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Comment by pfisherman | Hacker News Reader

I think the University of Texas has one of simplest and most egalitarian admissions policies that I have seen. If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities.

As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California.

If anybody from Texas has a different perspective on UT admission policy (I am sure it has its pathological edge cases) then I would be curious to hear.

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It's top 7% now and it has a holistic system to handle students outside that cohort.

The reason this exists is that it's effectively an affirmative action program for both urban segregated schools and rural schools, which combined have enough political power to pull this off. I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for this to be constructed - note that suburbs in general fight against such policies.

UT itself generally doesn't like the state mandated policy because it results in a less academically strong cohort than other flagship universities, reducing its rank.

Whether one school's admission program is "better" or not depends on what you view as the purpose of universities (something often lost in these conversations). Are you weighing more academically similar cohort (in which case purely predictive measures of performance are most appropriate) or some sort of equity metric where putting students from less socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds with stronger ones can result in higher upward mobility? One can certainly make the case that the Texan system could be failing on both accounts compared to say UCs, but you'd need to try to build a causal model to understand which school is producing better results for students that arrive.

> reducing its rank

Do universities exist for students? Or do students exist for universities?

I'm sure university administration believe the latter, but given that they're supported by the state (in UT's case, ~25% of their budget?) there's a pretty strong argument that they owe the people of the state education.

University Presidents and Trustees have this bizarre fixation on rankings. I have no clue why, especially considering the fact that that composition of the top 100 is fairly stable. Rarely does a university experience a big swing, up or down. Most universities are never going to dethrone the top 20, no matter how hard they try. And it's not like they are in desperate need for enrollment either.

Because we put MBA’s in leadership positions of universities so they do what they’ve been trained to do - run a business. And part of that is finding metrics to measure their success by.

Someone should give those guys an old-school CRPG to provide an outlet for this make-the-number-go-up fixation.

The metric that can be measured is not the eternal metric. The result that can be result-driven is not the eternal result.

What do you think fantasy football is?

I expect it's a case of metrics-measured, metrics-optimized-for.

Rankings are an easy "objective" measurement administrators can take to financial supporters (either government or private) and say "Here's what we're spending your dollars on." Consequently, rankings become very important to administrators.

There was a stretch in my life where I knew a lot of people who knew where George Washington University ranked versus Carleton College versus who knows what. The upper middle classes take this stuff seriously.

When people hear about a university they don't know about, they often get their initial impressions from the rankings. I imagine universities that fail that test can end up being filtered out very early on in the process. For some people anything top 20 is great, but I think even the top universities don't want to be written off by the best candidates because they were #11 instead of #10.

It’s not really bizarre at all. Parents and therefore students care about rankings, and it directly leads to enrollment, donations, and talent attraction. There might not be changes in overall rankings but individual college or program rankings do change substantially.

The administration will all profess a desire not to be so beholden but it’s part of the game so to speak, you have to play.

Source: current board member of a public university college

>"individual college or program rankings do change substantially."

I hadn't considered that. Good insight.

Agreed, but that argument is more relevant to argue along the lines of how many in-state vs. out-of-state/international students you can educate. (Even then it's murky -- I can argue the international students both bring additional funding and add diversity which improves the learning experiences of in-state students).

Regardless, the argument here is simply which people they select. Assuming they hold 90% of spots for Texans (required by law), it's just a question of how they select people. The university wants to select the strongest students holistically (which some additional diversification criteria) - the state wants it to select the top 7% of students from every high school. Even if you argue the people are owed a state education, either criterion is a valid way to select the students that attend.

now you are starting to ask extremely uncomfortable questions for the higher education cabal.

Unfortunately, what I suspect is going on with all this high minded "get rid of the SATs" is really going to at least help the universities combat what was an increasing pressure to do pre and post testing to validate or establish the value of a university's program. You cannot as easily gain useful information if you have no pre-test.

The very irony of this is of course that it is a kind of deliberate and manipulative breaking of the scientific process by universities who will simply claim even more profusely that their graduates improve over 4 years of study, without any control of variables.

The only possibility I see to circumvent what may be a devious scheme is for citizens to press state Legislatures to require a pre-test on entry and a post-test on graduation. Expect extreme pushback though because the data that is available strongly indicates that universities are largely not actually conferring the value one may expect. In other words, the quality of the students on entry is the primary determination of the quality of the student on graduation, which seems to hold across the board.

Exactly! It's about reducing evidence and accountability, along with increasing enrollment ($).

High calibre students not only help the university's rankings, but also other students. A few of my courses had absolutely terrible lecturers, but we managed to more or less learn the material from each other.

I had a girlfriend at U C Davis, and I found the opposite.

The best students were called 4clickers. They sat in the front row, with four color pens in hand. They never helped, and one on occasion turned her in for cheating. She used to talk about how competitive thstudrnts were. They all wanted a spot in a graduate program. It was the most depressing school I ever visited. Couldn't wait to leave on Sunday. (I was suprised she cheated, but it taught me something about "the high caliber" student.)

