Posted by
Jill Cowan on Thursday, May 01, 2008 12:46 pm
Yesterday, Apr. 30, after an absurdly long wait, UC Berkeley transfer applicants everywhere finally received the big news. Over a month after those obsessive-compulsive, overachieving upstarts known as future freshmen got their decisions, transfer applicants finally got their just desserts in the form of tasty hunks of Berkeley acceptance. Well–either that or they had an extra month to get their hopes up, only to end up tasting the bitter fruits of rejection, some for the second time around.
So, what we’re trying to say is now might be a good time to call your BFF back home to see what’s what. And you might want to have your sympathy voice ready, because according to a transfer admissions FAQ, usually about 2 in 3 transfer applicants get the shaft. Ouch. Though, to be fair, those odds are better than the very general estimate for freshman applicants–3 in 4 applicants receive a “nix.”
Earlier: You’re Either In, or You’re Out: UC Berkeley Admissions Breaks Hearts, Futures at 5 p.m. PST
Prospective Transfer Students FAQ’s [Cal UGA]
Many of us know what it feels like to be tortured via the throes of anticipation. We waited anxiously for Cal Football to reign as No. 1 last semester, but the moment never came. We cried tears of sweet closure when the last installment of Harry Potter reached our eager hands.
Still, none of that compares to the emotional turmoil that arrives in many student mailboxes across the country today. Yes, it’s that time of year again–the day many high school seniors open a long-awaited letter from the UC Berkeley admissions department (or, rather, log into the myBerkeleyApplication portal at 5 p.m PST for quicker results).
One glance at College Confidential, a message board consisting largely of soccer moms and stressed out overachievers, and you can get a sense of the agony. Some are even accusing admissions of an e-mail conspiracy after their “suspicious” and “cruelly worded” letter announced the release of acceptances on Mar. 27. The letter proclaims, “Thank you for your patience: We’re worth the wait!” Cruel, indeed.
read more »
Ok, so perhaps no one was calling it the messiah of the admissions process. Well, at least no one we know. (Though Ricardo Vazquez in the UC Newsroom seemed pretty stoked about it).
Really, StatFinder didn’t come to redeem the admissions process. But like the iPhone, it has some nice things about it that just make life a bit easier.
The University of California is smitten with this new Web site of theirs, calling it a
bq. first-of-its-kind Web site for a public university that will allow anyone to access and search a wealth of admissions data with a few simple clicks of a mouse.
And, that’s, well, true. There are more than 50 tables, breaking down data on admissions by high school GPA, ethnicity, college GPA, SAT scores, parent income and parent education, among others things.
The university sees “reporters, parents, counselors, policy makers and others interested in this information” accessing this information. Notice that they include “parents” but not “applying students.”
Perhaps it’s come to this point where Mom and Dad are more interested in the competition of college than the kiddies and thus commandeer the application process for their offspring.
Like the iPhone, the application has minor inconveniences … Doesn’t increased accessibility to admissions data only encourage increased competition in applying for colleges?
Oh well, at least we all already got into Berkeley. And at least we aren’t comparing StatFinder to the Nokia N800.
Online Service Will Open UC Admission Statistics to the Public [Daily Cal]
StatFinder puts admissions data at your fingertips [UC Newsroom]
UC StatFinder [Web site]
Posted by
Scott Lucas on Monday, September 24, 2007 08:36 pm
In an opinion piece in today’s New York Times, UC Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel suggests that “despite their image as meritocratic beacons of opportunity, the selective colleges serve less as vehicles of upward mobility than as transmitters of privilege from generation to generation.”
We like think of colleges as meritocratic institutions, open to everyone who meets the standards. However, As Karabel explains it:
bq. The paucity of students from poor and working-class backgrounds at the nation’s selective colleges should be a national scandal. Yet the problem resides not so much in discrimination in the admissions process (though affirmative action for the privileged persists in preferences for the children of alumni and big donors) as in the definition of merit used by the elite colleges.
His proposed solution?
bq. One of my favorite [ideas] is a lottery. This could take the form of reserving a modest number of places in the freshman class — say 5 percent to 10 percent — for applicants who, having met a high academic threshold, would be selected at random. While the admissions office would know the identities of the students admitted by lottery, no one else — not faculty, not employers and not the students themselves — would.
The Clog’s two cents? It’s no surprise that unequal education at the elementary and high school level produces inequalities at the college level. Until we fix that, anything else is just a Band-Aid. Also, there is a place for students who can’t make it at the best schools.
The New College Try [NY Times]
Jerome Karabel [Department of Sociology]
On Thursday, we got a glimpse into Berkeley’s future when the university released data on the more than 10,000 students accepted for next fall. For reasons that boggle the soul, our school felt the burning desire to tell us we admitted
a student who danced with a ballet academy in Salzburg, Austria; several nationally-ranked debaters; a member of the U.S. Junior Olympic Water Polo team; a nationally-ranked chess player; and several members of a high school team that won the first place in the American Computer Science League All-Star Contest. The class also includes 44 sets of twins.
Several members of a prolific comp-sci team???!! Really??!! AND 44 sets of real-life, honest-to-god twins!! Excuse us as we all simultaneously wet ourselves.
Honestly, no celebrities? We couldn’t admit a Star Wars Kid caliber famous person to make things interesting in this urban-hippie-hellhole? Couldn’t we get Jonny Moseley or SuChin Pak for another season? Being on MTV totally proves that you took advantage of opportunities.
You’d figure that we’d get something a bit more substantial from such a gigantic class. Nope, stuck with the usual batch of MCATs-obsessed stress queens and EECS androids. Thanks a lot, Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Now, only an incoming class of 88 Siamese twin debate wizards can salvage fall ’07’s prospects of being interesting.
It’s important to note, though, that these students haven’t decided to join our ranks just yet. Berkeley expects only about 4,250 kids to enroll. It is also important to note that Berkeley accepted 370 more students than they did last year. So don’t expect much breathing room in the RSF come September.
Posted by
sjlee on Wednesday, January 17, 2007 02:54 pm
Timothy Egan’s recent feature in The New York Times
packs more slop into the messy ongoing battle between advocates and opponents of affirmative action in post-secondary education.
The racial roulette for classroom seats is a hot-button issue for California’s public university system in the post-Prop 209 era and, as Egan suggests, particularly so at UC Berkeley.
With the school’s Asian American admission numbers reaching around 46% in the past couple years, Egan’s article focuses
on Berkeley’s consequent administrative and social dynamics issues.
Vital points raised:
- Race-neutral admissions policies vs. gaping discrepancies between inner-city and suburban high schools vs.
cultural capital differences as the main reason for increased admission numbers of Asian American students and the
subsequent drop in African American and Latino freshman counts
- The sticky plurality vs. majority issue as applied to the Asian American minority on this campus
- Lumping a bunch of distinct ethnicities together under the “Asian” umbrella
- Discrepancies in standards among admission candidates of various ethnic minorities
- Stereotypes and ethnic cliques existing without a lot of protest among the students
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