Are California public universities harder to get into now?

No.

The Sacramento Bee has a very misleading headline for an article, AM Alert: Are California public universities harder to get into now?, in which the reporter claims that UC and CSU are harder to get into than in the past, based on the following statistics:

In 2013, for example, 21 percent of California high school graduates applied to at least one UC campus, compared to 17 percent in 1996. But the admissions rate stayed relatively flat during that time, with 14 percent of graduates accepted into the system.The contrast is even more stark at CSU, a much larger and less selective system long seen as the university to educate the masses. While about 27 percent of California high school graduates applied to CSU in 2000, and 20 percent were admitted, that figure had risen to 46 percent of graduates in 2013, with only 32 percent accepted.

But those statistics are saying the UC is remaining equally hard to get into (14% of high-school graduates being admitted) and CSU has gotten easier (32% of high-school graduates being admitted, rather than 20%).

The pressure for more students to attend college and the enormously rising cost of private college has made more students apply to college, so that the admissions process seems more competitive, but the public universities are admitting a greater fraction of Californian high-school students than in the past, so objectively, it is easier for Californians to get into public university than in the past.

Of course, paying for it is harder now, as the state continues its trend of disinvesting in post-secondary education, demanding, for example, that UC take 10,000 more students but paying only half the marginal cost of teaching the students.  I have no idea how UCSC is going to cope with its share of this demand, as we are already standing-room-only in many classrooms (to handle the current demand the fire marshal already gave permission to over-enroll classes by 10%, on the theory that 10% of students wouldn’t show up for class anyway—we can’t just push that any further ).

Bruni opinion column on college admissions

In How to Survive the College Admissions Madness, Frank Bruni writes consoling advice for parents and high school seniors wrapped up in college admissions and set on going to elite colleges. Although the obsession with elite-or-nothing is more a New York thing than the American universal he treats it as, it is common enough to be worth an opinion column, and he does as nice job of providing a couple of stories that counter the obsession. (No data though—his column is strictly anecdotal, with 5 anecdotes.)

He recognizes that he is really talking to a small segment of the population:

I’m describing the psychology of a minority of American families; a majority are focused on making sure that their kids simply attend a decent college—any decent college—and on finding a way to help them pay for it. Tuition has skyrocketed, forcing many students to think not in terms of dream schools but in terms of those that won’t leave them saddled with debt.

But the core of the advice he gives is applicable to anyone going to college, not just to those seeking elite admission:

… the admissions game is too flawed to be given so much credit. For another, the nature of a student’s college experience—the work that he or she puts into it, the self-examination that’s undertaken, the resourcefulness that’s honed—matters more than the name of the institution attended. In fact students at institutions with less hallowed names sometimes demand more of those places and of themselves. Freed from a focus on the packaging of their education, they get to the meat of it.

In any case, there’s only so much living and learning that take place inside a lecture hall, a science lab or a dormitory. Education happens across a spectrum of settings and in infinite ways, and college has no monopoly on the ingredients for professional achievement or a life well lived.

The elites have some resources to offer that colleges with lesser financial endowments find difficult to match, but any good enough college can provide opportunities to those who look for them.  For some students, being one of the best at a slightly “lesser” institution may result in more opportunities, more faculty attention, and more learning than being just above average in an elite school.  (And, vice versa, of course—moving from being the best in high school to run-of-the-mill at an elite college can also be an important wake-up call.)

Currently, the American college landscape is very broad, offering a lot of different choices with different prices and different strengths.  Unfortunately, many of our state legislatures and governors have decided that only one model should be allowed—the fully private, job-training institution—and are doing everything they can to kill off the public colleges and universities that have been the backbone of US post-secondary education since the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890.

The colleges established by the land grant acts were intended as practical places, not primarily social polish for the rich (as most private colleges were then, and most of the elites are now).  The purpose of these public colleges was

without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.[7 U.S.C. § 304, as quoted in Wikipedia]

Although agriculture is no longer as large an employer as it was in the 19th century, research in agriculture at the land-grant universities is still driving a major part of the US economy, and engineering (quaintly referred to as “the mechanic arts”) is still a major employer and a primary route for upward social mobility in the US.  The land-grant colleges were explicitly not intended as bastions for the rich to defend their privilege (as our legislators want to make them, by raising tuition to stratospheric levels), but for “liberal and practical education of the industrial classes”—colleges for working-class people.