Yeah it really depends on the students' objectives/options. For Electrical/Computer Engineering majors at my University we all knew we were all going to at least get decent jobs at graduation, those going to Grad school were the minority. So it was a very collegial atmosphere for the most part.

But if you're in one of those programs where the Undergrad is fairly worthless by itself and are competing for a limited number of slots at a prestigious grad program, that's when then cutthroats start to emerge.

Sometimes the _professors_ would get sick of the shit the competitive students spread over the class. Nothing quite as satisfactory as watching the lights go out when a pre-med’s career prospects get ranked over a B in organic chemistry. Leave the professor’s attention for those of us who are here to learn, not for those who merely want to collect As.

If you consume media or follow university rankings they exist only for prestige, whatever that is.

> I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for this to be constructed

I believe california has a similar program (or did at some time since Bakke), specifically for UC (the "higher tier" university system, versus cal state system)

ELC (https://www.ucop.edu/enrollment-services/programs-and-initia...).

It doesn't get you into the top UC though (which Texas' program does), just any. There is wide variance in UC schools.

Yes and there are definitely CS schools which IMO are better than many UC (cal poly SLO e.g.)

And what is the "top" UC anyways. This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I personally think more favorably of UCSD over cal, and, for some disciplines Davis or SC over cal. UCLA is highly regarded across the board and probably exceeds cal, for, say pre-nursing program.

> If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities.

UC is the more elite of two separate state funded university systems in CA, but it has a similar guarantee (but not campus-of-choice), that evaluates earlier (counts only 10th and 11th grade) and has a 9% cutoff for the “in your class” guarantee, which is called “Eligibility in Local Context”.

https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...

They also guarantee admission to the top 9% statewide, even if they aren't top 9% of class.

https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...

California State University, the larger state-funded system, has a process called “redirection” which functions as a kind of admission guarantee for qualified California residents who are applying as first-time freshman or certain transfer statuses, but I can’t easily find clear documentation of the cutoff (which may just be the minimum CSU eligibility cutoffs), but in any case is broader than UCs.

I'm not convinced that Texas is more progressive here. (Even before considering the sibling comments that indicate that the actual current guarantee is less than the top 10%.)

Right, but the campus of choice difference is huge!

The UC system includes schools like UC Merced which just aren't that competitive or prestigious to begin with, just as the UT system includes schools that are much less competitive/prestigious than UT Austin.

I think a lot of the meme form of 'conservative' and 'liberal' concepts OFTEN don't fit if you define it by politics or a state policy... especially any policy as time goes on.

A state government might have a very liberal or conservative party in power ... and a given policy might be considered the opposite, but they're not going to revisit it all the time.

The reasons for the policy too might have nothing to do with 'conservative' and 'liberal'.

Personally, I'm not really sure I buy into the idea that any given University has to have a given admissions policy and be 'liberal' or 'conservative'. There's room for a mix of policies across universities IMO / should be a mix.

Fankly I think you could tell most people any random policy is 'conservative' or 'liberal' and they'd just support or oppose it based on that label.

Definitions are all dorked up... and 'conservative' and 'liberal' is too weird and narrow a lens to view everything through.

Just as an example George W. Bush ran a campaign that very vocally opposed "nation building", it was thought to be a very important conservative value. George W. Bush then started the largest / longest nation building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan in decades ...

These terms often don't make any sense when applied.

TBF, I think when OP was talking about "conservative" vs "liberal" s/he was more less talking about progressive vs regressive systems.

A regressive system takes away from those that don't have much to give to people that already have a lot.

In this way - a blanket statement of guaranteeing the top x% of students admission into state schools is - I would argue fair and reasonable - but I would also argue is regressive.

This is assuming the top x% of students come from wealthier & more educated families. It's possible this assumption isn't true.

I think progressive policies would be like those that make it easier for certain groups to get admitted (i.e. harder for other groups). This seems unfair, but if you want change, I don't see how you do it fairly.

Affirmative action is a shortcut, but sometimes the shortcut is the only way to make any progress.

There may be a few very large issues, but also a gazillion small factors that make up systemic discrimination, both racially and against women. It is impossible for minorities to fight those individually, especially not from a position of weakness. It is more effective to counter at least a small part of the net discriminative effect by relatively simple quotas.

And usually those policies don't make up the balance anyway.

I'm dubious that economic standing isn't a better criteria than race in most situations where affirmative action would be desirable.

Providing programs to help those in a weaker economic position more directly addresses the need, results in programs that everyone can feel that maybe they or their family might benefit from, and avoids perpetuating raced based discrimination and the resulting resentment.

