. So there are larger values at stake. But besides, even within your definition, it’s not clear how this can be summarized by a single number (or set of numbers).
I like the sports draft analogy above. Admitting people based only on GPA would be like drafting players based only on one statistic, or a fixed aggregate of statistics. Apart from defining the statistic, no human discretion would be involved, so it could be argued as fairer… But people don’t do that, because they know that player statistics depend on other factors (which team they were on, which position they’re playing, etc.) so you can’t compare anyone based on one number. Surely, we would agree that academic achievement is more complex.
OK, I like your sports draft analogy as well. Let’s say a player has great stats. RBIs, hitting average, and strikeouts per inning are all stellar. However, this player’s stats were accumulated while playing for the Inner Mongolia Youth League and when he is pitted against minor league players from Cuba and New York he just doesn’t measure up. His set of stats from Mongolia don’t mean a thing when he faces a standardized tryout test that pits him against future major league players. That is why admissions officers should measure how likely any student will thrive among highly competitive peers in a major league university. Based on the sad dropout rate of poorly prepared students, it’s obvious the admissions officers did a poor job in predicting their success when race had to be used as a factor. I think we both agree that admitting someone based only on numbers is not enough. However, when one of those numbers measures how well that person did compared to other applicants, then it should count heavily. Even then applicants should demonstrate why they deserve to be admitted. However, if an applicant cannot demonstrate any achievement or talent other than the color of his skin, then how can he or she contribute to the excellence of the university?
And neither the amount of the tuition that you pay, the size of the endowment of the university , whether it practices race preferences or not, legacy preferences or not etc. are good predictors of future professional success…….
The UC chancellors’ amicus brief reveals an embarrassing fact. It screams “WE FAILED!” With literally hundreds of education PhDs and millions of outreach dollars at their disposal, the ten chancellors still could not find an excuse for admitting more Black and Latino students. They tried getting rid of SAT II tests. They tried guaranteeing a larger percentage of high school graduates from low income school districts. They tried a mysterious holistic admission policy with an adversity clause. In the end they admit they failed because they say the only way to fill the quota of Blacks and Latinos is to ignore academic achievement and take race into consideration. Like children who fail to define a vocabulary word without using the word itself, the chancellors take the easy way out and simply say they need to look at race after all. The brief acknowledges that the chancellors cannot find any legally defensible excuse to enroll more underrepresented minorities, and no creative manipulation of UC application databases fields would yield more minorities. Yet despite this massive failure the chancellors still cling to the belief that somehow admitting students with no identifiable academic strengths makes UC better. If the purpose of diversity is to mix the mediocre with the excellent, then they will succeed if Prop 209 were overturned.
We know chancellors face political pressure from Black and Latino legislators to increase enrollment of their constituents by any means necessary. However, by not questioning such pressure and pretending “diversity” is good for all students even if the “diversity” admits cannot keep up with regular admits, the chancellors ruin the prestige of UC schools, destroy support for UC among California’s taxpayers and UC alumni, and hurt the underrepresented minorities who really do get in on their own merit.
And the dumbing down of the UC’s begins…
Libtards running the institution screams future academic deterioration of UC.
It’s stunts like this that cause U.C. to lose support among California’s voters. Voters passed Prop 209 because getting into college should be based on academic merit, not skin color. Now all the UC chancellors are telling the voters that they are better than the voters and would overturn the will of the voters if they could. White and Asian voters already suspect an unfair admission process secretly favoring Latinos and Blacks with lower academic achievements, and this latest amicus brief merely confirms that suspicion. Look at pictures of the ten chancellors:
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/chancellors.html
Only one Black and no Latinos, Pacific Islanders, or Native Americans. Why don’t the chancellors end their hypocrisy and step down so that more underrepresented minorities can become chancellors and take their six-figure salaries?
