You may be joking, but I have several high achieving peers whose families did this with good results. The choice was: did they want to be in the best high school with the highest level of competition, or did they want to go to an OK school that had good magnet programs and less competition. my sample size is only about three, but it worked out well for them.

This is the new meta, in SF at least.

Despite the "what are secondary effects?" school admins trying to "fix inequality" by creating school lotteries, ending gifted programs and focusing on "equality of outcomes not equality of opportunity", the only thing that has actually improved troubled schools is that smart kids with involved parents now actively seek out lower rated schools like Mission High so they can more easily rise to the top of the class and get a free ride to Berkeley or another UC.

There was an article about this exact phenomenon in SFGate a year or two ago so it is definitely a real trend.

One of the charts in TFA shows a discontinuity in admissions rate around 75% UPP. This means that if you send your kid to a HS that is underserved when you enroll, but drops below the critical 75% threshold because too many other families are doing the same, then the school could fall out of the strong-benefit category.

The kid would still have a better chance than if he applied from a high-performing school, but it wouldn't be as much of an advantage.

Socially, I'm guessing the kid could face some challenges because (1) other high performing students might not like him because he's a curve-breaker, (2) teachers would know what the family was up to and could view it as distasteful, and (3) if the student went to UCSD or another school where this is a well-known hack, there could be stigma for having gamed the system/being less-smart.

Once upon a time, the SAT an IQ test, and it was a real achievement to score a 1600. That achievement has been hollowed out in tandem with the value of most college degrees.

We know how to test for merit. The greatest tragedy in this college admissions racket isn't the shadowy affirmative action policies, the mountains of student loan debt, or the entire college admission-industrial complex that's sprung up.

It's that even the tools we've used to use to measure if someone was _ready_ for college have been annihilated.

There nothing stupid about controlling for circumstances.

As an analogy, let’s say you want to build a fun race car that you can take to the track. You go out and look at a bunch of used cars and you want to be qualitative so you measure out their 0-60 times.

You could just say “the car with the best time wins” and take the fastest one you tested. Or you could consider context like “this one had bald tires tha could easily be upgraded” or “we tested this one going uphill”.

The goal is to find the car that can be turned into the fastest and not which has the best numbers right now.

The students operating at this level are identical. There’s no practical difference between a 4.0 and a 4.5 GPA when comparing students from different schools.

Ok well look at it the other way. Should a student be punished if they took every AP offered but less than another student?

California has that. The top 9% from each high school and the top 9% statewide are guaranteed UC admission. This does not guarantee admission to any specific campus, so if you are only interested in say Berkeley or UCLA you might get admitted but UC will find you a place at some campus.

It's all publicly funded universities in Texas, not just the UT system.

In other words: you've just pissed off a lot of Aggies grouping them in with, ahem, tu.

UCs already guarantee this to the top % of students in every school.

I think U of Florida used to give full rides to the top n of each high school's graduating class. I think n was something around 5.

This seems terrible incentives. You are now in a purely adversarial relationship with your peers and hurting them helps you

Right, up until middle school send kids to the best school, then for high school move to an area with poor schools.

> it gives everyone the same chance to excel.

How does the existence of standardized testing give everyone the same chance? As an extremely over-exaggerated example example, someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject.

Not UCs, they are forbidden from doing so by law

That is illegal in California public schools like this article focused on.

The truth is, UC San Diego admits students who didn't get into the more prestigious UCs like Berkeley, LA, etc. That's probably why you see data like this

For you and your parent:

There is a special term to denote "amount which something is opaque" and that term is opacity.

UK caps applications to 5 to combat this exact problem.

> How could it realistically work any other way?

Well for one, what if universities like Harvard publish clear and transparent criteria for their students? For example it could say that the minimum required SAT score is 1580, and students with a lower score will simply not bother to apply, instead of sending in their application in the hope that other parts of their application will stand out enough.

For two, university admissions officers have internal adjustment algorithms to adjust the GPA from different high schools. They could publish that together with a minimum adjusted GPA.

The 50k application problem only exists because under the holistic process, everyone thinks they have a chance.

I was a transfer to UCSD - the transfer community itself is pretty large and one college (Sixth) houses a significant percentage, with dorms specifically for transfers. IMO there was far higher interesting diversity of folks there compared to rest of campus: veterans, addicts who got their shit together, tons of immigrants who couldn't afford going straight to UC (as well as your standard mostly 20-22 year old SoCal transfers) from which most people I know formed good networks.

Is that bonding experience worth another 12500$ a year ? CC is about 1500$ in tuition for a full 30 units vs 14000$ at a UC per year.

I made life long friends in community college.

Plus college doesn't work out for everyone, better to spend 3000$ figuring that out over 28k.

If you pay your own way and go the absolute cheapest path, your spending 3k at community college for 2 years and about 14k for 2 years at a Cal State. 17k total.

Vs 14k a year at a UC and around 56k for all 4.

This really depends on your financial situation though. For a lot of families this isn't a lot of money.

> many students drop out

I'm pretty sure that's the case at UC too. I don't know UC, but at my 4 year engineering school it felt like 25% attrition every year; if you only do a year and drop out, better to not be paying enormous student loans for probably the rest of your life for that.

If you do two or three years and drop out, better to have a degree, even if it's just an Associates.

If you know you'll make it all the way to a Bachelors, yeah, maybe it'd be better to go direct. But even then, you might get smaller class sizes (and better experiences) at a CC because of the relative levels of the student bodies. Lots of people taking calculus based physics of mechanics at a UC and not so many at a CC, so the UC might do lectures in a hall but the CC might have it in a classroom.

