The University of California's War on Meritocracy

The University of California System, or UC System in short, comprises 9 public schools: UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Merced. These public universities have long been known for their extremely prestigious reputation among the public schools. In fact, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego are among the top public schools in the entire United States of America. Gaining admission to such schools is not easy. In 2025, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego had an acceptance rate of 11%, 9.4%, and 28.4% respectively. One might imagine that due to the selective nature and strong reputation of such schools, only hard working individuals with high GPAs and selective awards would be admitted. While that is a very reasonable thought, it is completely wrong on many levels.

The UC system loves to present itself as merit based, even though its admissions process clearly goes far beyond pure academic performance. Due to a Supreme Court ruling in Harvard v. SFFA, considering race in college admissions is a direct violation of the US Constitution's 14A Equal Protection Clause. But that does not mean the system is actually blind to background. UC campuses still evaluate applicants through a broad “comprehensive review” that includes factors like gender, family income, first-generation status, personal circumstances, and the quality of a student’s school and neighborhood. On paper, that sounds fair. But in practice, it is a direct disadvantage to top students from places like the Bay Area, where competition is exponentially higher and outstanding achievements are treated like nothing special. A student can do everything right, take the hardest classes, earn elite awards, and still get pushed aside because admissions officers decide someone else had a harder life story. At that point, the message is pretty obvious: what matters is not just what you achieved, but which circumstances you were born into. That is not meritocracy.

Just as absurd is the UC system’s decision to go completely test blind. They threw out the SAT and ACT because they were supposedly “unfair” to some economically disadvantaged and "marginalized" communities, but in reality those exams were one of the few parts of the process that even tried to hold everyone to the same academic standard. A 4.0 is not the same thing everywhere, and everyone and their mom knows it. Grades depend on the school, the teacher, the curve, and how much inflation a district is willing to tolerate. Meanwhile, the parts of an application that are much easier for wealthy families to game, like polished extracurriculars, expensive summer programs, private counselors, and carefully packaged essays, are still treated like meaningful evidence of merit. So the one thing that is actually harder to fake gets tossed out, while the easiest things to manufacture stay. In a place like the Bay Area, where students are already facing far tougher competition than the average applicant, removing standardized testing does not make admissions fairer. It just makes the process more subjective and vulnerable to favoritism disguised as “holistic review.” This is not equity. It is the destruction of any serious academic standard.

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech), one of the most elite science institutions in the world, is a perfect example of why going test blind is a horrendous idea for any reputable institution. In 2020, Caltech went test-blind and later extended that policy through the fall 2025 admissions cycle. But by April 2024, it reversed course and brought the SAT and ACT back. Officially, Caltech said the change came after a faculty advisory committee concluded that standardized tests give useful information about academic preparedness for its rigorous programs. Around the same time, more than 140 Caltech faculty signed a petition raising concerns about declining student readiness and classroom performance and pushed for testing to be reinstated. In other words, one of the most academically intense STEM schools in the country tried test-blind admissions, watched serious concerns emerge about preparation, and then decided that throwing out standardized testing was a mistake. If even Caltech came back to the conclusion that common academic benchmarks still matter, the UC system has even less excuse for pretending GPA alone can carry the entire weight of admissions.

And if anyone thinks this criticism is exaggerated, just look at what is happening at UC San Diego right now. UCSD’s own Academic Senate report says that more than 900 first-year students in Fall 2024, about 12.5% of the entering class, were placed into remedial math pathways, and the report explicitly states that Math 2 had to be redesigned to focus on elementary and middle school material because many students’ gaps went far beyond high school. Even more telling, a majority of the workgroup recommended that the UC system consider returning to standardized testing, and the report states that for more than two decades the single best predictor for math placement at UCSD has been the SAT math score, with ACT math performing just as well. That makes my own UCSD waitlist even more ridiculous. I qualified for the USA Mathematical Olympiad, which is direct proof of elite mathematical ability, yet I was still waitlisted by a campus whose own faculty are now sounding the alarm that too many admitted students are arriving underprepared for college-level math. That is how upside down this system has become.

