UC ADMISSIONS….We’ve been having a minor kerfuffle here lately about admissions standards for the two flagship UC campuses, Berkeley and UCLA. The chairman of the UC Board of Regents started it by pointing out that thousands of students with high SAT scores were rejected by the two schools while hundreds with low SAT scores were admitted. Was this part of a plot to reject high scoring whites and admit low scoring blacks?
I don’t know. But today the LA Times ran a long article about students who were “baffled” by their rejection despite having high SAT scores. The article itself was fairly uninteresting, but it did include this table, which shows the rejection rate of kids with SATs over 1400 at Berkeley by ethnic group:
Applied
Rejected
% Rejected
Asian American
5,898
2,616
44%
African American
124
54
44%
Latino
417
169
41%
Native American
44
20
45%
White
4,985
2,435
49%
International
895
610
68%
Other
130
62
48%
Unknown
1,439
621
43%
Total
13,932
6,587
47%
The obvious conclusion is that having a high SAT score just doesn’t guarantee you admission to Berkeley, regardless of your race. Nearly half of all high scoring students are rejected, and the rejection rates are pretty similar for all ethnic groups. (UCLA shows the same pattern, although the rejection rates are a bit lower across the board.)
Basically, lots and lots of kids with high SAT scores get rejected because there are just too many kids with high SAT scores these days, and the difference between a score of 1350 and 1450 is probably pretty meaningless. In fact, the emphasis that the critics place on SATs is puzzling: if SAT scores were all that mattered, then we’d hardly need admissions officers at all. But that’s never been the case, and that’s especially true at UC, whose chancellor has been a persistent critic of the SAT for quite a while.
One final note: don’t feel too sorry for the rejectees. Many of them end up at first-rate private universities, and the ones who don’t most often end up at schools like UCLA or UC San Diego, which are absolutely top notch schools, even if UCSD isn’t as well known as the flagship campuses. (I didn’t even apply to Berkeley or UCLA myself. I applied to UCSD instead because its reputation was so good.) In the end, these kids are all doing OK.