The term that is disingenuous is underrepresented minority. All this term means in the UC system is that a lower percentage of a certain racial/ethnic group meets minimum UC admission standards than the percentage of whites meeting minimum UC admission standards. It wouldn’t even matter if there is a higher percentage of said group enrolled at a UC, the group would still considered underrepresented. In other words, there is no problem that underrepresented groups as defined by UC have a lower percentage of UC undergraduate enrollment than their corresponding percentage in the population. That is exactly as it should be since the group meets UC standards at a lower rate.
Whites applicants have been adversely impacted by UC admissions policies of the past twenty years and the number of white admits has declined precipitously. This started when UC acceded to the Demands of the Asian Task Force who alleged Asian applicants were being discriminated against by UC admission policies and therefore changed the admissions matrix so that the Verbal section of the Sat Exam had minimal impact on admissions even for a future English or Rhetoric major. UC began double counting Sat Subject Exams and essentially forced the College Board to start offering the Exams in Asian Languages; the results of said exams giving an incredible boost to admissions of Asian applicants. 40% scoring a perfect 800 on the Chinese Exam and 56% scoring a perfect 800 on the Korean Exam; 86% scoring above 700 on the Chinese Exam and 90% scoring above 700 on the Korean Exam; and these scores were double counted where the Sat Verbal section was only single counted.
At the bottom of the web page at the link:
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/SAT-Subject_Tests_Percentile_Ranks_2011.pdf
This is what negatively affected white admissions at UC in a major way around 20 years ago and allowed Asian admissions at Berkeley and UCLA to double, almost overnight, at the expense of white applicants. This is also why Sat Subject Exams have now been eliminated.
The present admissions scheme disfavors students at competitive high schools, most of whom are white. Instead of adjusting the GPA of a student at a highly competitive high school in the upwards direction, UC does just the opposite and under comprehensive review requires a higher Gpa of applicants from a competitive high school(high API) than applicants from an uncompetitive high school(low API), to attain a higher score from the two readers of the application, which is scored 1-5 with no set standards and 1 being the highest score. The applicant from the uncompetitive high school already has an inflated Gpa from a lack of competition for grades. One might think that the Sat exam would take care of this to a certain extent as that is what it is mean to do, adjust for Gpa’s that represent varying levels of preparedness. An applicant with a lower Gpa but a higher Sat score from a competitive high school would then be on a somewhat more equal standing with an applicant from an uncompetitive high school with a higher Gpa and a lower Sat score, but this is not how comprehensive review works. Instead, the readers require much higher Sat scores from applicants from a competitive high school to score a 1 or 2 than are required of applicants from an uncompetitive high school. Up to hundreds of points higher: 700+ scores on each section of the Sat versus 500+ scores on each section of the Sat to be competitive at Berkeley and UCLA from a competitive(high API) high school versus an uncompetitive(low API) high school.
Look at the statistics of enrolled students from individual Low v High API High Schools at “School Reports”:
http://statfinder.ucop.edu/
This policy more negatively impacts white applicants than Asians or any
other group. Low income Asian applicants are a major beneficiary of
this policy while more academically qualified middle and high income
Asian applicants from high API schools are negatively impacted. This is
why UC needs to discriminate based on race, directly, because their
inane policies attempting to boost admissions of African Americans and
Hispanics have had the unintended consequence of primarily boosting
admission of low income Asians at the expense of higher qualified Asians and Whites.
And it makes no sense whatsoever, as UC’s own statistics clearly show that the best indicators of success at a UC are the SAT scores of the applicant. A high GPA and low SAT scores translates to a relatively low level of success at a UC. UC should be requiring high SAT scores from applicants at low API schools because the GPA, especially at a low API high school, is not a good indicator of preparedness for a UC.
At this link:
http://statfinder.ucop.edu/statfinder/default.aspx
Run a Custom Table for Persistence, Graduation and College GPA by entering class, freshmen entered from high school, for all years reported separately, California Residents, All Campuses(Reported Separately), UC GPA, Complex Table, High School GPA (Weighted Capped) and SAT Total Reasoning Score, Run Table.