I can only speak for my own experiences, but I found my instructors at community college to be absolutely fantastic and even better than the ones I had when I eventually transferred to a UC. I had transferred to a UC first, ran out of money and then I wrapped up at a cheaper CSU years later.

At a UC you're probably going to be interacting with teaching assistants anyway.

I have to completely disagree with your last paragraph. No one should be thinking grad school right after a B.A. Go and see the world for a little bit. Excluding maybe law and medicine.

Even then, I've seen this horribly backfire in families. The kid is expected to do really well in college and then become a doctor, the pressure is too much and they just spaz out.

Next thing you know your a college dropout couchsurfing because your parents are threatening to send you back to the old country for an arranged marriage.

Assuming this isn't a rhetorical question: San Diego, Davis, Irvine, and Santa Barbara all rank in the top 15 US public, top 50 US / top 200 global universities (USN&WR, THE, QS rankings) and have specific programs that are world class ( including the ones you mention--two UCSB professors won last year's Nobel in physics.

Though Berkeley and UCLA have the advantage of most all departments being top 10, "average school" is not a fair assessment for the rest.

> that “extra” is going to be somewhat school and school system dependent

Is it? That’s news to me. I grew up thinking it was standard to just have 5 grade points for honors and AP classes. I guess the nuance comes into the bar for a class being “honors,” vs. AP which has a more consistent definition given the standardized exam?

> Colleges should be prioritizing strong students

I agree with this, but I think you didn’t get the point. The point is, the way we measure strength has to be considered in light of the environment. If a student is in a high school where the average strength is 100, and the student has achieved a strength of 200, it shows that the student has tenacity and grit and drive. Whereas another student might be in a high school where the average strength is 200 and has a strength of 200, and this shows that the student is content to be just average. After admission, the first student has a much higher potential of outperforming the average freshman. The first student’s strength could very well be limited by the amount of resources available in this high school, and not by his/her innate ability.

At least, this is what is supposed to happen, if you believe the UC admission officers.

> This seems backwards to me. Colleges should be prioritizing strong students for admission and nothing else. Our country needs the best engineers and doctors. Colleges are a scarce, valuable resource and should be reserved for the best students, regardless of why they are the best students.

It seems unlikely that Americans would be so massively overrepresented in American colleges under this policy...

> You seem to be falsely equating private schools with "the wealthy" and public schools with "the working class"

Agree. Plenty of non-wealthy get to attend private schools through scholarships and financial aid

Maybe in the US, but not elsewhere. Lots of places just sort by grades or test scores. Part of the reason for the weird US system is the low ceiling: school is relatively easy compared to developed countries, so there are way too many people with identical scores at the top.

Some other countries just use test scores and exam results.

Yeah, there’s really no way around it when you have more qualified students than slots, unless you just mark each applicant as qualified or not and run a lottery.

But they do have to “craft a class” to some extent. An obvious example is athletic recruiting, but some schools are consciously thinking about populating other extracurriculars, like marching bands or orchestras.

And you also don’t want a class that’s all computer science majors or zero philosophy majors. I imagine they consider other factors as well. The admissions staff may be liberal, but I’m guessing at most schools they deliberately admit some outspoken conservatives.

I can’t say I’m the kind of guy who faces bootlicking with a gastronomic interest. The taste of the boot doesn’t change what’s being done.

That's my point.

Alma mater prestige is increasingly divorced from employability and thus financial prestige.

You don't need to go to an Ivy or Ivy adjacent to have a very successful career in Tech (software/hardware), Accounting, Actuary, Nurse Practitioners, and other high paying careers.

And historically (past 40-45 years) "prestigious" careers like law, consulting, marketing, advertising, publishing, and media with significant gatekeeping just haven't kept up.

A BBA from Purdue wouldn't get you an MBB interview, but that increasingly doesn't matter because now that BBA could land a PMM or FP&A role in a tech company and end up with a faster career potential than the MBB hire - both will end up fighting for the same job within 3-5 years of graduating anyhow.

Despite being an Ivy grad, I'm happy about this return to the pre-1980s norm.

It's an elite program within a non-prestigious university. It goes to show how concepts like prestige are truly performative in nature.

Even at my Ivy League alma mater, a traditional public school like UIUC or UW was well regarded by most departments, but society at large pedestalled my alma mater to an unrealistic degree.

Pierre Bourdieu tends to dig deeper into the sociology of elitism, and is in my opinion a must-read.

It's treated as "good enough", and now the the second generation of SWEs, PMs, and AEs are getting hired I've seen their parents (a large number of whom are now mid-level leadership in most tech companies here in the Bay) increasingly lobby to include these "lower tier" UCs to the recruiting pool.

My point is, for the younger generation a university's societal eliteness just isn't a strong predictor for success, and I strongly believe data will back up this observation within the next decade (there's usually a 5-7 year delay on data gathering in the social sciences, eg. Data from 2018-22 is only now starting to be analyzed).

UCR is where you want to go if you're going for Geology or Ag/Hort, you aren't really trying to go there for SWE or EE, it isn't exactly known for those sorts of programs.

Source: I live right next to their citrus and asparagus test fields and often visit their geology building to use their XRD and XRF systems.

If the acceptance rate wasn’t being gamed, they could accept a lot more of the top candidates - they would have years of statistical data knowing that only x% of those top students will commit.

It’s not really a risk to overaccept if you know what % will commit.

Interesting idea, but look at it from the applicant’s perspective: you’d have to front like $50,000 to apply to just 5 schools (if you call $10k the average price for a semester). Even if you solved the financial aid question here, admissions is a numbers game for students, usually, so getting accepted to more than one school would dig the student loan debt hole that much deeper across the board.