I think that it would benefit the US for legislatures to once again invest in the “education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life” and for parents and students to look seriously at the state-supported colleges, before the madness of privatization wipes them out.

(Disclaimer: I teach at one campus of the University of California, and my son attends another—neither of them land-grant colleges, but both imperiled by the austerity politics of the California legislature, who see their legacy in building prisons and making sure the rich don’t pay taxes, not in providing education for the working class.)

Question about high school workload for home schooling

On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 12:57 AM, a parent  wrote to a homeschooling e-mail list (I forget which one now):

I want to prepare my kids for college, but I also value them spending an hour drawing, or trying to get a fire by rubbing cottonwood sticks together, or making a ridiculous video for fun. Can’t we have it both ways? I’ve already written off UC for freshman year, but I don’t necessarily want community college to be the only option they have. I want his 16th year to be just as fun as his 6th, filled with math and writing, yes, but also with whatever his passions are. That seems like an exciting time to get real world experience, like interning at an environmental organization, helping with water quality research, becoming a park docent, going on amazing backpacking trips … as opposed to sitting studying biology with a textbook, for example. 

Am I in dreamland? Are my priorities right here? He is in 8th grade, so according to these presenters, 9th grade is around the corner and we should be figuring out this fast.

Thoughts???

I’m coming from a different place than many home schoolers, as we did public and private schools through 9th grade, only switching to home school for 10th, 11th, and 12th grades.  I understand that the reverse path (starting out in home school and switching to public or private for high school) is more common.

Having just sent my son off to college this fall (at UCSB in the College of Creative Studies) after three years of home schooling (with the aid of an umbrella school in the local school district), I can answer a few things with some confidence:

• No matter what you do, entry into the super-selective schools is effectively a lottery.  Most people don’t win the lottery.  All the crazy-making prep changes the odds very little on the super-selective admissions lottery. Unless you donate millions to buy your way in to a private school, your odds are not much better than the ones you get from the Common Data Sets for each college.
• High school can involve a lot of fun activity—my son took at least 22 different theater classes in his 4 years of high school, about 8 of them in his senior year (mostly through WEST).  There were at least 15 different performances in his last year (see his theater page) with four different shows four weekends running one month. He also started a tech start-up with other home-schooled teens (something that he is continuing in college—they’re expecting their 4th prototype back from China this week and hope to do first sales through Kickstarter in December).  He also was involved in a couple of the MATE underwater ROV competitions, did science fair (up to state level) every year except his senior year, kept up a full load of UC a–g courses, and still had time for his main recreations (reading and computer programming).
• Some springs got a bit stressful, with the umbrella-school trip to Oregon Shakespeare Festival, State Science Fair, WEST performances, MATE robotics, and AP exams all piling up in the same few weeks.  Time management and priority setting required parental support (though my wife and I sometimes disagreed about how much parental support was needed).  Extra parental support was needed some years (like for flying from CA state science fair to Ashland, Oregon, when two events overlapped by a day, or finding a way to get AP exams offered in the make-up time slots, when AP exams conflicted with the Ashland trip, or even just finding a way to take AP exams for AP courses not offered in our county, like the AP Physics C exams).
• Taking courses at Cabrillo College and at UCSC can be very good experience (my son had 2 at each: Spanish at Cabrillo and math at UCSC).  Cabrillo courses are much cheaper, but the hassle of biking 45 minutes each way for classes (or taking even longer on the bus) made scheduling them harder.  The practice of getting himself to classes on an irregular schedule was good prep for college, where he has a different schedule every day (from Wednesdays with classes from 8am to after 8pm to Fridays with one class at 1–1:50). Getting into lab classes at Cabrillo turned out to be very difficult, so we ended up doing all science at home (calculus-based physics for 2 years, then on-line AP chemistry for one year).