And be amazed at the lies that have been told by everyone associated with UC Berkeley Admissions and UCOP over the years regarding the power of the SAT to predict outcomes. In almost every GPA range, the higher the SAT total, the higher the UC GPA. I note that all the information from before 2006 has been removed from the database. It was formerly available. High GPA and low SAT scores predict relatively poor UC GPA performance. This is just the opposite of the UC party line. Here it is in black and white on UCOP’s own website.
UC has not exactly been truthful regarding the power of the SAT to predict UC performance. It is a much better predictor than GPA.
Instead of a 4.00 GPA and a 1500 Sat score(Cr+ Math+ Writing) from a low API high school and a 4.4 GPA and a 2100 SAT score from a high API high school being similarly scored a 2 under comprehensive review, the applicant from the low API high school should at least be required to have a 2100 SAT score. A 4.00 GPA and a 1500 SAT score for an applicant from a low API high school might be the equivalent of a 3.50 GPA and a 1500 SAT score for an applicant from a highly competitive high API high school, but under UC’s new admissions matrix, the applicant with a 3.5 GPA and a 1500 SAT from a highly competitive high API high school would not qualify for admission to any UC, not even UC Merced or UC Riverside, while the 4.00 GPA and 1500 SAT for an applicant from an uncompetitive low API high school would score a 2 and be admitted to Berkeley or UCLA.
See the Calculator at the right of the page:
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissions/freshman/california-residents/admissions-index/index.html
Even with lower SAT scores, down to a 1420, the 4.00 applicant could be admitted to Berkeley or UCLA, or if the 4.00 GPA represented the top 9% of the high school class, that would indicate eligibility in the local context regardless of how low the Sat scores. Meanwhile, the 3.5 GPA student from a highly competitive high school would need a 1770 SAT score to be admitted to UC Merced.
The current UC admissions policy tremendously disadvantages applicants from highly competitive high schools, most of whom are white, not only from being admitted to Berkeley or UCLA but from being eligible for admission to any UC.
The top 9% class rank admissions policy that has greatly raised the bar for applicants with solid but less than stellar Gpa’s from competitive high schools to be admitted to any UC at all is based on the falsehood propagated by UCOP that the GPA is a good predictor of success regardless of SAT scores and it simply is not true.
Has the UC Statfinder been updated to 2011 or is it static since 2008 ? Try the admissions practices of a Stanford , it is far worse with their vast system of preferences compared to Berkeley. Yes, there has been a recurrent discussion on the SAT and GPA grade predictability business for college grades. SATs do have a better record for predicting first year college grades compared to GPA’s , after that it becomes another matter I guess from what I had read. By “competetive high schools ” I take it to mean of the sort of Mission San Jose, Monta Vista, Irvington, Lynbrook etc.
Here in Southern California, heavily Asian schools like Mark Keppel. Temple City. John Rowland, Cerritos, Diamond Bar etc. have higher APIs or mean SAT scores like Bev Hills, Mira Costa, Malibu, Santa Monica etc. Greater wealth does not necessarily go hand in hand with greater competetiveness. I personally think that under the current UC admissions dispensation , Latinos are the biggest beneficiaries because of the added impact of the essay portion. So what would be the requisite SAT score needed for someone from a low API school to graduate in 5 years from Berkeley at a 90% probability ?
I agree with almost everything except the “most of whom are white” part. If you look at the California API scores for 2009, 2010, and 2011 high schools and look at race composition, the highest scoring high schools are now mostly Asian (excluding Pacific Islanders) or have a high percentage of Asians. Here in the Bay Area it’s schools like Lowell in SF, Gunn in Palo Alto, Monta Vista in Cupertino, Mission San Jose in Fremont, and Dougherty in San Ramon. Piedmont, Orinda, and Moraga are still predominantly white. In the Southland there’s University High in Irvine, San Marino High, and Gretchen Whitney Academy.
http://api.cde.ca.gov/Acnt2012/2011BaseSchSS.aspx?allcds=01611760135244
My point is, Asians (excluding Pacific Islanders) are negatively impacted as much as whites now. Asians at Cal typically voice support for diversity without realizing that diversity goals work against Asians in UC admissions, even though they helped Asians 20 – 30 years ago.
