Guidance counselors quite often either have no idea or don’t care what’s actually necessary. Often again, they are overworked and don’t have enough time to advise students. There’s a gigantic difference between a student who was misadvised and so lacking a fine arts credit or a foreign language credit, or told by a counselor not to bother with SAT IIs, and a student who simply lacks the intellectual capacity/work ethic to attend university.

There are no such kids. Seriously. Any kid who has genuine ability and doesn’t need handholding is able to get at least a 550 on each section of the SAT and will be capable of getting at minimum 500 on the SAT Lit and Math 2c Subject tests–even if they sat in school every year and did nothing.

If they can’t make those scores, then they would need extensive handholding.

But like I said–the UCs can fill their quotas of low income underperforming kids who aren’t capable of doing college work from their existing standards. This is all about the pretense that they are expanding their efforts.

I see this as a win-win situation.

Give “highly-marginal” students a chance, at a very low cost to society.

It’s all crap. If they ever seriously started accepting kids with an average of 400 SATs and no subject tests over kids with 650 average SATs and subjects, one of two things would occur: a lawsuit or a complete removal of taxpayer support for UCs.

They want to make themselves feel better by having a policy that allows them to pretend to accept more incompetents than they already are. There are tons of incompetent URMs with the requisite a-g classes, top 4%, and SAT subject tests in the low 300s–far more than the UCs could ever accomodate. It’s all window dressing.

That said, I’m glad my kid will be graduating before 2012, just in case they do manage to destroy the system.

Perhaps this is the kind of lack of required courses that the UC schools are going to be willing to consider, rather than a lack of actual academic core.

Maybe the drop in percentage of automatic acceptances is related to a desire to take more out of state kids who were ineligible for consideration but who may inflate both the average test scores and the minority enrollment numbers?

That doesn’t seem all that dysfunctional to me.

I mean, it does seem completely and unacceptably dysfunctional compared to any rational standard of how high schools ought to work. But it doesn’t seem unusually dysfunctional compared to what I would expect schools are actually doing. My reference point here is the high school I went to — a Blue Ribbon school, arguably the best high school in my state (not CA), with a fair number of high-achieving students. We had 4 guidance counselors for 1300 students, so they pretty much didn’t talk to you, period. (I talked to mine before my senior year only because I made an effort to do so.) 3 of them were well known to be useless if you wanted to go to college out-of-state; they just didn’t know anything about the options, and if you were going to college out-of-state obviously you were so smart you could figure it out on your own, plus which you intimidated them. (My guidance counselor was the other one. She *wasn’t*, technically, but I assigned her to myself when going out of my way to talk to her. And even she couldn’t give me a whole lot of help; I did figure it out on my own, but the list of things I didn’t know flabbergasts me now. (There are books that describe hundreds of colleges? You can study for standardized tests? And, of course, this was before everyone had a web page, so no help there.))

There were astonishing guidance resources in the small prep school where I taught, and I’m sure the affluent public schools in the area have such things too, but I don’t expect much out of guidance departments outside of wealthy areas. Unfortunately.