For students thinking of University of California (still a very good choice, even if the state legislators and state governor don’t put much money into UC any more), I’d recommend trying to make sure that the a–g courses are covered in spirit, even if the courses are at home or through other non-UC-approved sources.  It is not a perfect curriculum, but it represents a good compromise between many different views of what a high school education should include.​

The time-management skills my son learned from doing too many of the things he loved should help him get through college, where he is likely to set up the same sorts of stresses for himself—he took a fairly light load first quarter (4 courses: 2 math, 2 computer science), but is planning a heavier load for winter (6 courses: 2 math,  3 computer science, 1 theater, I think).  Luckily 2 or 3 of the courses are graded on a rather strange system, where the teachers decide at the end of the course how many units were earned, so if he slacks a bit on those courses his grades won’t suffer—he’ll just earn fewer units.

Of the generic advice from the Khan Academy about what all high school students should be doing:

• Take college-prep courses. Yes, definitely.  The a–g courses are a good guide.
• ​Focus on your grades. Not really—we kept him focused on learning, not on grades. Most of his courses were ungraded, though we had very high standards for what we expected him to do.  Those courses from outside providers that were graded got high grades, but that was a natural consequence of focusing on the learning and doing all the work to high standards, not from paying any particular attention to grades.
• Explore and commit to extracurricular and leadership activities. We considered his theater work and his start-up company as curricular activities, but someone with a more conventional view of education would have considered them extracurricular. I don’t know whether his odds at super-selective schools would have been different if we had spun the work as extra-curricular rather than curricular.​
• Find summer volunteer opportunities/jobs/internships. Nope, he spent his summers doing more theater, more on the start-up company, and relaxing. He worked very hard at the theater and on the start-up, but it wasn’t a “job” where he was reporting to a boss—it was more like professional work, where he had to manage his own time, sometimes with externally imposed deadlines.
• Begin an ongoing dialogue with your parents about how to pay for college. Start saving for college. High school is rather late to be thinking about paying for college.  We saved 10% of my salary each year in a 529 plan from the day he was born. As it turns out, because he ended up at a state school, we saved more than we needed to, so unless some of it gets used for graduate school expenses, we are likely to end up paying a tax penalty in 4 years for the previously untaxed earnings in the 529 plan.
• Search and apply for non-traditional scholarships (those available before you are a senior in high school). Other than the National Merit Scholarship (he was a Finalist, but no one offered him money except desperate schools that had nothing of academic value to offer), he did not apply for any scholarships. Most of the scholarship applications are a lot of work (comparable to another college application), with very little expected return. He decided to put his time into his startup company instead, which has given him very valuable learning and experience, even if it never breaks even. Because he ended up at a public university, and we had been saving enough to be able to pay for his going to a private school, he did not need a scholarship to go to college. So the investment of his time in learning how to design electronics widgets and get them manufactured was probably a wise one—it will pay off later much more than a $1000 scholarship would.

Where PhDs get their Bachelors’ degrees

Last year I wrote about a study that looked at where CS PhD students got their bachelors’ degrees. Now Reed College has extended that question to other fields as well: Doctoral Degree Productivity.  Their point was to show how high Reed ranked on the standard they chose: the number of students who went on to get PhDs divided by the number of students getting bachelor’s degrees.  I quote the tables and accompanying text below, but I take no credit or blame for the data—this is directly from Reed’s site:

Undergraduate Origins of Doctoral Degrees

Percentage ranking of doctorates, by academic field, conferred upon graduates of listed institutions.