One may still not believe me due to the strong reputation of the UC System. Therefore, I will provide some very concrete examples of the clear systemic bias against high achieving Bay Area students. One of my friends made the US Physics Team, which means he was one of the top 20 high school physics students in the entire country. He got admitted to MIT, Caltech, and Stanford, three schools that are about as selective and academically serious as it gets. Yet somehow, the UC system still rejected him from UC Berkeley and UCLA, and even waitlisted him at UC Davis and UC Irvine. Take a few moments to think about how insane that is. A student who was good enough for the very top STEM schools in the world was apparently not good enough for multiple UCs. At some point, that stops looking like “holistic review” and starts looking like a system that is actively blind to exceptional achievement.

Consider another case. A friend of mine is a two-time gold medalist at both the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) and the European Physics Olympiad (EuPhO) - among the highest levels of achievement possible in pre-college physics anywhere in the world. He was admitted to MIT. He was rejected by UC Berkeley.

Or take a friend who qualified for the Math Olympiad Program (MOP) through the TST track, earned USAMO Gold, attended USACO Camp, and was accepted into MIT PRIMES, one of the most selective pre-college research programs in the country. He was also rejected by UC Berkeley. He now attends MIT.

I could also point to my own college roommate, who qualified for the USAMO and has extensive experience in mathematical research. He was rejected by UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Science for Applied Mathematics, and also rejected by UCLA.

These aren't isolated stories, either. I personally know numerous MOP qualifiers - students competing at a level well beyond USAMO qualification alone - who were admitted to MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and other HYPSM schools, while being rejected or waitlisted by Berkeley and UCLA.

Well, you may say that I only listed a small sample size, and my friends are "outliers". Well, let us take me as an example as well. I had a 4.0 GPA and 4.64 Weighted GPA for the UC System, which is almost at the very top of Monta Vista High School, one of the most competitive schools in California. I qualified for the USA Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO) and earned Distinction on the USA Physics Olympiad (USAPhO), placing me in the top 250 and 394 high school mathematics and physics students in the nation, respectively. I also won national level research awards from MIT and IEEE, and had a research position in a Ph.D. level lab at UC Merced. You would probably assume that I was accepted by practically every UC, including Berkeley and LA. You would be wrong. I was waitlisted at UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, and UCLA. I was also rejected by UC Berkeley.

One may say: "Tommy, what exactly are you insinuating right now"? Well, my point is that UC admissions have become too subjective and insufficiently capable of identifying exceptional academic preparation, and that high achieving students are the prime victim of this system.

Notice how I said "high achieving"? That is exactly where the usual UC defense of “holistic review” falls apart. I have seen this pattern firsthand at my own school. Plenty of students with clearly weaker academic records, lower GPAs, less rigorous schedules, no national awards, and no serious academic distinction still get into Berkeley and UCLA, while students with far stronger academic profiles are rejected or waitlisted. That should not happen in a system that claims to value merit. Instead, it happens because the process puts so much weight on PIQs and other subjective factors. But PIQs are not a measure of college readiness. They do not show whether a student can handle advanced math, difficult science courses, or an actually rigorous college workload. They mostly measure how well a seventeen-year-old can package a story, sound reflective, and present a polished personal brand in a few short essays. And that process is hardly immune from unfair advantage either. Wealthy families can pay for private counselors, essay editors, and endless coaching to make an application sound compelling, while the student with the stronger actual academic record can get punished for being less polished on paper. UC openly says it looks beyond grades and uses personal insight questions to understand personality, background, and experiences. That may sound noble, but when students with Olympiad-level achievement, elite research, and top academic records are getting passed over, it becomes hard to pretend the system is still centered on merit. It is not measuring who is most academically prepared. Instead, it is measuring who can tell the most appealing story.

In the end, great universities are not built by famous professors alone. They are built by the students who fill their classrooms, raise the level of discussion, challenge each other, and eventually become the engineers, researchers, and leaders who define the school’s future. If the UC system keeps turning away some of its most academically proven students in favor of subjectivity, storytelling, and politics disguised as fairness, it will eventually pay the price. A university cannot claim to value excellence when merit is pushed aside for a process that rewards impression over preparation. Prestige is not permanent. Rankings do not stay high by themselves. Respect is earned by maintaining real standards, and once those standards start to collapse, reputation follows. Berkeley and UCLA can live off their name for only so long. If this trend continues, the UC system will stop being respected as a place that rewards excellence and start being seen for what it is becoming: a system that abandoned the fundamental concept of meritocracy.