Comments: UC Berkeley admissions policies

These are comments I posted over at joannejacobs.com.

It was reported in today's Oakland Tribune and
Daily Cal that out of the students with SATs above 1400 who were rejected, the vast majority (80%)
were out-of-state students, or international students, or students who withdrew their applications, or were students who applied to the ultra-competitive College of Engineering (which is usually tied with Stanford as the second best school of engineering in the country, behind only MIT).

What that means is, if you are an in-state student with a score over 1400, you have an excellent chance of getting admitted to Berkeley unless you apply to the College of Engineering...

Less than 5% of admitted students had scores under 1000... and I bet a high percentage of those were recruited athletes...

Berkeley still has the highest SAT average of any large public research university...

So am I concerned that some of these kids are not quite ready for the academic challenge? absolutely... I hope they get the needed extra resources to help them catch up...
I'm not just saying that... as I'm a grad student here, and have also been a lecturer here as well.
But please, let us dispense with this ridiculous hyperbole of Berkeley rejecting hordes of superqualified whites and asians and being overrun by mediocre black and latinos... it just a'int true.

Posted by jab at October 7, 2003 02:48 PM