UC considers high schools with an API above 4 to be competitive and does not give applicants from such schools special consideration afforded to applicants from API 1-4 high schools which UC considers low performing, unless the readers can discern from the response to UC Personal Statement Freshman Applicant Prompt that the applicant is one of their preferred minorities.
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissions/how-to-apply/personal-statement/index.html
Most whites go to schools in the API 5-8 range and at such schools, relatively few are admitted to Berkeley or UCLA or any UC at all.
For instance, Del Campo in suburban Sacramento with an API of 8.
http://statfinder.ucop.edu/reports/schoolreports/school_uc_enrollment_report.aspx?atpCode=50915&Year=2008-09&Type=highschool
A good school but not a super performing school. Majority white but not overwhelmingly white. Mostly middle class with some upper middle class. Only 1 of 17 applicants admitted to Berkeley and 2 of 16 admitted to UCLA. Yes, middle class Asians who attend Del Campo will be similarly affected as whites but only 4% of Del Campo students are Asian.
http://statfinder.ucop.edu/reports/schoolreports/school_report.aspx?atpCode=50915&Year=2008-09&Type=highschool
Asians tend to go to high performing schools or to API 1-4 low performing schools and more go to low performing schools than to high performing schools and are a major beneficiary of UC’s preference policies designed to admit a higher percent of Hispanics and African Americans as well as policies that finance their education – Cal Grant A, Blue and Gold. For Cal Grant A Entitlement Grants that fully pay the tuition at a UC or CSU only a 2.0 HS GPA is required.
Many Asians come from low performing high schools like Oakland High, API 2, 53% Asian.
http://statfinder.ucop.edu/reports/schoolreports/school_report.aspx?atpCode=52225&Year=2008-09&Type=highschool
22 of 94 admitted to Berkeley and 21 of 84 admitted to UCLA. 1129 Sat (Cr + Math) at Berkeley and a 4.03 HS GPA and 1156 Sat (Cr + Math) and a 4.01 HS GPA at UCLA.
86% of Enrolees at UC were Asian.
Contrast that with Del Campo where we are not given the information for the one admit at Berkeley but are for the 2 enrollees at UCLA, 1390 Sat(Cr + Math) and a 4.29 GPA. And note that only 49 students applied to any UC compared to 134 applicants to any UC from Oakland High even though the schools are essentially the same size, 1766 students at Del Campo v 1810 at Oakland. This is due to a combination of students from Del Campo not being eligible for an education funded by Cal Grant and Blue and Gold and UC doing no outreach whatsoever at schools like Del Campo. The real story would be told if UC made available the Sat and Gpa information for admits and applicants from each high school instead of just for enrollees, but that would show exactly how unfair UC’s admission policies are to students at middle class high schools. It is not as if the Asian students being admitted and enrolled at Berkeley and UCLA and the rest of the UC system from low performing high schools are super performing students. 980 and 3.67 at Davis(30 enrollees), 926 and 3.22 at Santa Cruz(10 enrollees), 920 and 3.52 at Riverside(3 enrollees.) They are benefiting from policies designed to admit African Americans and Hispanics. Applicants with those averages are no longer eligible for admission to any UC by means of the new statewide admission index and would only be eligible if in the top 9% at their high school.
Highly qualified Asians are being negatively affected similar to highly qualified whites but a large segment of less qualified Asian applicants at API 1-4 high schools are also benefiting whereas there is no large segment of white applicants benefiting and the numbers of whites being negatively affected dwarves the number of Asians when one looks beyond API 9 and 10 schools to API 5-8.
Thanks for your detailed explanation. I don’t understand how Asians are managing to beat the system by going to lower-API schools to get 4.0 GPAs while whites can’t do the same thing? Perhaps Asians don’t face the outright hostility directed against whites by Black and Latino thugs in low-API schools, which might also explain why so many moderate-income white families have left California in the last 10 years.
