Admissions is a rat race, where you have to run as fast as you can just to keep up. You may have a 4.0 GPA, and 1550 on your SAT, and are the quarterback of the hockey team, but you'll be passed over for someone with a 4.0 GPA and a 1550 SAT, who is both the quarterback of the hockey team, AND spent three weeks building orphanages in East Oblastan.
Once you're admitted, you no longer need to participate in the rat race. You just need to meet the criteria for passing your classes, which do not scale up, just because the person sitting next to you in lecture is an orphanage-builder.
i guarantee you there are a number of people every year who get rejected from Berkeley but accepted to Stanford (or equivalent) -- just a lot of noise in the process and after a certain point it becomes pretty arbitrary.
i bet this fact is how the admissions officials rationalized this corruption -- if the line between acceptance and rejection is arbitrary anyway, how much worse could it be to try to get some money out of it? (a lot worse)
Agreed. I was accepted to a top-5 school and rejected from more than one school ranked 25+ (one was >50). I know someone for grad school applied to 5 schools: they got rejected from all 5 schools, reapplied the next year, and got accepted to 3/5.
One of my kids applied to Cal a few years back...at Cal you apply to the individual college (such as the college of engineering) when you apply. Some colleges are much easier to get into than others and it's very difficult to change colleges once you are admitted, it's like applying to get into the school all over again. Obviously getting into the CS or Engineering programs at Cal is very hard but many of the other programs are much less competitive. I don't know if that's how all the UC schools are or not, but the difficulty of admissions seems like a mixed bag at UC Berkley.
If they can manage to make "student athletes" pass classes they’ve never been to (and who they pay tuition for) then how hard do you think it would be for someone that’s actually paying to go there?
The admissions criteria for universities don't make a lot of sense. The standardized tests select for students that are good at writing those tests.
Malcolm Gladwell (yeah, yeah, I know) did a podcast series about the admissions process for law schools and the role that test taking speed plays in the admission process.
FTA: an example: """In regard to this engineering applicant, the associate dean stated that he was concerned that the applicant’s math test scores were low, but when he considered those scores together with the applicant’s holistic rating and GPA, he believed that the applicant would be successful as an engineering major and admitted the applicant. """
Colleges rarely if ever fail students. There’s a known phenomenon of grade curving (adding +x% to exams if it was difficult for some students) which I never understood during my time in higher education.
Yet it makes sense because universities want to lessen liabilities and have rich alum give back (esp. the case with the children of wealthy donors).
I went to Berkeley and this wasn’t true for Berkeley. Popular majors were very competitive and were designed to filter students out of majors. Many classes were based on a curve such that effectively 1/3 of people ended up at least leaving the major. Sample popular majors: computer science, chemical engineering, molecular cell biology. I knew of at least one person who effectively failed out after one semester and of community college transfers in danger of failing out.
Same experience at my UC. Popular/impacted major courses aren't even allowed to curve up (only down). The universities will defend the reputation of their top majors by aggressively filtering out people not meeting the bar. It's not unheard of for a majority of a class to be given non-passing marks, and it's in their financial interest to do so since the student will have to retake the class, thus pay more in tuition. They'd just rather you waste your time and money in an non-impacted major (and so it doesn't impact their graduation rate stat used for major rankings).
Definitely have my share of friends that did 6-8 year stints at the UC for a 4-year degree from constantly failing out of classes, but never forced out.
In this case, the students are alleged to have been less qualified which does not imply unqualified.