Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:op--there's a lot of subjectivity in college admissions. that's a hard fact for many to swallow. but if everything were based on something more objective, like test scores, people would be equally unhappy with that...
There is not an army of admissions officers looking over 150,000 applications subjectively scoring them on just their own individual desires. The UCs are feeding the apps into an enrollment management system and hiring 3rd party consultants to build the class they want. This means that there is clear objective criteria in addition to gpa. UCs are test blind and say they don’t consider AP scores yet they have you self report them. UCs also are always bragging that they’ve increased URM, Latino, first gen and low income students. That’s great but to achieve this they have to be assigning additional points to a proxy measure.
If the value of your house, zip code, your parents level of education and proxy measures for your race change your odds of acceptance from 20% to 2% that is valuable information in deciding college planning.
We dodged a bullet as DH is UC all the way, multiple legacies, PhDs, doctors etc all from UCB, UCLA and a dark horse who went to UCI. He did not want to save for private but I wasn’t willing to drink the Kool Aid. DS is top stats and going to an excellent top 10 SLAC which he will enjoy and benefit from far more than any of the UCs. He was shut out of the UCs despite a perfect GPA, most rigorous courses, great ECs and great essay. It’s really shocking in our school district who got in and who didn’t. It certainly wasn’t the top students. There are a lot of kids whose parents banked on in state. If they knew they only had a 2% chance of a top UC or a 5% chance of a mid UC that brags about a 40% acceptance rate, they would have planned differently.
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