Don’t think this is true anymore? CA got rid of such things to my knowledge. and replaced it with something equally obnoxious. The UC now only admits the top 3% from each highschool. So if you come from a highschool that is very competitive (like my son’s where 35 kids graduating with straight A’s isn’t uncommon and they EARNED them) - a large number of highly qualified kids won’t be able to attend because the school does such a good job of turning out large numbers of such kids.
The school is 40% Asian, 40% Indian, 20% other. That is the makeup of our neighborhood - and the school reflects this. These communities highly value education and they push their kids HARD to succeed in school. This is the MAIN reason the school does so well!
You don’t have the UC admission policy correct.
Local option — the class rank guarantee — means only a seat in the UC SYSTEM, and, effectively, only gets one a seat in the least-competitve UC campuses (Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara Riverside and Merced). Virtually no local option students are admitted at Berkeley or UCLA, and few at the middle tier (Davis, San Diego and Irvine).
The top UCs still practice affirmative action, of course, but in a watered-down “obstacles overcome” system. While still biased against whites and Asians, this system at least avoids the worst excess of affirmative action: admitting as “underrepresented” the children of already successful and well-educated parents. (Stanford, of course, will still give more points to Colin Powell’s kids than to those of a melanin-challenged Wal-Mart checker.)