An interesting though somewhat biased story about Asians in Lowell High School:
http://colorlines.com/archives/1999/05/on_the_wrong_side_chinese_americans_win_antidiversity_settlement_and_lose_in_the_end.html
Most white families who have the income to not live in areas served by API 1-4 high schools are not going to choose to live in such areas to increase chances of a child being admitted to Berkeley or UCLA. The Asian families whose children go to these schools do not consciously choose to live in the areas because it will increase chances of a child to go to Berkeley but because there is a neighborhood with other Asian families, often first generation, that they can afford to live in, that just happens to be served by an API 1-4 high school.
With regard to the article, it is true that not all students can excel at Lowell and those who do not would have been better off going to a less competitive high school, even more so now that the Sat scores required to be admitted to any UC with less than a stellar Gpa have been heightened. The chances of such students being in the Top 9% at Lowell are remote, meaning the student cannot qualify for any UC.
As far as applicants from API 5-8 high schools, under comprehensive review 1-5 scoring, since UC considers their school to be competitive, their Sat scores are a major factor in the selection process unlike students from API 1-4 high schools; however, most are from families that cannot readily afford costly Sat Prep classes, so the applicants on average tend to have lower Sat scores than if they had been able to attend Sat prep classes to the same extent as applicants from API 9-10 schools that serve higher income areas, but due to the high school not being as competitive, the readers subjectively discount the Gpa for this fact and place more importance on the Sat scores for applicants who they know are not preferred minorities from the response to the personal statement. This is why we see a Del Campo with only 1 of 17 applicants admitted to Berkeley and 2 of 16 to UCLA. At API 9-10 schools, if an applicant does not have quite as high Sat scores, the readers consider that the high school is highly competitive and the Gpa is given more weight than the test scores but this only happens for preferred minorities at API 5-8 high schools. The truth of the matter is that while there are certainly on average higher performing students at an API 9-10 high school, the AP, IB and Honors classes at an API 5-8 high school can be just as competitive as the AP, IB and Honors classes at an API 9-10 high school. The overall API of the high school is lower since it does not draw from as homogeneous of an area where most of the parents are at least college educated and many are professionals with graduate degrees.
I’ll read this explanation further , I just don’t have time. I agree that the UC should publish the SATs and GPA, of every student should be published for all to see with everything about their personal information included other than their names and addresses, so we can see for ourselves what sort of business these 2-man team of checkers are engaged in.
At the very least, each applicant should be informed of the score assigned by each reader, a summary of the rationale for the score and and the race/ethnicity of the reader. UC also needs to publicize the Sat and Gpa averages for each score at each UC -1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5- by race/ethnicity. It is amazing that Californian’s have allowed this obvious attempt to circumvent Prop 209 continue for as long as it has without demanding any transparency at all.
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2008/09/if_you_like_whodunit_books.html
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/groseclose/CUARS.Resignation.Report.pdf
The Sat and Gpa averages for each score-1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5-by race/ethnicity at each high school should also be available.
If the data supplied by Statfinder is correct, we find that in 2009 for Latinos who come from family incomes below $40k start getting accepted at Berkeley with just a GPA of 3.0 (unweighted ) . For whites coming from families with annual incomes below $40k they start getting accepted at Berkeley at a higher GPA grade of 3.2 ( unweighted ). Now that is what I would call rank injustice. So is that a case of 1 group is more equal than another group even among the poor ? It cannot be a case even among the poor that the mean SATs of Latinos are higher than that of whites. I urge everyone to check the veracity of my figures. Ithink the UCs are using the essay part of the application and the reader system to raise the number of Latinos in the UC system come hell or high water. This is simply nothing but rank injustice.
Disclosure is always the best cure for everything to avoid all sort of suspicion, I do believe that UC is manipulating the system to increase the enrollment of Latinos and blacks . To your earlier comment about API 5-8 schools, I would say that even if the UC increased recruitment in those schools both whites and Asians will benefit, if they did not then both will be just penalized . It is not only whites who will suffer or profit in either situation but both racial groups. Thing is the majority of the readers at UCLA were either black or Latino.