If when economic equality isn't the inequality you're attempting to correct it's so highly correlated that it should be sufficient-- after all, a big part about why we care about the lasting effects of historic racism is that it has produced a lasting weakened economic standing.

i think what your comment aludes to, and is an important point that gets lost easily is, concentrating on race masks the real issue which is systemic economic and opportunity disparity

I think you underestimate contemporary racial discrimination.

I am a Texas resident (born here and also graduated from high school in Texas) and would like to point out that it's not just UT, every state school (the other big ones with a decent amount of competition are Texas Tech and Texas A&M) follows this policy. In actuality, it appears that because the demand is so high for UT they have had to lower the number to 6%: https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/

The primary flip side to the top 10% law is that urban centers have much higher levels of competition than rural ones. If you happen to go to high school in Nowhere, Texas, it's quite easy to go to UT since achieving that top 6% is a somewhat trivial endeavor. Whereas if you go to an urban high school in a population center such as Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio, you have to really apply yourself.

Aside from quantization errors for high school classes with fewer than 16 students, why would it be easier to get the top 6% in a rural school?

Because on average the children of urban/suburban professionals have more academic support, higher expectations placed on them, and more competition, and as a result end up with more academic practice/preparation, compared to rural or working-class children.

You're saying it would be easier if you imported the support and expectations with you? Otherwise I still don't get it. If rural school students as a class are poorly supported and have low expectations, and you are a member of that class, I don't see where your advantage arises.

The same amount of effort spent on academic pursuits (or the same amount of external support) will get you further on a local–relative scale in a less competitive environment. Even the 75th %ile students at many schools filled with children of upper-middle-class professionals work insanely hard. But sure, being one of the few academic strivers in a less competitive school has its own challenges.

I think making the system more equitable by supporting kids from all backgrounds is socially beneficial, even if it sometimes makes suburbanites complain.

I think he's saying if you're in a bad urban school, it's hard to see how you're any less likely to be in the top 6% than if you're in a bad rural school given the same academic abilities. (Academic abilities which don't always need to be very highly developed.)

football

A typical rural school attracts students based on proximity---if you're living in that district, you go to that school, no matter how much your parents make or whether they're lawyers or a convenience store clerk. (Additionally, the residents of the area are typically less interested in education, rather than getting a job or playing sports.)

In an urban area, residential areas are typically segregated by wealth, and wealthier parents want their kids to go to good schools. Further, they are capable of moving within the area so that their children go to good schools. As a result, the competition among students for the top N% more fierce due to the pre-selection of students.

I take it you never visited Yates High?

I think you mean if you go to a good school you need to apply yourself. If you live in a rough neighborhood and go to a bad school, it's not really all that difficult. Of course, you have to get through high school, which is not so easy in the rough neighborhoods. But you get the idea.

The downside of that system is that the 10% at one school is definitely not equivalent to the top 10% in another school. When you compare rural school districts to the suburbs of the major cities a kid in the top 10 people at one school might not even rank in the top quarter at another school.

But that's an upside if you're looking to be equitable.

Not necessarily. Wealthier parents are more mobile, and can move residences such that their children are in the top 10%.

You're losing the forest for the trees. Wealthier parents most often send their children to good private schools, and their children have lots of options for college if they are talented and hard working.

Where I lived in Texas, no middle class family sent their kids to public schools.

That's a hell of an indictment of the local schools. Where I live (Portland, Oregon suburbs) most middle/upper middle class families send their kids to public school.

Idk Seattle for example is liberal as hell but 25% go to private schools. Likely because equity goals are not good for non target groups

Where was this? I highly doubt this is true.

The equilibrium state in this scenario would be all public schools approaching equivalence, which would be a positive outcome.

Not positive at all; the only possible equivalence is when every school is equally bad

Eh, kids from rich/educated families probably get a much smaller marginal benefit from the quality of the school since they're getting tons of extra stimulation at home (stability, parents reading to them at night, parents encouraging academic pursuits). Meanwhile lower-achieving kids benefit just from having the higher-achieving kids in the same classroom.

It seems like you are arguing that wealthy parents move to places with worse schools to make it easier for their kids to be in the top 10%.

This is in fact exactly what happens in Texas. I've met many people who attended UT whose parents or friend's parents did exactly that for the explicit purpose of increasing their chances of their child being in the top 7% of their graduating class so that they could get automatic admission to UT Austin, a very good school to attend compared to the usual options for someone graduaitng #35 in a class of 500 from a public high school with low educational achievement rankings.

They'll often go straight for petroleum engineering if their career path is as calculated during college as it was in high school, and end up with a six figure salaxy at age 22 (not sure this still works as of 2020 given the problems with Houston's gas sector).

For some parents, making sure their child has a sure fire path to the middle class is what they consider their main responsibility, and will do things as crazy as move to a worse school district just to get them on the above track.

If you're as cynical about the value of education (to provide a "job") as the people described, you'll absolutely sacrifice the quality of your kids education (moving to a school with ostensibly less talented or credentialed teachers and possibly less academically gifted peers to learn from and larger class sizes) in order to game the system.

