Over 1,000 UC STEM professors sign open letter asking for reinstatement of SAT/ACT requirements

Well, we do know the difference between “here” and “hear”, which the academic elite apparently do not.

My ex is a black lesbian and management at Goldman Sachs.

She was one of only a few women at her level in her office/location.

She was one of only a few black people at her level in her office/location.

She was one of only a very few LGB people at her level in her office/location.

If it's so easy for black LGB women to get in, why were there so very few?

It was white, middle class men almost exclusively, who had been to a certain brand of prestigious university. As in, 90%+. Obviously it will have changed somewhat since then, but still.

Being

- black
- female
- gay

made it more difficult. Her words, not mine. She felt out of place constantly. Yet what she went on to achieve was remarkable. She did this by gaining skills that few other people had.

It needs to be a LEVEL playing field, not favouring any applicants.

How you achieve this when people come from different areas, different schools with vastly different averages and results, I don't know.

The white working class boy from a school where most people get two GCSEs and leave at there?

The Asian girl who goes to an elite school, has private tutoring and the average is 8 A*s and 2 As for GCSE results?

How do you compare the two?

The boy achieving 10 As may be more of a relative achievement than the girl achieving 10 A*s.

He may be more intelligent yet has received worse quality teaching, more disruption, crime, less opportunity, more distractions, no tutoring, no preparation for the exams. Maybe he's a carer for someone in his family.

There's no formula to compare the two. But one A* does not = one A* there. That's for absolute sure.

Trump to Harvard: Make sure some of your professors are Republicans from the south or I cancel all cancer research grants.

Interesting that got downvoted by 5 people when it's advocating for equality and nothing else.

It was her experience. There were barely any women, barely any black people, and barely any LGB people. She started in the '80s I think (not 100% sure - maybe earlier). She was a complete and utter rarity yet good at her job presumably given the amount of promotions she received over the decades there (she's still there AFAIK even now but in the US not London) and her salary and bonuses. She got pretty far up after decades of career progression. Unless people are saying that white, MC men are inherently better at the job? The over-representation was HUGE. Why? If a board room is 100% white men what has caused this, in your opinion? Why so few women? Or why NO women at all?

The white working class boy is considerably disadvantaged compared to the Asian private school girl who has received extensive support and tutoring. Even help with things like personal statements makes a big difference. Some schools just don't care. He could be top of his year and outstanding for the area, top 0.1%. She could just be average for her area. Arguably he's achieved more but how do you measure that?

As things stand in 2026 I'd like to see gender, race, sexuality and any other factor that's similar taken out of applications initially and to see what happens. Then address it. Go on academic achievements and experience only, or have an entrance exam. But there are issues with that too in terms of university admissions.

Screen CVs without these factors.

I used to work in university admissions (undergraduate at first) and people from certain postcodes or schools simply did NOT get in. We even had summer schools and they weren't particularly successful. There were too many obstacles to overcome. If one area has a record of sending 2,000 students to the university and one has sent 0 the odds are somewhat different for those applicants. The boy could be 300% better than the average student at his school but still not good enough. He may be more intelligent and a better candidate yet on paper this doesn't come through.

What happens if you go to entrance exam only and get a cohort that's 99% Asian students? Would people have an issue with that if it's solely based on academic performance and nothing else?

insurancejournal.com

Goldman Sachs to Pay $215M to Settle Gender Discrimination Lawsuit

@ijournal

Goldman Sachs Group Inc agreed to pay $215 million to settle a long-running class-action lawsuit that alleged widespread bias against women in both pay

Open link

More than three-quarters of UK companies pay men more on average than women, BBC analysis of government figures suggests.

The median pay gap among those companies was 9.7%.

But according to the Office of National Statistics the UK's median gender pay gap is 18.4%.
Why is there a difference between the figures? The ONS figure is based on its annual survey of hours and earnings, and that includes both full and part-time workers, and covers all employers.

bbc.co.uk

Gender pay gap: Men still earn more than women at most firms

https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews

New figures show 74% of medium and large companies pay men a higher wage rate than women.

Open link

The global unadjusted gender pay gap is 68.5%.

The public doesn't realize that Physicists, Chemists, Doctors, etc have to get strait A;s starting at 9-10 years old and spend summer vacations studying the next grade materials in order to finish a STEM degree in the State of California.

Haha. So in other words....if you needed a life saving surgery, youd rather have a black doctor who had the standards lowered so they could meet the absolute minimum, basic requirements than a white or Asian doctor who who well exceeded all the requirements and is higher achieving in the field? You can say "yes", but youd be lying. And even if you werent lying, the rest of the population doesnt want worse care by lower achieving doctors just because you want certain minorties to recieve special treatment.

As a higher education worker I agree with the UC STEM profs. Time to stand up and challenge the destructive ideology of their own administrators.

To the point in your post, I don't believe that running is the correct analogy at all. Because our sport is one of the few where merit is not just clearly observable, but objectively measurable across all competitors, everywhere. That's the whole point.

I see no circumstance where a coach will expend a scholarship on athlete B with a performance differential of that magnitude.

I see plenty of occasions when DEI faculty are privileged, as well as students fitting the DEI profile.

I am curious about how this came to be because when I started, it was not so, or at least not at all evident in these ways. It seems since 2010 and particularly 2015 or so that the nonsense permeated admin structures at high enough levels to create this toxic environment in higher ed.

So they met all the requirements of being a doctor and now are being attacked on a running messageboard?

Make it make sense.

Sounds like you don’t disagree with anything I actually said.

The global pay gap is what you talk about? Do we compare ourselves to Somalia or Yemen? The adjusted pay gap (same qualifications, hours, etc) is between 1 and 2%.

