Hacker News Reader

Comment by oh_sigh | Hacker News Reader

"At Cal State, about 40% of freshmen each year are considered not ready for college-level work and required to take remedial classes that do not count toward their degrees."

This is crazy to me. I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies?

View on HN

It's amazing that there's such a thing as remedial classes in a university, but hey, how else are we going to get an adequately diverse student body?

Are you insinuating white people don't need remedial classes?

Are you insinuating that white people can't be diverse?

They can't be racially diverse if they are white. If you mean educationally diverse, you're just trolling.

So White people are all one race, now?

Germans and Slavs and Scandinavians and Italians are all the same?

When did that happen?

Yes, it's Caucasian. There is a difference between race and country of origin. I mean wow.

Huh. Hasn't always been. Look up the history of race sometime.

Race is politics and not biology. I mean wow.

Are you saying Germans and Slavs and Italians aren't the same race, i.e. Caucasian? That's what you were stating. I understand the origins of race, but you implied they weren't the same race.

Maybe they're the same race now, but historically it hasn't been that simple.

Hell, Italians and Irish haven't always been considered White.

> So White people are all one race, now?

Always have been, pretty much since the classic idea of defined “races” was formed, in early race models—whether in two-race (Caucadoid/Mongoloid), three race (adding Negroid), or five-race (white, yellow, brown, black, and red) models—whites were, alone or with some others, one race.

There's an entire department of the federal government whose first, or perhaps even only, priority is to deal with the fact that OP indelicately mentioned.

which department? i seem to be missing the implication

Most directly, Ed. But now that you mention it, Justice is a close second.

jeff sessions justice department?

I'm commenting on trends that have persisted over administrations, and certainly accelerated under the last one. I don't pretend to know what's going on with this one, except to note that the career staff of many agencies are in semi-open revolt.

Of course all kinds of people can land in these remedial classes if they are not prepared.

Now, I ask you, which schools do a better job of preparing students for college level work, the schools white kids get to go to or the schools black kids have to go to? If you are wondering, look at the AP classes offered at say Palo Alto high school vs Crenshaw high school:

http://schools.latimes.com/school/los-angeles/crenshaw-senio...

http://schools.latimes.com/school/palo-alto/palo-alto-high/

Highlights:

Proficient in Math: PA: 76% Crenshaw: 2.5% (not a typo)

Proficient in English: PA: 84% Crenshaw: 18%

Now, are you saying we shouldn't let bright kids from bad schools get into college?

>Now, are you saying we shouldn't let bright kids from bad schools get into college?

Show me where I implied that.

I was just using your technique of putting words in someone else's mouth, with a question mark at the end. See GP post.

Palo Alto Avg. Income: $126,771

Inglewood Avg. Income: $43,394

Wouldn't it make sense to compare like-to-like, and choose two schools in areas with similar incomes?

Just btw. but in Germany ~43,000$ would be considered a not too bad income, certainly not an income where one would expect people to have ~2.5% math proficiency.

Sure, but a drink in Germany isn't going to run me $7 to $12, it would be less than half that usually. In a major city in the US, your living standards on $43k a year will be much lower than in Germany.

An average 1 bedroom in Inglewood ranges from $1350 to $1600 a month. An average 2 bedroom ranges from $1650 to $2000 a month.

Someone making $43k a year would end up with $2,667.51 a month as take home pay. This would not include health insurance, which could run anywhere from $100 to $400 a month (and potentially much, much higher).

From a different article about this same subject[1]:

> The policy announcement “aims to address inequities in college readiness head-on in order to close gaps in degree attainment and afford all students the opportunity to succeed,”

When a policy like this is couched in that sort of language, it's pretty obvious that the changes aren't being made because white kids are having trouble graduating.

[1]: https://edsource.org/2017/cal-state-adopts-new-policies-to-h...

Eh, numbers seem to match up with national numbers, and there's not a huge difference between ethnicities https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_270.asp

The scary one to me is "field of study: education" : 41.1.

41% of future teachers need remedial education? Wonder how that stacks up to other countries.

Education, psych, business, english, journalism, etc are buckets that catch a lot of people who don't know what they want to major in but go to college because "that's what you do"

Go to community college like I did. I took a bunch of remedial classes that helped me prepare for university. I wasn't prepared for a real university education out of high school. But after 3 years of community college (2 major switches) I transferred to UCSD for CS and got by BS and am currently doing my masters.

I don't think lowering the standards is a good idea. I think we should fill the gap's in education left by high schools failing at their jobs.

> I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies?

No, Cal State is the 2nd of three public college tiers defined by California law. (Top is the UC system, bottom is the community college system, which will indeed let in anyone who applies.)

CSUs, except for Cal Poly SLO, admit on a quota-by-major system, scoring all applicants objectively and taking the top $quota who applied in each major with a score above the minimum admittance threshold. Some majors at particular campuses, and some entire campuses, are considered "impacted", which means they get enough applicants that you're unlikely to be admitted with a score near the minimum threshold. The converse of this is that if you're above the minimum threshold, and you apply to a non-impacted campus, you'll be admitted. If your school gave you As, you'll beat the threshold without any inquiry into the quality of your school, or whether it was possible to receive grades lower than A.