Well, assuming this also moves funding this may actually do wonders for balancing out the system. And there may be some benefits to all the students, in seeing how the other half lives, making more advanced classes available in poorer neighborhoods, etc.

Yeah I agree this improves diversity and combats school district segregation. I think this is exactly the intent and works as it should.

In practice they want nothing to do with the poors so they cluster into "good" school districts.

Yeah I mean you always want the best for your own kid that’s normal

They can, but they don't, just like how Jeff Bezos can choose to live under a bridge, but doesn't.

Nobody with money goes out of their way to send their children to a school in a 'common' part of town, because they don't want their children to mix up with 'the wrong kind' of people.

If you ever find a case of a wealthy family moving to a rural area to improve their children's chances of getting into a state school, please let us know.

I went to high school in a science magnet program in Texas. Students from 3 high schools were eligible for the magnet program, and the magnet program was housed in one of the 3 high schools. Our math+science classes were in the magnet program, but our English/history/PE/art/all other classes were in the host school. The program made up about 10% of the host high scool, and students in the program were counted as part of the host school for purposes of university admission.

This understandably made people unhappy at the host school - ~7% of the class is academic high achievers from out of the school zone who take most of the admission spots reserved for the top N%.

I don't know of any cases of parents moving to avoid the extra competition, but I probably wouldn't have heard of that if it happened. I do know of some people set on going to UT who did not apply to the magnet program so they could have less competition.

The point here is you don't need to move to a rural area to decrease school competition. There are plenty of cases where you can move a mile to get into the zone of a less competitive school.

You are making an implicit assumption that groups should be treated equitably. Some of us disagree with that--we feel *individuals* should be treated equitably and see these attempts to treat groups equitably as treating individuals *inequitably*.

Why should my chance of getting into college be hampered by where my parents live or what color skin they gave me??

Aiding one person is inherently discriminating against another.

It's all a hack job to try and work around the fact that we haven't yet figured out a good objective measurement. Things like SAT do the same in reverse, aid the wealthy students at the expense of the poor ones. It's not an easy problem.

> Why should my chance of getting into college be hampered by where my parents live or what color skin they gave me?

Why should theirs be hampered by the same?

Well to be fair University of California has a policy that is more or less the same.

https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...

Most people who weren’t 18 and living in CA in the last 3 years don’t know much about how UC admissions work.

I'd point out that this only guarantees you admission into the general studies / undeclared school. It can still be difficult and competitive to get into the engineering or business school for example.

A law was passed in 2009 for the University of Texas specifically, that stated "the university must automatically admit enough students to fill 75 percent of available Texas resident spaces" [1]. That 10% number has dwindled down to the top 6%.

As a past automatic admission, I'm horrified hearing stories from coworkers. The process was never stressful for me -- I sent in one application, heard back before the holidays and was done.

[1] https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions#fndtn-freshman...

At the time I entered UT Austin, in 1986, they had that 10% policy---it's how I got in. Some programs (nursing and business are the two I remember) had competitive admissions, though, but that was for sophomores or juniors.

The University had 50,000 students at that time. During my time there, they were constantly trying to find a way to reduce that number and succeeded at some point, so the 2009 law may have been a result.

> many policies in “conservative” Texas

Just want to point out that the policy you're referring to was put in place while Democrats ran Texas. Historically Texas was a Democratic state, with only eight years of Republican governors from 1874-1995.

> more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California

And also that California was historically a Republican state. For most of the years from 1943-1999, they had a Republican governor.

Note that until recently, there was little correlation between the progressive/conservative axis and the Democratic/Republican axis. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to the downfall of the Dixiecrat faction of the Democratic party and the current ideological sort. Ezra Klein's book "Why We're Polarized" has a lot of good background on this.

I went to UT and having this program in was a great experience. It allowed for a lot of variety and kids from all sorts of backgrounds, but you still had crazy smart people. If you're from the city, the school's super hard to get into. I don't know about the more suburban or rural areas. That being said, my classmates were very diverse and it was a blast. CS education was phenomenal there and I still think their approach puts them in the best of the best globally. Everything else was really nice too, can't have asked for a better experience.

All system can be gamed. I guess UT isn't that prestigious to create strong enough incentives. Imagine if Harvard said you'd get admission if you're top 1% of the class. Imagine how many parent would just stick their kid into the worst school for 1-2 years to get that.

California just made it very hard to game.

That wouldn't be a good thing? Students are assigned to schools based on their address. To put their kid in a bad school would require moving into a bad neighborhood. That means the poor town gets more tax money, which all the students benefit from.

The overwhelming majority of towns do not impose an income tax and presumably the property tax would be the same regardless of whether a "typical" or "college admissions gaming" resident lived there. The only small difference in tax income to the town would be any minuscule difference in excise taxes on vehicles or local sales tax. Do you have a larger difference in tax income to the town in mind that I'm not seeing?