If you do the math it’s obvious that the numbers were switched, likely by accident. Look up other sources as well.

bull. they are legally prohibited from using some sort of points system, so any tiebreaking at this point is precisely that. similar scores, and you look behind them to what they uniquely offer, or whether a score is more special from a kid from a different place.

here's the deal, you folks aren't actually trying to be even handed yourselves. i was reading the other day we went down the one star generals list and pulled about everyone who is a woman or of color. we just assume they are there on affirmative action despite the military usually being fairly rigorous on testing and scoring people and favoring the winners of that.

so behind a smokescreen of making stale claims race is a college admissions factor, you're going around at government deliberately hiring white people because "any minority there is a token."

so you have swung over far worse towards outright racism, the old default. you don't hire because they are black.

I included the global figure as I found it to be fairly shocking.

Not keen on the adjusted pay gap as it doesn't take into account why women aren't getting the good roles in the first place (although the un-adjusted pay cap isn't ideal either).

Adjusted gender pay gap: However, this is considered a textbook error in econometrics because occupational sorting may itself be an outcome of gender discrimination, which would make it a bad control. By controlling for job characteristics, the analyst introduces collider bias into the analysis, making it impossible to draw valid conclusions about the role of gender discrimination on earnings.[9]

Analyses limited to wage differences within the same job category reveal a different distribution across countries. In Israel, gender was estimated to account for about 35% of the pay difference observed in identical roles. By contrast, in Hungary, nearly the entire within-job gap (96%) was attributed to gender. Spain recorded a relatively high share at 77%, while Germany (54%) and the United States (48%) were closer to mid-range levels.[22]

A 2025 analysis by the Pew Research Center found that in the United States, women earned about 85% of what men earned across hourly earnings (full- and part-time included).[24]

A Morningstar analysis[50] of senior executive pay data revealed that senior executive women earned 84.6 cents for every dollar earned by male executives in 2019.[51] Women also remained outnumbered in the C-Suite 7 to 1.

A 2020 analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that gender wage disparities are present across most major occupational groups in the United States.[52] The report noted that women working full-time in similar occupations still earned less than men, indicating that occupational wage gaps cannot be fully explained by differences in hours worked, part-time status, or employment type. Wage penalties were documented in a variety of professional and service sectors, suggesting that industry-level pay disparities persist even among full-time workers with comparable roles.

Women outnumbered in the C-suite by 7 to 1 is sad.

So are women just worse at doing these roles?
They don't apply in the first place?
Don't consider it to be a viable option?

Should it be 50:50?

Reasons why not?

Would people have an issue with it if it was 50:50?

Would love to know your opinion on that - the 7 to 1 C-suite figure.

this is not what happens. at elite colleges, if you aren't within x points, you're not considered.

your argument is fake. you do not pull the required SAT scores, eg, 1400, 1500+, being a ne'er'do'well who goofs off. they are not considering kids with 900, 1000, 1200 scores. they won't let you in as a jock admit unless you're pretty close. you do not have 1500+ averages for SAT letting in kids far below that.

we are talking at most 50, 100 points. that's 1400-1450. do you know kids that smart? they aren't dummies. they aren't lazy. they are high achiever types like a varsity track runner.

the question, which you're still avoiding, is what do we do when 1 school predictably produces 1400 average scores, and another produces kids who barely get points. do we hold that against the really bright kid from the school where no one scores any good? i think the kid with the 1400+ from an inner city school deserves a medal as they are way outscoring their curve. while a kid scoring 1400 from a 1400 school is average and unlikely to be a great student as they took abundant prior resources and turned out......average.

again, if you want to treat test scores like an absolute indicator of talent, you need to be handing every kid an equal school, at least in the public school world, where my school isn't 200 points better than your school on average.

i think what this data you point to shows, is SAT is flawed but GPA might be more flawed. if SAT skews by area, not all schools grade alike. that's how you get kids who can't do college level math despite probably needing near 4.0 grades to get in a UC school. is 4.0 is soft.

i'd then argue you need SAT not so much as supposedly infallible admissions tool but as indicator of minimum qualification to do math or english work. considered that?

I didn't read all of the responses, but with the rampant grade inflation that happens in a lot of high schools, apparently cutting SATs/ACTs resulted in many students getting accepted to colleges they couldn't actually succeed at. That is the primary reason schools are bringing it back.

My son is going to UCLA next year and also applied to San Diego, Santa Barbara and Berkeley, so he went through the UC application process from out of state. He got accepted by all of them.

He had a high SAT so I was a little concerned for him that not being able to include it would hurt him, but It did seem to me that even without the SAT, the UC application does a really good job (as opposed to the common app) on giving the schools a better chance of getting to see the strengths of the applicants.

no, the stats are pretty clear, each degree is more money. y'all are often comparing some very hardworking non-degree anecdotal exception who ironically probably went to some trade school for years. so it's not "don't need school," it's what type of school. the kids who don't do traditional school end up HVAC, plumbing, electrician school with perhaps a state qualifying test. the kids who do computers without a degree either go to some coding boot camp or study phone book size manuals. an entrepreneur has to be able to price properly, make correct change, and read financials.

there is no short cut without a degree. maybe wendy's. they don't pay much.

now, some of us take on debt but then we have deliberately decided to tax less, fund less, and put more of it on the students. the only colleges in the manner of what my parents did -- when you could afford full tuition working summers -- are juco. but juco isn't launching you into the great jobs. catch 22.

personally i find the debt-shaming of college kids funny when we let big corporations run up massive debt loads relative to profits.