I don’t really have much time to respond sorry, but I will try to raise a few points. Of course poorer Asians will tend to settle in in less wealthy areas like El Monte in Southern Cali , where they tend to be serviced by API 1-4 schools , there is no doubt about that . But even in these schools they tend to outperform their Latino classmates be it in grades or GPAs . Be it in Oakland Tech, Oakland Hi, Skyline, South El Monte hi, El Monte hi, Rosemead etc. it would be the same case So if there was a directed targeting at these type of schools , then Asians would tend to benefit more than blacks or Latinos in the UC admission system as far as these schools are concerned
Whites of course far outnumber the Asians (between 3 to4x in Cali in terms of high school graduates , in Cali we do know that Asian test takers have higher mean SAT scores than whites along with GPA’s. Even if API 5-8 schools are not targeted by the UCs per your assertion, Asians in those schools just like whites would still be penalized in the UC admissions process.
My real concern is if a student in an API 5-8 school who had better grades and SAT scores but poorer than a student from an API 1-4 school with lower grades and SAT scores will be denied admission at a UC campus in favor of the API 1-4 student. If it were so, then it would be just downright reprehensible.
Another question I would like to be answered is the graduation rate of students from these API 1-4 students in the UC system. I am willing to accept a graduation rate in 6 years of 75 % from the students of these API1-4 schools.
This kind of discussion probably reflects a concern among whites as to why they had been reduced to being the 2nd largest racial group in the freshman class in the entire UC system after Asians, a whale of a difference indeed from the early 1980′s where they were the overwhelming majority in the freshman class of the UC system. This is a contrast of course to every private school in California where whites are still the largest racial group in the freshman class. I understand the reason as to why that is the case.
A short way of describing the situation goes to something like this : In private schools, whites are the biggest beneficiaries of their own version of a preferential admissions system. In public universities, it is blacks and latinos. In either system, Asians get the shaft.
I don’t have any problem with adjusting admissions so that smart applicants are not excluded because English is not their first language. For a few decades, we have been bringing brains to the US from other countries, and we want their smart children to be able to reach their potential. This isn’t about letting less intelligent students take places from intelligent students. This is about getting the most intelligent students into Cal, and sometimes language skills are blocking those intelligent students.
Extreme scores by native speakers of Chinese or Korean on an Sat Subject Exam designed for English speaking student’s learning the foreign language in a high school setting and that only tests skills in the spoken language are not an indication of intelligence.
Nope, but the rest of the SAT, their grades, and the rest of their applications did show that they were Cal material. The language subject scores just showed that they were proficient in a language other than English, so the admissions office could recognize quality applicants who did not have English as a first language. Silicon Valley has benefited tremendously from intelligent workers who do not have English as their first language, and I believe that universities like Cal have helped to educate these workers.
The issue is that scores on an Sat Subject Exam that only tests the spoken language and is designed for non native speakers does not show proficiency in the foreign language at all, especially Chinese, where the written language is much more difficult to learn than the spoken but where the spoken is relatively easy for a native speaker but difficult for a non native speaker who the test is geared for. This gave a massive preference to Asians under the old admissions paradigm and not only in qualifying for any UC but also in selection. Under the old admissions policy at Berkeley, between forty and sixty percent of the class, depending on the year, was admitted based strictly on grades and test scores. The rest of the class was supposed to be admitted after taking account of points added for extracurriculars, Honors/AP classes or whether they were not offered which was worth a certain number of points, the essay etc, however, any underrepresented minority or recruited athlete was admitted who met minimum UC eligibilty and this was before the group that did not qualify on Gpa and test scores alone but had points added. By 1989, at Berkeley, no applicants were admitted with points added since the number of underrepresented minorities had become so large that there were no slots remaining for the points added group.
Essentially, the GPA was multiplied by 1000. The two sections of the Sat were added together and the three Sat Subject Exams were added together and multiplied by 2 and then added to the scores of the two sections of the Sat. The total was multiplied by 5/8 and then added to the Gpa which had been multiplied by 1,000. After the points were totaled admission of the top forty to sixty percent, depending on year, was strictly by points.