Not to mention that you could just rent an apartment in that area to get an address and drive your kid to school.

Well, UC doesn't consider your skin color in said evaluation (the evaluation criteria is constructed in a weigh that does boost racial diversity, but that's different from considering at the individual criteria), and it has similar gaming dynamics.

As the article notes, you absolutely can go to a weaker high school to boost your chance into a UC (parents can also try dropping their income lower to boost their kids as well). Though, neither might not be a good strategy for the long-run anyway.

Consider there is a major difference in purpose between a State and private educational institution. Prestige is hardly relevant in my view--the purpose is to efficiently allocate state taxpayer resources for the public good of state citizens at UT, as it should be for UC. Harvard and prestige are two tangential things.

UT Austin is one of the most prestigious public universities in the nation, the Texas equivalent to UC Berkeley. Texas just strictly limits how many from out of state can come (also, in state tuition is only $5000/semester, so it heavily incentives even the wealthy / those who can achieve a Harvard or, say, Pomona College admission to attend). Full disclosure: I did not attend UT Austin.

Also. as someone who grew up in Texas and now lives in California, I can tell you the UT System has more than its fair share of gaming attempts -- as such, you're ineligible for the automatic-in based on rankings if you switch schools in the last 2 years (i.e. you need to get in holistically), and those who attend private high schools also need to get in holistically (because top private schools got caught saying more than 7% of their students were in the top 7% and have non-state-standardized ranking criteria). Granted, being automatically admitted to one of the UT schools via rankings often does _not_ mean admission to UT Austin, but rather a satellite campus.

It's a decently progressive and fair system.

https://news.utexas.edu/2020/06/18/new-ranking-puts-ut-austi...

> Imagine how many parent would just stick their kid into the worst school for 1-2 years to get that.

Native Texan here, not the first time I've heard this strategy.

For in state students, you really can't beat UT's cost to value ratio..people do try hard to get in.

What's wrong with that? That'll encourage education-focused parents to move to more diverse neighborhoods. Right now parents are trying to cram into the 3-4 best school districts in any given area.

> Imagine how many parent would just stick their kid into the worst school for 1-2 years to get that.

This actually happened when UT started applying the rule. Parents moved their kids to less competitive schools.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth my U.S. state tried to stem the brain drain to out-of-state universities. They offered big money scholarships to anybody who graduated in their school's top ten. The higher the rank, the more money.

This was pre-internet, but people still tracked rankings across the state. One kid would transfer schools to bump their rank two spots. That would cascade to a flurry of transfers. All the top students knew where their GPA would place them in every other high school in the state and everybody was watching for movement. Eventually, they capped the program to be based on your rank midway through senior year to prevent 100s of transfers in the last month of the school year before graduation. Which of course, just moved the activity to the last month in the semester before the last semester before graduation. But then you had to maintain your GPA in the new school for a whole semester, so it involved more risk.

Now that I've told this whole story, let me say that none of it is true. Or, at least, I don't really know how much of it is true. I do know that it was the buzz among students when I was in school. I never entered that world very deeply. I'm pretty sure that it did happen a bit. Probably not as much as it was talked about.

I'm from Texas, went to UT when it had the 10% rule. It was a problem for kids who went to competitive/affluent schools that were so competitive that one or two Bs would put you out of the running. So you would get some lopsided scenarios where some kids would get into MIT but also be rejected from Texas because the standards were that high. Meanwhile the valedictorian of a bad school with a 900 SAT score would get in. Some kids would move to less competitive high schools to have a chance at going to UT.

California does that too:

https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...

Yep. And the data that shows it at play is here: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions...

California has an even better program. If you go to a California community college and have a 2.7 GPA you are guaranteed admission to a CA State University.

The problem arises when most of them want to attend UT-Austin rather than UT-El Paso or UT-Permian Basin or UT-Rio Grande. And as noted by others the threshold had to be revised downwards from 10%. I personally believe you can receive an excellent education from most institutions but there's prestige associated with UT-Austin that isn't with the satellite campuses.

This is a terrible policy. Anyone who has kids in high school and sees the lengths people go to game their grades will tell you this.

For many people, finishing in the top of your class in highschool is challenging if you are capable but have had a relaitively difficult home life -- it requires broad spectrum high performance across years. Getting a good score on a single test is more achievable for some.

Now imagine the situation for a student with a poor family who finds themselves in a school mostly with students from wealthy families? The "top-%" metric would doubly harm them.

On the plus side, at least the top-% metric provides an incentive for students to attend 'worse' schools, which to the extent that students are benefited by mixing with more capable students, could help everyone.

> If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities.

Aren't most schools small enough that this incentivizes sabotaging classmates to boost your relative rank?

Yes, this is a side effect of stack ranking and it exists even when the class sizes are large.