Here's CSU San Jose's policy (they're impacted):

> To be considered for admission, graduates of California high schools or residents of California, as defined for tuition purposes, must have a minimum eligibility index of 2950 using the redesigned SAT or 694 using the ACT. The minimum eligibility index for nonresidents of California is 3570 using the redesigned SAT or 842 using the ACT. The CSU eligibility index is calculated by using either the SAT or ACT as follows:

> SAT (sum of scores in mathematics and critical reading) + (800 x high school grade point average)

> -or-

> (10 x ACT composite score without the writing score) + (200 x high school grade point average)

( http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/static/admission/freshma... )

Obviously, this scoring system is massively biased in favor of GPA over test scores (if you were running a college, would you rather admit someone with a 4.0 GPA and an 800 total SAT score, or someone with a 3.0 and a 1600?), which does a lot to explain why the caliber of students in CSUs is so low. I found it interesting, when I was looking into this a few years ago, that CSU San Francisco was impacted in their "social work" "major", but not in computer science.

While interesting, being of college age and living in the area, SFSU impaction makes sense. CS majors are generally more serious about their education and major choice and also know that SFSU is a poor choice for a CS degree. Meanwhile, I know many people that, getting into their 20s, go "I wanna live the city life!", and quickly pick a major with SFSU being an easy admission.

Compare SJSU being impacted in all majors, including CS.

Not all cal states are created equal. Many are effectively glorified community colleges(not necessarily a bad thing) , while others (like calpoly slo) are excellent universities. Source:was recently a California high school student

Cal Poly SLO shouldn't be used as an example of the CSU system; it is technically considered a CSU but is exempt from the admissions process that every other CSU campus is required to use. Cal Poly SLO can indeed be described as more or less an excellent university; no other CSU can.

A quick Google search tells me the closest Cal State to me, Sacramento, has a 67.3% acceptance rate. Slightly higher than the national average of 64.7%, although I'm not sure how trustworthy those numbers are.

I went to CSUS. I'm very surprised it's that low. Shortly after the one year I went there, they implemented a "fast track" acceptance which basically meant they accepted you as long as you had a high school diploma.

> I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies?

No, it depends on the Cal state. There are two cal state that have high acceptance rate and have low grad rate. IIRC CalState Domigez have the highest acceptance rate.

But there are other very selective calstate such as cal poly.

Cal State (CSU) is an umbrella term for many california state universities across California excluding UC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California).

Examples are CSULB, CSUF, CSU-whatever...

edit:

I had to take remedial English classes at a UC in my program ESL. So it's not amazing...

Examples for UC is UCI, UCLA, UCR, UCSD....

A co-worker has his CS degree from CSU Long Beach. I mentioned this to him the other day when I saw it elsewhere. He said, "it was basically high school when I was there and that was a decade ago."

I can't comment on Cal State, but SUNY schools in New York will pretty much take anybody. That doesn't necessarily make them bad institutions, it's just widely varied. I was fortunate enough (or unfortunate depending on how you look at it) to attend a SUNY CC and two private schools. My education at the SUNY CC was far superior to one of the private colleges, while the college I actually graduated from blew them both out of the water. It still surprises me how drastic the differences can be.

Cal State LA Accept rate: 68%

UCLA Accept Rate: 18%

uhh.. this is a really messed up comparison considering UCLA is the most applied to college in the world.

> UCLA is the most applied to college in the world.

That's just your opinion really.

It is a good school. Most applied in the world doesn't mean anything. A trade school could be more applied than UCLA.

But UCLA does have Alan Kay, creator of smalltalk, and Terrance Tao one of the most famous mathematician. Also their med school is nice.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-college-made-histor...

Cal Poly Accept rate: 29.5%

UC Irvine Accept rate: 40.7%

Not sure where we're going with this though.

Even better, UC Merced Acceptance rate: 73.7%

It's the newest UC and also middle of nowhere.

My family members who teach at Berkeley indicate it is not much better there and they've been complaining about it more and more for a decade now.

I went to a Cal State university - it was a joke.

Would be happy to hear more about your experience. In what respect?

* Slept through my year there. Managed a 4.0.

* After I was there, they literally accepted anyone with a high school diploma. They called this "fast track acceptance."

* In the orientation, I, as an anthro major was somehow grouped with about 40 engineers. The guy was discussing the math and English assessment tests. If you had x on your math SATs, you can skip the math test. If you had y in your English SATs, you can skip the English test. He asked how many people can skip the English test. Me and like 5 people raised our hands, which wasn't surprising in a room full of engineers. He asked how many can skip the math test. Maybe 10 more people raised their hands.

Somehow, I, the anthro major had a higher math SAT score than a bunch of people who wanted to build the bridges I drive over.

Went to CSUS. Indeed it was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com