Rank	All Disciplines	Science and Math	Social Sciences	Humanities and Arts
1	Calif. Inst. of Tech.	Calif. Inst. of Tech.	Swarthmore	New England Conserv. of Music
2	Harvey Mudd	Harvey Mudd	Grinnell	Curtis Institute of Music
3	Swarthmore	Reed	Reed	Juilliard
4	Reed	MIT	Bryn Mawr	Cleveland Inst. of Music
5	Carleton	NM Institute Mining & Tech.	Spelman	St. John’s College
6	MIT	Carleton	Oberlin	Reed
7	Grinnell	Wabash	Wesleyan	Hellenic College-Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Sch. of Theology
8	Princeton	Rice	St. Joseph Seminary	Swarthmore
9	Harvard	Univ. of Chicago	Harvard	Oberlin
10	Oberlin	Grinnell	Pomona	Amherst

Percentage Ranking by Specific Fields of Study

Rank	Life Sciences	Physical Sciences	Psychology	Other Social Sciences*	Humanities
1	Calif. Inst. of Tech.	Calif. Inst. of Tech.	Univ. Puerto Rico – Aguadilla	Swarthmore	St. John’s, MD
2	Reed	Harvey Mudd	Wellesley	Reed	Reed
3	Swarthmore	Reed	Vassar	Harvard	Amherst
4	Carleton	MIT	Hendrix	Grinnell	Swarthmore
5	Grinnell	NM Institute Mining/Tech.	Pontifical Coll. Josephinum	Univ. of Chicago	Carleton
6	Harvey Mudd	Carleton	Grinnell	Bryn Mawr	Yale
7	Univ. of Chicago	Wabash	Swarthmore	Thomas More College of Lib. Arts	Thomas More College of Lib. Arts
8	Haverford	Rice	Barnard	Oberlin	Bryn Mawr
9	MIT	Univ. of Chicago	St. Joseph Seminary Coll.	Bard College at Simon’s Rock	St. John’s, NM
10	Earlham	Grinnell	Pomona	Wesleyan	Wesleyan
11	Harvard	Haverford	Reed	Amherst	Princeton
12	Cornell Univ.	Swarthmore	Wesleyan	Pomona	Bard College at Simon’s Rock

*Does not include psychology, education, or communications and librarianship.

Source: National Science Foundation and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. The listing shows the top institutions in the nation ranked by estimated percentage of graduates who went on to earn a doctoral degree in selected disciplines between 2001-2010.

All the schools listed are private schools except Univ. Puerto Rico—Aguadilla and NM Institute Mining/Tech., but seeing dominance by expensive private schools is not very surprising—grad school is expensive, and students who can afford expensive private schools are more likely to be able to afford expensive grad school and are less likely to need to work immediately after getting their B.S. or B.A. A PhD is not a working-class degree—it is prepares one for only a small number of jobs, mainly in academia or national labs, so for many it is just an elite status symbol.  What is more surprising is how poorly the Ivy League schools do on this list—perhaps those who get their elite status conferred by their bachelor’s institution see no need to continue on to get higher degrees.

Reed does not report numbers directly comparable with the ones in the Computing Research Association report, which reports only on computer science PhDs, where

Only one institution (MIT) had an annual average production of 15 or more undergraduates.   Three other institutions (Berkeley, CMU, and Cornell) had an average production of more than 10 but less than 15.  Together, these four baccalaureate institutions accounted for over 10% of all Ph.D.’s awarded to domestic students.   The next 10% of all Ph.D.’s in that period came from only eight other baccalaureate institutions (Harvard, Brigham Young, Stanford, UT Austin, UIUC, Princeton, University of Michigan, and UCLA). 

Note that five of the top producers of bachelor’s in CS who went on to get PhDs were public schools.  The CRA does not report PhD/BS numbers for individual institutions, probably because the numbers are too small to be meaningful for most colleges—you have to aggregate either across many colleges or across many fields before the denominators are big enough to avoid just reporting noise.  Reed did the aggregating across fields, while the CRA report aggregated across colleges, finding that research universities sent about 2.5% of their CS graduates on to get PhDs, 4-year colleges about 0.9% and masters-granting institutions about 0.6%.  They did have one finding that supports Reed’s analysis:

The top 25 liberal arts colleges (using the U.S. News and World Reports ranking) collectively enroll slightly less than 50,000 students per year in all majors and were the origins of 190 Ph.D. degrees between 2000 and 2010, collectively ranking ahead of any single research university.