It also encourages zero-sum thinking generally.

That would be a ton of work (liable to expose the plot) unless you're right at the threshold and you know who's immediately in front of you.

In my experience the more common narrative was gaming the system to keep your GPA high. AP/DC/Advanced classes are typically shifted a GPA point up.

For example, you may not take an elective (Photography) because getting the top grade in the class would still drop your overall GPA. Despite Spanish being available in middle school, our valedictorian waited until high school because it would count a point higher -- by the time you realize how to play the game, it might be too late.

The other example cited was kids attending a very competitive school up until their senior year and then moving to a less competitive school and graduating a higher rank.

My favorite example of this is a CISCO/networking class offered at my old high school.

It counted as 2 classes when it came to calculating your GPA...and accordingly was supposed to take up 2 "slots" on your schedule. However it didn't and instead the 2nd slot was always after school, which nobody went to anyways. So it allowed you to fit N+1 AP classes into what would normally be a N class schedule and gave a major advantage when calculating class rank.

As a result you got some very interesting people taking this class who you would never expect, simply to boost their class rank. It saddens me a little now to realize that these kids schedules were planned out from the beginning from fall freshman year to optimize their GPA...but I went to a very competitive school so in retrospect it makes sense.

Bonus, to your point they offered ap options for most arts and electives! You could take AP photography or "honors" art/music which counted as an AP for weighted gpa calculations :P

In our school district they have multiple tiers: normal classes, honor classes, AP classes, college classes. It amuses me that AP classes are weighted higher than college classes. That is, it would just amuse me if it didn't affect my children.

So students can take a college class, get an A, and receive college credit. Or they can take an AP class, get an A, then take an exam that might determine whether they get college credit. Why take an AP English class when you could just take College Freshman English? Because the AP class will be better for your GPA.

I get to see first hand when advisers are sticking a kid in an AP Government class that is completely pointless instead of the Honors Biology class for GPA reasons. Never mind that the kid wants to be a botonist or marine biologist or anesthesiologist. We don't have room for that. We have to maximize their GPA. Stick them in AP English instead of normal Stats even if they could be in Stats and normal English and are more interested in Stats.

If your kid didn't take the Honors Ag class as a freshman, they're already mathematically eliminated. They will never recover the additional 0.025 point GPA advantage. There are only 64 academic slots available in a four year schedule. There are are 32 highest weighted classes, 16 mid-weights, and 24 low-weights. Only four of those can be taken as a freshman. If you miss just one opportunity, you're out.

So you have a 4.0/4.0 GPA, 4.625/4.75 weighted GPA, and a class ranking of 53.

And hopefully a support group that helped you understand and choose what is most important in life.

Sounds like my school district. Freshman were technically banned from taking AP classes (but of course, some parents spoke to the school and thus they were allowed in). And naturally the valedictorian 3 years later was one of the 4 that was able to get into an AP class freshman year.

I always felt quite vindicated when I got my class rank (8/432) even though I had a "normal" schedule. 0, 3, 6, 7 APs. I even took a free period and only had 6 classes junior year as opposed to the normal 7!

I had a similar situation at my school where I was valedictorian because there are 2 Latin language APs vs. only 1 for most of the other foreign languages.

Try living in a rural area where some kid took all 5 AP classes offered, and all 8 Honors classes. They've been #1 throughout high school. Then somebody moves in from a school that offered more than 5 AP classes. Suddenly the kid who did everything possible didn't do enough.

Or the student who was tied for #1 when the school decided they wouldn't accept ties. So they did pole vault scoring and reached back to kindergarten to see who got the first B.

In academics as in sports and all other pursuits, sometimes you just have to be satisfied with excellence regardless of trophies.

I think it would incentivize making sure your lower ranked peers stay in school to pad out the ranking more than sabotage. IDK how you would even sabotage effectively, but I can think of a lot of ways to help your peers stay in school.

As mentioned below, this is also how the UCs are doing admissions. You can look at the data for yourself here: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions... You'll find out that there's a ~5-10% acceptance rate per high school.

I've heard of some families gaming this system by having their students attend less competitive high schools in order to improve their rank.

The problem I see with that is that, if you are rich enough to game the system that way, you are probably rich enough to be gaming the system in order to get your kids into something other than a state school.

Unless we involve football, for example. Sports break the model.

I'm skeptical of how egalitarian the top 6% (for UT Austin) policy actually is. All this does is guarantee you admission to the university, not a specific major. So, while you can gain admission easily to a liberal arts major, you aren't guaranteed admission to a STEM major and will still have to be a competitive applicant to gain admission into a STEM major.

If the goal is to somehow boost black or hispanic admissions, it won't work at many schools due to other groups dominating the top 10%.

Doesn't the UC have the same policy? It is the top 9%, but still- https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...

The top 10 percent policy is a merit based system and the most recent flavor of "progressivism" says that merit based systems are racist and should be abolished. Lottery and quota based admissions is what considered progressive today.

