Latino and White Freshmen Are Nearly Equal at U. of California

Numerical questions:

From 11 to 30 (%) out-of-state:
Are Californian high-school grads suddenly dumber? Or outsiders
suddenly much smarter? Does this increase mean that 19% of
in-staters who would have been admitted two years ago were axed this
year? Could the UC system’s desperate need for $$ underlie these
numbers? Could financial considerations outweigh academic
qualifications?

Latinos: 26% admitted vs. 47% of
18-19′ers in California. OK. How many of that 47% are high school
grads? How many applied to UC system? What are the similar ratios
for white, black, Asian, female, male (the last two groups most
easily determined)?

What are the ratios of the
out-of-state groups as far as applicants, admits, and enrollees?

Five years ago, what were the
percentages? In 2011, what of the “53% not Latino” is White?

Mark Twain popularized“ There
are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” To that
trio he should have added a fourth: percentages.

Asians are erased of course as usual:  the smallest group among students of color, yet the largest plurality exceeding even the number of white students in the CA system where affirmative action may not be practiced.  It’s sad the way these Asian Americans have bought into white ways of knowing, and it’s disturbing that so many win and place in Western classical music competitions (unless they feel they are subverting the music of the oppressor). I wonder if Asians have lost their authenticity.   

Ahh, landrumkelly, I think there’s your answer: apparently the distinction between “Latino” and “white” is that “white” is short for “lily white” which presumably excludes Latinos.

Again, focusing on race when we should be focusing on people.  Why are humans this simplistic in our thinking? 

“Asian Americans are winning classical music competitions when they are the best. It’s pitiable if you think that makes them unauthentic.”     

pmckechn, I was being ironic. Of course they win because they’re the best. It gives the lie to Vladimir Horowitz’s incredibly stupid racist and homocentric comment (if indeed he said it): “There are three kinds of pianists: Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists.” And don’t get me started about Asians playing in a technically perfect but “robotic” way. So many Asians blow away the competition with their soulful interpretations.

Oh, wait–don’t only all blacks and a handful of whites have soul? (pmckechn: that’s irony in case you didn’t get it.)

The comments by Steven McDonald and Jochen Rick miss a key point. If students are REQUIRED by their instructor to post the material in a Wiki, then FERPA would apply. Conversely, if the students posted the material on their own, without being required to do so, then McDonald and Rick are right.

There’s no question that FERPA only applies to required activities; however, Georgia Tech cannot easily assess whether participation in a course wiki was required or voluntary. Hence, all content was removed. As an educator, a resource that can only be used for voluntary (i.e., secondary) activities is not nearly as useful as one that can be used for required activities. If the result of FERPA is that use of wikis is so crippled that it only allows for non-essential uses, then it is still a major blow to this technology. 

In the recent court arguments about the placing of gps units on cars to follow people, it was pretty clear that what someone does in public is not protected by privacy concerns. (How this applies to using the gps units to track people has yet to be decided.) That someone is a student is a public act. They somehow get to campus, they walk across campus in full view of anyone and everyone who is there, they were their school logo and so on. Mere attendance can hardly be construed as something one has a privacy right to protect. It’s absurd CYA thinking by spineless lawyers and university admins.

Absolutely.