There are so many things in the college admission game that various players (other parents, school staff, counselors, admissions deans/officers, chancellors) perpetrate but will never say out loud. First among these is that, even at a high school which doesn’t have class rank or latin honors, you are in fact in competition with the other students. And therefore, other parents will keep many secrets from you. Realize clearly that on many levels college admissions is a zero-sum game. Pull up a chair, because I am here to spill the tea, over the course of this and several more posts, because I believe the gifted community, such as it is despite any humble-bragging, needs to hang together, lest we hang separately. Even if your kid takes my kid’s spot at Stanford.
The easiest and most egregious place to start is California. Here’s a quote from a sub-forum on collegeconfidential, whcih I captured after it got hidden but before the poster got banned. Parents were discussing their progress on a UC waitlist, and of course the larger question is why their hard working and high IQ kid was even relegated to a waitslist to begin with.
This appears to be the results of UC’s social engineering in the guise of their “holistic”admission policy. I invite you to take a look at your public high school’s average admission percentage from this SF Chronicles article: Charts show UC admissions rates for every high school in California https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/uc-school-admissions/
And you will clearly see that there is a massive preferential treatment of some high schools. Let just say many schools from lower socioeconomic area would get such an admission boost that if their students apply to any UC, their admission rate is actually 100%! I’m not kidding. If you look up these schools historic average SAT score, they barely crack 1000 if that. So the poorly performing schools are preferred by UC AO. This is shown by their data.
For our high school, which is in a very affluent neighborhood, where majority of kids are driven and academically very well-prepared and loaded with very high achievers who attained various state and national honors in each graduating class (a few years ago there were 13 kids going to MIT in one year), yet their UC AO rate is only average amongst all CA high schools. Our high school is consisting ranked in the top 1% in CA public high schools, students average SAT scores are 1400, yet their academic performance is discounted to the point that their high school only manages an average UC acceptance rate.
Like your experience, we see these high-achieving kids managed to get into highly desirable oos schools, but they can hardly get into their own state’s universities in UC. If you live in these neighborhoods, these high school kids have effectively been disenfranchised. Their parents may be paying vast sums to support UCs, but their kids have little chance of attending because they are from affluent neighborhoods. That’s what the data indicate. You can see for yourself. Now they are forced to pay massive Out Of State tuition, if they want their kids to have quality higher education. That’s the state of California for you.When the UC hides behind a lawsuit to ignore SAT scores, when they obfuscate their admissions under the term holistic, and when they say “You’re considered for admissions at UC within the context of others at your school.” this is all cover for their social engineering. UC’s whitewashing is tantamount to a school-based (or zip-code based) affirmative action.
And this month we get to see what the Supreme Court has to say on this. I’m skeptical over how much effect it they will have, the UC in particular is like the love child of the DMV and the Vatican, and consciously and with malice aforethought disregards the will of California’s voters and legislature since time immemorial. Further like most US universities, they’ve had plenty of advance notice to concoct folded lies, obfuscations, bare lies, and weasel words like “holistic”, so again I’m not sure how much will change how soon.