This reads like a straw man argument.

Lottery systems with an initial cutoff make sense if you have a large surplus of applicants who surpass your lower quality threshold. Rather than make asinine minuscule decisions over who exactly the top 1,526 out of 10,000 are, cull the 7,234 that don’t make the cut and randomly select from the survivors.

I'd rather prefer my surgeon, should I ever need one, be one of those "asinine miniscule" top 1526 applicants selected based on pure merit.

The entire point is that you set the initial cutoff such that the differences in “pure merit” between your threshold and the lowest candidate if you went anal-retentive on ranking do not translate into meaningfully different outcomes.

Top 6% now FWIW

Yeah I wanted to point this out. In Texas it is the top 10% for every public university except the University of Texas at Austin which varies the percentage from year to year depending on the expected number of applicants. 6% is the lowest I have seen it. I believe it was 8% the year I was accepted.

> If anybody from Texas has a different perspective on UT admission policy (I am sure it has its pathological edge cases) then I would be curious to hear.

Texan here. I'll share my story, at risk of coming across as big headed: I feel the 7% percent policy unfairly shut me out of a "better" school. I can't tell if it negatively or positively impacted my career. It either allowed me to focus more on becoming a better programmer (going to an easier school); or it made me lag in my career 1-2 years (not being able to go from a top school directly into FAANG/a SV startup).

For my first 1-2 years of HS, I had a somewhat challenging personal life and didn't take any advanced courses. It wasn't until the 3rd year I stepped up in every way possible, taking all AP courses, and getting 4-5s in 8 AP tests by graduation. I don't recall what my GPA was, but thanks to my false start it didn't meet the threshold, and I attribute being not accepted to UT to the fewer spots available due to the 7% rule.

( an aside, I'm still baffled at how this happened. By all accounts I was overqualified: won a regional UIL CS championship, had multiple gaming projects, knew multiple programming languages. There's a larger critique here about how the hell colleges determine admissions. I assume the quantitative, filterable metrics like GPA precluded anyone of importance from reading any of my qualitative attributes )

GPA is something you can game, and people in my school did. For example, the two highest level math courses you can take in HS is Calculus AB and Calculus BC–the former covers half a year of college-level math, and the latter covers a full year, both over the course of senior year. I chose BC due to an interest in math. Many others chose AB simply because they would both be weighted the same in GPA calculations, and clearly AB would be easier. The result is that the BC class had a dozen students and AB had 30. By informal surveying, the highest ranking students in the graduating class took AB, not BC. This is just one example: there are other ways a students can reduce how much they learn in favor of a higher GPA. I absolutely do not regret taking BC, it was the best part of my HS education. It's a shame it possibly harmed my college admissions.

In the end, I was rejected from my first choice (UT Austin), was accepted to University of Houston on a half-free ride, but was very disillusioned with the quality of their CS program during my entire tenure. I landed in a subpar job right out of college, and after a year at a software consulting firm for the oil industry I managed to get myself to Silicon Valley (after throwing a hail mary and moving to Seattle without a job–and then using a connection to a friend I met in Calculus BC to get a referral at a startup), where my career really started. In hindsight it was just a year or two, and perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but I think the admissions process at UT really failed to identify me as a worthy entrant, and I think the 7% rule exacerbated this. I used to be salty about this (in college / in my subpar job), but now I don't give it any thought.

I count myself lucky because, like many in this field, I was motivated to develop my programming skills outside school. Perhaps going to a weaker CS college allowed me to focus more on skills more relevant to software engineering (I even had time to consult in college).

________

btw, UT Austin has a unique provision in the Texas law that reduces the 10% requirement to slightly less, hence my usage of 7%. See https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/

If egalitarian means teachers pick the winners and test performance is irrelevant.

Am I wrong in thinking that the top third are guaranteed admission to a CSU?

Irony is when the nuances of reality conflict with facile binary stereotypes

So basically stack ranking?

The reason being that US conservatism is often a more egalitarian branch of liberalism. In states like California and New York, they're animated by a more hierarchical and traditional type of (small-r) republican politics in which they cultivate client groups which they support through direct cash payments and favored policies.

In California the worthies are untitled hereditary aristocrats who secure political power by accumulating and supporting vast client populations. These clients vote for the aristocratic party and provide it with a patina of moral justification. It is an intensely traditional political form that can be found in other societies going back thousands of years. These aristocrats in turn ensure that big corporate interests get favored tax treatment (often effectively zero tax) while preventing small business competition through hyper regulation. BigCo gets subsidized and pays zero tax, LilCo gets hit with endless demands for paperwork and fines. You can find similar social forms in many societies throughout history: it's not special or unique.

"As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California."

While I (as a graduate of UT Austin) agree with most of your comment, I would like to know why you believe Texas' tax policies are progressive?