Reed’s findings are also consistent with the NSF report that put the “Oberlin 50” colleges highest at over 5% of their science and engineering graduates going on to get PhDs, compared to about 3% for research universities.  The NSF report supports somewhat the analysis that socio-economic status is important in determining who goes on to grad school—private research universities match the Oberlin 50, but public research universities have only about half as large a fraction of their graduates go on to grad school.

I found out about this site from The Colleges Where PhD’s Get Their Start, which has a copy of the tables that probably came from an earlier, buggy  version of the site, because Lynn O’Shaughnessy wrote

I bet most families assume that attending a public flagship university or a nationally known private research university is the best ticket to graduate school. If you look at the following lists of the most successful PhD feeder schools for different majors, you will see a somewhat different story. Not a single public university makes any of the lists. The entire Cal State system, however, is considered the No. 1 producer of humanities PhD’s.

I could believe that the Cal State system had the largest raw numbers of students going on to get PhDs in humanities, as they are a huge 4-year college, enrolling about 438,000 students [http://www.calstate.edu/as/cyr/cyr13-14/table01.shtml], with about 76,000 bachelor’s degrees per year [http://www.calstate.edu/PA/2013Facts/degrees.shtml]. Are there any other colleges in the US graduating so many BS or BA students per year? But the fact remains that Cal State is not the flagship university of California, and the University of California probably has a much higher percentage of its alumni go on to get PhDs.

In fact, one of the big problems with these lists is the question of scale—most of the colleges that come up high on Reed’s lists (which means high on NSF’s lists) do so by having very small denominators—they don’t graduate many students, though a high percentage of those go on to get PhDs.  In terms of raw numbers of students who go on to get PhDs, the public research universities produce many more than the private research universities, and the liberal arts schools are just a drop in the bucket. Of the top 25 schools in terms of raw numbers who go on to get PhDs in science and engineering, 19 are public research universities and 6 are private research universities—of the top 50 only 17 are private research universities.

When you are looking for a cohort of similarly minded students, you get slightly higher enrichment at some very selective private schools, but there are actually more peers at a large public research university—if you can find them.

Changes to UC admissions requirements

The University of California has just made it much more difficult for students to satisfy the a–g requirements for admission:

Effective for students applying to UC in November 2014 for freshman admission in fall 2015, one full year of Geometry must be completed to satisfy the mathematics (“c”) subject area requirement. In other words, even if students complete three year-long math courses, they will not have fulfilled the mathematics subject requirement for UC admissions unless they have taken, and passed with a letter grade of C or better, one full year of Geometry.

…

As a result of the revised mathematics subject requirement, the omission of a Geometry course can no longer be validated by higher-level math courses, such as Algebra II/Trig, Trigonometry, Math Analysis, Pre-Calculus, or Calculus, taken at the high school or college level. Furthermore, the omission of a Geometry course cannot be validated with any examination score.

…

UC faculty have determined that an examination score (SAT/ACT, SAT Subject, AP, IB, etc.) cannot validate the omission of a Geometry course. This includes “challenge” exams taken to demonstrate proficiency in a subject for which a student receives only a Pass or Fail grade. If, however, based upon a challenge exam, a high school awards both grades and units for the completion of Geometry, UC would consider that course omission validated.

…

A student can use a non-transferrable college/university course in Geometry to satisfy the requirement. However, advanced courses in mathematics, even those that are UC-transferrable, will not validate the omission of a Geometry course.

[http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/files/geometry-requirement-factsheet.pdf]

My son was fortunate in that he got into UC before this requirement was created, and he had taken a high school geometry course (in 7th grade) that would count:

UC will continue to allow students to self-report on the UC admission application a Geometry course completed in grade 7 or 8 to meet the mathematics (“c”) subject requirement. UC will not require the submission of a middle school transcript, nor will high schools be required to list middle/junior high school math courses on high school transcripts, but doing so is recommended.

But students who are relying on on-line courses are in deep trouble (particularly since the UC-approved online courses are generally rather awful remedial courses):

 Non-UC-approved online courses may not be accepted through principal certification. Beginning with
the 2013-14 academic year, students may use only UC-approved online courses to satisfy the subject
requirement.