Fyght4Cal said:

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OdontoBear66 said:

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okaydo said:

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GBear4Life said:

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I thought metrics like SAT, AP courses are weighted more than GPA, which makes sense to me. I knew a lot of mediocre HS students that had great GPAs.

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My point is that Stanford say can only accept 3000 people (I'm making up the number) but it probably gets 20,000 applications (another made up number) of people who have mind-blowing test scores, APs, GPAs, extracurriculars. They can only take so many people, so a lot of brilliant people are rejected because they don't stand out.

For instance, The Washington Post recently had a story about the phenomenon of high school students posting their college admission reaction standards. The main guy in this story got rejected by USC, but got accepted by Princeton. Was he highly qualified to get into USC? You bet he was! But USC only has so many spaces, and he didn't stand out to them.

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If you want to hear a strange one our third granddaughter got in to Cal, UCLA, UCSB, UCD, and multiple other schools but did not get into U$C (not even deferred), and she did it on credentials for she has parents that are both UCD grads, and no affirmative action type bennies to help in any way. Go figure. But Papa is very happy even though she would not have gone there anyway.

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There is no affirmative action in the California public sector, inc. the universities. The voters outlawed it in 1996, with the adoption of Prop. 209.

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Maybe not formally, but as recently as three years ago I know if you had parents who had graduated college it worked against you and conversely if you had no parents who went to college it helped in the UC system. And I was speaking of "affirmative action type" benefits which still comes in to play both public and private admissions. I do not disagree with it at all, just mentioning.

This is why no one should pay attention to college ratings like those in the USN&WR,

The concept that someone would bribe somebody hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their kid into SC still just blows me away. And then you get to honor of paying all that tuition. I mean, what the f.... Must be all about the parental ego.

It's also another reason why Admission/Acceptance Rate is a terrible, almost worthless metric in many circumstances.

Suppose School A and School B are good schools that have roughly similar admissions standards and generally good students apply to both.

But School B receives a ton of extra applications from largely less qualified students and then rightly rejects them, School B's Admission/Acceptance Rate will be significantly lower and it will look more "selective." But in reality, again, both schools are equally selective. You have to judge by the characteristics (scores/grades/achievements) of the students that do enroll, not the admission/acceptance rate.

Why would all the extra, less qualified students apply to School B and not School A? Maybe School B is in a bigger metropolitan area (*cough* UCLA) and/or has better name recognition for the less qualified students (e.g. due to past sports successes). Or maybe (as per above) they are intentionally recruiting candidates they have no intention of accepting to make their acceptance rate look better when in reality they are no more selective. But either way, those extra less qualified students in no way make School B more selective or harder to get into than School A.