Double counting the Sat Subject Exam in a foreign language that was a student’s native language and then minimizing the Sat Verbal section by only counting the score once gave a tremendous advantage to Chinese, Koreans, Hispanics, but less so since the Spanish Exam tests the written language and is at a much higher level of the language, and any other student who took a Subject Exam in a native foreign language. A few more exam points one way or the other could mean admission or denial for large numbers of students. As stated above, this advantage was not only for determining UC eligibility but also for selection purposes at competitive campuses. Silicon Valley would have benefited even more from workers whose native language was and is English and were not selected by means of an unfair advantage in admissions. In any event, this was not limited to Computer Science, EECS or Applied Math majors but to potential English majors, Rhetoric majors, History majors etc
If that is how it was working, then there should have been huge numbers of Asian students flunking out of Cal. Any who applied as English or rhetoric majors would have been decimated by the difficulty of the courses. The qualified students would have set curves that were just too much for these Asian students to keep up with.
The College of Letters and Science at Berkeley, UCLA and other UC’s does not now and did not then admit freshman applicants to a major but to the College of Letters and Science. A freshman admitted to L&S is free to choose any major. COE(College of Engineering) at Berkeley and HSSEAS(Engineering) at UCLA admits freshmen to a major but not L&S.
Your point shows how difficult it is for students who are not qualified to get into Cal. It is incredibly difficult for a student not accepted to an engineering degree as an incoming freshman to be able to declare those majors as a junior. Anyone who can actually transfer into a solid major as a junior was easily qualified to get into Cal as a freshman.
I guess some things never change. In the 70s U.C. defended full-blast quotas to the bitter end in the Bakke case, then took the “plus factor” loophole inserted by Justice Powell and rammed it right back into “de facto” quotas. The bankruptcy of the policy can be seen in the drop-out/flunk out rates (as high as 70% in the 70s) that the policy produced (don’t look for those numbers at the Office of Student Research site though, they’re not there). Only by Prop 209 were the quotamaniacs finally checkmated into facing up to the fact that it is fundamental underachievement in K-12 education that is the problem (Berkeley itself is hardly the poster child here as it has had race-based school assignment since 1968 and has only managed to produce a persistent “achievement gap”.)
As usual, the report contains a lie. “Minority” enrollment (as defined by being non-white, which I guess is what it’s supposed to mean?) is not down, it’s at record levels. What they’re talking about is “under-represented minorities”. With a looming outright Hispanic majority population in California (I bet if they really counted all the illegals it’s a majority right now) the linguistic blur here is getting a little Orwellian.
Did you all realize there never actually was a racially discriminatory admissions policy in the first place? That there were Japanese and Chinese student clubs in 1913? That the President of the University publicly stated this policy in the 1930s (this used to be on one of the U.C. history sites but they took it down.)
Next time you fly check out the pilot–does it bother you it’s about 99% sure it’s a white male? This is mainly because the U.S. military trains most of them and aviation (the whitest employment category in the economy) is just about the last thing that hasn’t gone over to quotas. I guess even the wacko left isn’t crazy enough to wreck the selection process for a job where if you mess up there is flaming wreckage and mass casualties.
Come to think of “white” jobs–have you ever seen a black placekicker? What’s up with that? Why doesn’t the NAACP boycott football or Al Sharpton demand a “fair share” of kicker’s jobs?
And the Japanese and Chinese Americans at that time never demanded that their numbers be increased thru a race preference unlike these whining BAMN and their supporters. Not only that, they outperformed their white classmates way back in the 30s,40s,50s….. academically at Berkeley. History repeats itself, even the Hmong in the Central do better than their Latino classmates.
I love Berkeley, but what the hell? Why can’t admissions be based off your…oh I don’t know… GPA? Extra Curricular programs? SAT/ACT/etc. scores? Work Experience?
Should I go on? I mean it’s simple… People that put in the work, no matter what their race are, are meant to be at high caliber schools such as UC Berkeley or the University of Texas. Saying we have to take this person over this person, because of their race, to fill some quota is racism in it’s own right. How is that not apparent?
