[Goreknowshowtocheat]

Good article. I was talking to a Chinese gentlemen whose children are in San Marino school system here in California(one of the best). His children are having difficulty keeping in the top 10% (70% of the kids are Asian) of the class which qualifies them for the UC system. He was bemoaning the fact he could have bought a nice house and alot cheaper one in a bad school system area and his children could have easily qualified for the UC system.

[Dog Gone]

I seriously considered doing this white flight thing myself. My son had excellent grades in an excellent high school, but he wasn't quite in the top 10% of his class, even with the honors classes.

I own a cheap second home in a rural part of Texas, and his grades would easily have put him in the top 10% of the high school there. In the end, we decided to just hope that he could work himself into the top 10% by the time he had to apply to college.

It didn't work, and he missed the cutoff. Fortunately, he prepared hard for the SAT test and he scored high enough to get into his first choice of university. But the competition is brutal.

The sad reality is that a high percentage of Top 10%ers from inner city schools drop out at the end the first semester of college. But they took the spot of better-prepared students who went to better schools.

[Rusty Shackelford]

Social engineering.... the 10% rule forces the even distribution of bright students evenly over the entire public system instead of the concentration of the best and the worst in seperate schools.

[only1percent]

Your Chinese friend doesn't have the UC rules quite right -- which the stats for San Marino High School would show (typically it gets 40-50% of its graduating seniors admitted into at least one UC campus.)

There are three, largely unrelated, rules for UC admission, which need to be considered.

1. The Master Plan says that the UC should accomodate the top 10% >statewide<, and the UC eligibility thresholds have a floating GPA-SAT I&II chart (i.e., high SAT makes up for lower GPA) which can help you reach the UC eligibility threshhold if you are in a school where "A"s are hard to come by. Even though the thresholds are designed to produce 10% of California high school grads eligible, they actually apply equally to out of state and foreign students who are applying.

2. You can obtain UC eligibility in the "local context" by being in the top 4% of your California high school class.

3. BUT, "UC eligibility" whether obtained under Master Plan criteria, or local context criteria, only means that >some< UC will admit you, not any particular UC. As a general rule, hitting only the UC eligibility threshold will get one into Riverside and Santa Cruz only. Each other campus gets to draw a higher cutoff line based upon the competitiveness of their pool. They are permitted to take any factor they wish into account OTHER than race, sex, national origin, although the campuses routinely defy that by using metrics of "hardship overcome" which only black or hispanic students can satisfy. They are also given a limited number of exemptions to the UC eligibility threshold, most of which are consumed by athletes or children of donors. (There is not a legacy preference, per se, any more.)