Excerpts:

UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.

A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.

In order to promote diversity of the freshman classroom the college needs to suppress merit to achieve their diversity targets?

I also find that objectionable. However, recalling my own college admission process, I think we have collectively determined that this opaqueness is basically working as intended. We are now treating it as a rite passage that qualified high school students can be mysteriously rejected.

I applied to 6 colleges (not counting those outside the United States), which would be considered an extremely low number today. I have colleagues who have kids applying to colleges right now so I know. Everyone is applying to more colleges just to counteract these seemingly random rejections.

Unless you get a full ride you probably should start at community college. You can then transfer later and generally you'll have a better variety to choose from.

The UC system is sorta weird though. Maybe the top 2 , UCLA and Berkeley compete nationally. After that you're paying UC tuition for an average school. Out of state that's around 50k, 16k in state.

You then get an unholy fraken monster patch work of different financial aid programs. Make over 160k as a family ? No aid for you!

It's a different welfare cliff. Parents get a paper divorce, live with the less affluent one, college is going to be free.

I'm still very very pissed I couldn't get my parents income info and had to drop out. I was making around 100k when I came back to finish. I paid out if pocket at a Cal State.

This sentence is buried midway through the article. It would be good for a future post to expand on this ... how much is explained by students simply applying more frequently to their local schools. This explanation was the only plausible explanation in the article I saw answer "why".

As a parent of a student in a private school, this is how it should be. For the amount of support and resources that private school students receive vs their public school peers, the standards should be higher. My child understands this, and knows that they will have to achieve more to get admission to a UC than a kid at a low income public school.

There should be exceptions, for example: very low SES student attending a private school on scholarship - although such students are usually exceptional or else they would not have qualified for private school scholarship.

The working class shouldn't be subsidizing the higher education of the wealthy.

[0]: https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-to...

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...

I'm surprised to see this granularity (# of applicants/admitted/enrolled to a college broken out by high school).

I'm not sure whether yield protection is actually practiced vs. just a paranoid student meme, but it was the first thing I thought of here and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the article.

Who is more elite - a new grad who has founded a YC backed startup who attended UIUC (an elite and selective CS program at a university that is not viewed as prestigious by society at large) or a Yale grad working on the Hill earning $50k?

As of today, all UCs are viewed similarly from a tech hiring practice perspective, though there is a bit of a geographic bias helping UC Berkeley, but this same bias also helps much less selective and less socially prestigious SJSU.

Getting into many of these places is a question of playing into your admissions officer’s biases. Knowing that they’re mostly liberal voters, often female, and nowadays more likely to be childless it’s presumably important to match that person’s energy.

Someone who would otherwise be writing romance novels is now picking students. Hence the infamous essay of the accepted student that went “Black Lives Matter” x100

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-39492187

However nothing in this series mentioned anything about out-of-state admission so I’m curious if there’s any data about that.

Certainly not your run-of-the-mill UC school except maybe UCLA or Berkeley and only then for very specific majors.

I went to a UC and graduated 14 years ago. I basically had to teach myself everything with the other students once I got into my major. And this school has done notable research in my field. But the quality of education was just terrible. Nobody could teach us multi-threading, compilers, theory of computation, networking, or algorithms properly. Like not at all. The students had to help each other the best they can and the most experienced or smartest individuals were just the ones that actually were able to do those subjects competently. But everyone else was pretty much shorted on their education, just like the poor math education throughout the country. It's pretty irritating how much it costs versus the quality you get. No way is it worth it.

And since I've graduated I learned that none of these topics is IQ-limited at all whatsoever. Math is completely intuitively if taught properly. ANYONE can learn it to a high level with good analogies and demonstrations and applicative knowledge. I developed competence with linear algebra and vector math not in school but doing game programming after I graduated. That's what actually made it "make sense".

I tutored several students since I graduated and I think I helped them for $30 an hour learning fundamentals and how to program and I think I did a significantly better job one-on-one for these students at a way cheaper rate than they would have to pay in school. It's sad.

I imagine LLMs could do a better job for many things than research professors that just throw slides on the board and barely elaborate on anything. The only way you learn in those courses is by really struggling on your own and going to as many office hours and TA hours as possible.