[quote=enron_by_the_sea][quote=bearishgurl]Mostly Asians are representing foreign public university students in CA BUT my beef applies to out of state of all races as well. It really isn’t a “race issue.” It’s a “resident issue.” These groups SHOULD be held to higher admission standards than in-state students and they used to be but their admission criteria was apparently “dumbed down” around 2008 in order for the UC to get their money.
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If your beef is with out of state students of all races, then why your original message only talks about preventing “Chinese” students? Were you also expecting those English essays to stop enrollment of students from other states? or prevent someone applying from Canada or Western Europe?
I don’t think your concerns (about UCs admitting too many out of state/foreign students) are not valid, but you need to recognize that your motivation behind designing a system that only screen out applicants from China, strikes some of us as insensitive. (And it would not work any way because foreign students have excellent English skills too. You need to travel abroad some time!)
Asians are already very suspicious of college admissions processes, which many feel are covertly discriminatory against them. Your proposal unfortunately only feeds into that narrative of hidden/unwritten biases against asians in the system of college admissions….[/quote]Enron, I didn’t design that essay portion of the SAT/ACT. It’s been there along along and the UC/CSU haven’t used it in a number of years to factor into the admission tests composite scores (not sure if they both stopped using it at the same time or different years).
We have to ask ourselves what would be a good reason NOT to use the essay portion if the UC/CSU truly wanted the best candidates for admission. Wouldn’t they WANT to see if an applicant can write a coherent paragraph and spell and punctuate? Why did they remove it from consideration in the application process? Could it possibly be that they wanted to make it easier for applicants to get admitted for whom English was not their first language? As in a foreign student, who will pay the full tuition rate to attend?
The truth is that Chinese students are the biggest group of foreign students that the UC admits and their parents come here in droves for the sole purpose of buying condos near certain UC campuses when their child is just five years old! The unit is purchased solely for the purpose of using it for student housing for that kid WHEN, not IF he/she will finally attend university there. The parents are that certain their child will be admitted into THAT campus. The presence of the essay on the ACT/SAT could slow down admissions of OOC students from all countries where English is not the spoken language. Hence, it is now gone.
Yes, OOC and OOS students pay the same out-of-state tuition and so the UC is at fault for admitting way too many of BOTH groups at the expense of the thousands of qualified in-state resident-applicants who are CA HS graduates. Especially when the vast majority of them cannot afford to attend an out-of-state or private college themselves.
I don’t understand why bringing back the essay would sound “insensitive” to an Asian American who was born in the US and schooled in the US. Their kid(s) will want to one day apply to UC/CSU as well. Every resident-parent and their student of every race in CA is in the same boat. Most of us want our kids to be admitted to a UC/CSU. Why should we support the UC “gumming up the works” by handing out seats right and left to non-residents, causing our own kids to be turned down for admission … even if they have stellar qualifications?
Who does this to this degree? Certainly, no other state that I’m aware of. Why does CA “owe” the rest of the country and world admission into its universities when it can’t even serve anywhere near enough of its own thousands of highly-qualified in-state applicants by doing so?