Too many bureaucratic hacks and professional victim’s advocates have built a career around all the extra services and expenses to deal with the admission of marginal and failing students who never belonged in college in the first place. To paraphrase the old Pareto Rule, 20 percent of the students are 80 percent of the administrations workload in terms of funding and social programs. Cut off the taxpayer gravy, and there’s nothing left to skim off the top. These people wold actually have to go out and get real jobs to earn a living…
“Never belonged in college in the first place?”
Excuse Me? Who are you to pass that kind of a judgement on these kids?
It’s easy to pass judgement. When GPA, SAT, and other academic scores don’t measure up such that skin color has to come into the equation then these kids never belonged in college in the first place.
I’m a graduate of Cal (Chem E, 1995) who has seen the effects firsthand of pushing people through programs that they are not qualified for, in order to maintain some false sense of “diversity” as not to offend those who can’t accept that not everyone is cut out for college.
How true, read the Arcidiacono and Aucejo at Duke, it is in the Internet. Black preferential admits at Duke like their white legacy admits classmates did not perform as well as their classmates who were admitted without any kind of a preference academically.
9.2k foreign applicants to Berkeley for fall 2012 freshman class compared to 6.2k at Harvard . 2379 who scored above 700 in the Math portion of the SAT for the fall 2011 entering class at Berkeley compared to 1278 at Harvard. Guess you just have to do the work to get into Berkeley. BAMN and their ilk and Lani Guinier and Gary Orfield won’t be happy until Berkeley freshman class represents the percentage representation of the racial groups in California
Wait, so you’re complaining that Cal freshmen have higher SAT scores that Harvard?
Who said I was complaining ?. , I am not complaining if Berkeley has more cranial “critical mass ( a favorite phrase by race preferentialists ) ” than Harvard
The complaint is that Cal freshmen have very high standards and injecting race into the equation simply makes no sense.
RyRy — You assume all have the same access to achieving those criteria. Take SAT scores for example. Pay the $800, and Kaplan teaches you to get high scores — how fair is that? Or gpa — high schools in suburbs offer lots of AP classes which are weighted higher in gpa. Urban schools rarely can offer as many as the suburban schools — how fair is that?
How fair is it that people who have busted their asses to get good grades and score in the 98-99th percentile of standardized tests get passed up for people who can barely read or write, merely because the latter have darker skin? Get a clue, Phony Doctor Whatever. it isn’t paying for specialized SAT training that gives you the edge, but the combination of ability and motivation. Stop pretending that all those AA students are latent geniuses who were kept out of college because they didn’t have money to attend the same crappy public schools as the rest of us…
In New York State, the College Board said that the mean score in the Math portion of the SAT who attend ” independent schools ” was 589
So you reverse discriminate. Is that fair? Liberal social engineering experiments have resulted in record black poverty.
If urban high schools don’t offer AP classes, the students can always take classes at local community colleges even as high school students. If poor students can’t afford a Kaplan class, they can borrow SAT prep workbooks from the library or buy a copy for less than what they spend on texting each month. Underrepresented minority students do have one advantage during the application process. They can use their skin color as an example of “overcoming adversity” in their application essays, since there’s a presumption that anyone with a black or brown skin color (excluding East Asians and South Asians) faced adversity in high school.
Really, ? Read the College Board data . The mean score in the Math portion of the SAT for SAT test takers in the state of New York who come from families making over $200k a year was 594 , The mean Math score in the SAT of Asian male test takers in California in California was 592 . Sounds to me that being poor won’t prevent you from having a good score in the SAT unless of course you are the sort of person who believes that all Asian male SAT test takers in California come from families making over $200k a year. This data is from the 2010-2011 SAT testing cycle.
And you think all those SAT prep schools in Monterey Park and Alhambra or in Santa Clara County are one-on-one tutoring classes like they’ve got over there in Beverly Hills or Orinda ? They are more like cram schools with 20-30 people sitting in a class. Even a waitress can save $800 if she does not go to Vegas for 2 consecutive years.