The last post looked at how geographic biases affect who applies to and gets accepted by UCs. This post is going to going to drill in to how the admissions policy has evolved at one specific campus, UC San Diego, which has been in the news because 8.5% of enrolled freshmen needed remedial math classes.
In 2024, Lynbrook High in San Jose was the highest-achieving non-selective high school in the state. 375 seniors (86% of the total) were proficient in both Math and English but only 37 were admitted to UC San Diego. On the other hand, Crawford High, in San Diego, had 38 students admitted even though only 23 (8.6% of the 266 seniors) were proficient in both Math and English. There are literally hundreds of students from Lynbrook who were rejected by UC San Diego despite being stronger than most of those accepted from Crawford.
In the popular imagination, we expect students from high achieving schools to be more successful in college admissions. This is no longer true, at least at UC San Diego. The relationship between the academic strength of the students at a school, as measured by the percentage who are proficient in both English and Math, and the chance that those students get admitted to UCSD is extremely low.
As the chart shows, UCSD seems to favor some schools at the expense of others with similar achievement levels. The dot in the top right is CAMS (the California Academy of Maths and Sciences). It’s a selective school where over 90% of seniors met or exceeded the standards in both English and Math and nearly 40% of seniors were admitted to UC San Diego. But Gretchen Whitney and Oxford Academy are also selective schools where over 90% of students were proficient in both English and Math and UCSD admitted fewer than 20% of them. Meanwhile, students from Berkeley High have much greater success than students at most other Bay Area schools despite not being better than them in any measurable way.
Preuss, Gompers, and Crawford are all in the San Diego area (Preuss is on the UCSD campus itself) and all had far more seniors admitted than would be expected based on their academic proficiency. One reason is that far more of their students actually applied than would be expected. You can’t win a lottery unless you buy a ticket and the kids at these schools bought more tickets to the UCSD admissions lottery.
Competing With Your Classmates
Naturally, schools with lots of strong students produce lots of college applicants. If students were being evaluated primarily on the basis of their individual accomplishments or essays, an applicant’s chances of admission would not be affected by the strength of his or her classmates. Unfortunately, if you are at a school where lots of your classmates are applying to UCSD, your chances of admission are greatly hurt.
Over the three years from 2022 to 2024, UCSD admitted about 26% of all public school applicants. That hides a huge variation. Schools that produce fewer than 25 applicants per year have an average admission rate over 40%. At the 63 schools that produce more than 200 applicants per year, the admission rate was only 18%. Students from those schools are effectively competing with their classmates for a limited number of spots. UCSD just does not want more of them, however good they may be. It may or may not be a coincidence that Asian students are the largest group of applicants at 55 of the 63 schools that produce more than 200 applicants annually.
Incidentally, San Francisco public schools had a combined admission rate of just under 20%, well below the state average. Mission had the highest rate (26.5%) and Balboa the lowest (15.4%). It may or may not be a coincidence that 90% (the most of any SF school) of the applicants from Balboa were Asian whereas only 25% (the fewest of any SF school) of the applicants from Mission were Asian.
Admissions Standards for Private Schools
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