(Texas does not have an income tax, but does have (very high) property taxes. A resident of Texas with a large income but a small real-estate footprint pays relatively few taxes (which is why many wealthy individuals choose Texas as their state of residence) while an average homeowner, whose house is the largest asset, pays a greater relative tax rate.)

>> As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California.

There isn't much that is progressive about property taxes. They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates).

Texas specifically has some of the highest property taxes in the nation, and that's in part because we have no income tax. Income taxes, though, are actually progressive.

Note that Texas's high property tax rates is one of the significant contributors to gentrification.

> Income taxes, though, are actually progressive.

For some states it is a flat rate, I know of one.

But to me is the largest issue is funding for public schools and quality. At one time you would leave high-school with an education that was similar to what you get now in a 4 year college.

These days all we are doing is running a kind-of day care until the public school student leaves to work at McDonalds in the afternoon once the School Day ends.

I also remember some Profs saying in many cases, the first year of collage is a re-education of what the student should already know.

> They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates)

Absolutely not. The burden of property taxes falls largely on the capitalized asset-value of real estate, so a typical middle-class household can offset much of that burden by paying for a smaller mortgage in the first place. And poor renters largely benefit by not having to pay local income or sales taxes, since the burden of the tax will fall on their landlords. Property taxes are in fact quite progressive.

Property taxes are fundamentally regressive because if two individuals in the same tax jurisdiction live in properties with the same values, they pay the same amount of property tax, regardless of their incomes. That's the literal distinction between progressive and regressive taxation. The fact that the middle class household can offset the burden by getting a smaller place is quite irrelevant.

In addition, it's erroneous to think that property taxes are shouldered by landlords. They are, in fact, passed on to renters.

>And poor renters largely benefit by not having to pay local income or sales taxes, since the burden of the tax will fall on their landlords.

This is not how the rental business works. Property tax is simply a cost passed on to the renter.

Well, there are problems with that right out of the gate.

* Consider a family where the highschool student has to work to help out with rent and food bills, so they miss school or don't have time to work on assignments. Compare this to a wealthier family where the student has all the free time in the world.

* Or consider a district that skews wealthier and tutors push the haves up into the 10%, and push the have nots below. Plenty of the have nots would have hit the 10% threshold if only they had money.

* Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities.

These are just a few I've read about off the top of my head. The idea of standardized testing is fair, but only if it is aware of inequities in the system. This has been a debate since the 70's. In fact, the popular TV show "Diff'rent Strokes" did an episode about systemic racism in standardized testing the early 1980's.

I'm not arguing if Cali has it right or wrong, but there are problems with using just testing.

IMHO you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good by pointing out situations the 10% (now 6% apparently) rule doesn't cover.

Second, you are not offering an alternative solution that would be preferable.

Also, you are not recognizing that fixing in the top 6% is not a requirement for admission so it is possible for the situations you list to be addressed.

Finally you end with an argument against standardized testing which has nothing to do with the comment you are replying to. In fact the 6% policy allows a student to get into the university without ever taking a standardized test.

You're describing certain individuals who might suffer from such an arrangement, but what's the opportunity cost here? If you will make a different arrangement, different people will suffer from it. I'm not convinced that there's a scenario where nobody at all gets hurt so I don't believe that listing a few examples of some people getting the short end of the stick in itself warrants outright rejecting this approach.

> Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities

For example these people by your own definition will be rare. They might also be disadvantaged in other ways should they live elsewhere, which means that that the same person in two different places would simply face a different set of disadvantages which might even themselves out. Likewise "a district that skews wealthier" should naturally have fewer "have-nots" than other districts so "have-nots" themselves would not be disadvantaged on average.

What your scenarios describe are students who are not ready / prepared to do as well as their peers in college.

You cannot resolve prior inequities by forcing students into college- they drop out at higher rates, with higher (unforgivable!) debts, and word of mouth of their experiences will continue to deter others from trying.

I personally witnessed this happen to friends I had made my freshman year at school.

The ACT in particular has a really low bar for anyone who does reasonably well in school- most state schools around here had a minimum score that certainly required no preparation to achieve.

Yep. Packing unprepared students in based on non-merit items (including legacy) and disadvantaging prepared students is absolutely ridiculous. It's bad enough that the standards are low for student athletes because it's all about talent-recruitment business and NCAA $$$, where educational attainment is tertiary.

Some schools are actually quite good at ensuring student athletes need to actually be students in addition to athletes. The necessary discipline to simultaneously train in rigorous athletics and scholarship can make for a compelling case.

Alas, my alma mater did not, and it was pretty obvious to everyone that they were athletes first, and kept up appearances about schooling. I am reasonably confident that several degree programs that the school offered would not have existed if the football and basketball programs didn't exist.

Would they have been able to let in more students who would have bean more focused on schooling? Honestly, I don't know, but I strongly suspect there are lower hanging fruit to pick first.

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