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Comment by Aperocky | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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