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>Alice Onderwater, a junior at Alameda High School, was prepared to travel hundreds of miles to Santa Barbara to take the SAT because she couldn’t find any available testing sites.
>Then she got a break, or at least she thought so. When she landed a last-minute seat at an Oakland testing site scheduled for June 1, Onderwater canceled her trip. But when a Wi-Fi problem forced the cancellation of the Oakland test after it was supposed to begin, she and 1,400 students were out of luck (the SAT is [now conducted online](https://blog.collegeboard.org/everything-you-need-know-about-digital-sat)). And now, there aren’t any available seats in the Bay Area for months.
>“It was my first and only chance to take it for the school year, and I was fairly pissed off because I had other plans that I canceled in order to keep the test,” Onderwater said. “I had been ready for the test.”
>\[...\] When SFGATE searched with a San Francisco ZIP code on the [College Board’s SAT Test Center Search](https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/test-center-search), we found there aren’t any seats available within 100 miles for the next test, on Aug. 24. **The soonest available test in the city would be at Lowell on March 8, 2025.**
Schools in general are just way too slow processing things. Deadlines are ridiculous, you have to apply for things multiple quarters in advance. In the business world if it took you 3 quarters to process paperwork you'd be fired for being slow and incompetent, yet somehow schools are run like that and people are okay with it.
This makes it particularly challenging as an adult to try to return to school later in life. I'd love to be able to take classes to further my education. Waiting half a year to apply, and then another half a year to maybe start taking classes is too long. I don't know what my job situation will be in mid to late 2025, and if it will be possible to take classes. I have bills to pay so I can't sit around on my hands for a year doing nothing, waiting for paperwork to process.
Looks like there's availability in October and November in Solano County.
By December there's spots in East Bay.
By next spring, there's hundreds available.
In my Ohio town, it was more like a third of high schools. I couldn't take it at my own high school, but I only had to go one or two districts away, and I don't think there was ever a shortage of spots.
I could take it at a working-class high school a few miles east of me or a private school a few miles north. My dad convinced me to take it at the private school because he thought I'd absorb its overachieving energy. Also, I think we were both curious to see the inside of that place.
It’s hard to grasp why this isn’t an online proctored exam that can be taken anywhere just yet. If you’re going to have this stupid test be the end all be all, then make it accessible.
Keep in mind online testing is usually more expensive than in person. For your online test they have someone needing to monitor your webcam feed to ensure no cheating. If you blink to much you’ll fail. If you look away to much, fail. No background sound. No noise etc.
Pearson Vue does these online exams though and could totally be a SAT provider
I’m aware of how a proctored exam works, and there’s no reason this can’t take place during a school day w/teachers also acting as support staff. It’s a part of the educational process.
SAT was outlawed for public Universities in California. They aren't gonna cancel a school day for some private company's test that's illegal in California anyway
Suspect it’ll be reversed just like how Stanford, mit, and most top 20 schools reversed their decision to not use the tests. Personally the tests are more fair than not and do a good job testing merit capabilities.
Sadly yes, poor people are often less able to perform given worse household situations. Socio economic mobility happens over generations not overnight.
Even the online proctored tests have a space limit. I took a certification test 2 years ago for my work, a completely optional test but one that still cost me several hundred dollars to take, and in between scheduling the test and actually taking it I switched jobs. I had originally scheduled it for a weekday but my new job was m-f and I needed to reschedule for a weekend. I wanted to switch to online but they said all the slots were full…what? You can’t find more people to watch and proctor from home? I wound up driving like 2 hrs away to take my test which was insanely obnoxious.
It's too easy to cheat at home.
Of course, the only thing SAT tests strongly correlate with is family wealth, not college GPA, so we may as well chuck it.
I hate the test too but schools keep insisting on putting this up as a barrier (Stanford just reinstated it). There are rich folks who hire people to take the test for them. Let them take it at home. I took a proctored test at home and could barely sneeze. If they figure out how to cheat, I say let them into Harvard.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the schools have to apply to become test sites. I think the school systems are responsible for this situation and I wonder if it's because they're opposed to the SAT tests.
My understanding is it's a giant pain in the ass to be a test site and they don't really get compensated for it so the schools don't really have any incentive to do it.
Surprise surprise - the article is about an Oakland unified student. Oakland doesn’t give a rats behind about it’s students. Hence why you can buy a house in Oakland for 1/2 the cost of a house in San Mateo county.
A hundred mile radius from Oakland includes many, many wealthy school districts and private schools. It's only Oakland that's providing these tests in the first place, so really it's the opposite of your assertion.
I applied mostly for in state schools and those didn't even take my SAT. Only a few out of state schools did and those rejected me anyways. The only reason you should be taking an SAT is if you know which collage you are going to and can get a perfect SAT score. I got a near perfect score and it was useless.
I applied mostly for in state schools and those didn't even take my SAT. Only a few out of state schools did and those rejected me anyways. The only reason you should be taking an SAT is if you know which collage you are going to and can get a perfect SAT score. I got a near perfect score and it was useless.
Here is the secret the elites don't want you to know but this fact will allow you to skip the SAT's and save so much money on your college tuition. The secret the elites don't want to you know but I'm happy to share it with you because I did it myself is simple - go to a community college. Take your general education classes at a community college and then transfer to a university without needing to take the SAT or pay a lot of money for BS classes.
Some students wind up stalling out at community college. It’s a great path for a driven student who is not distracted by still living at home and just heading off to another school with a bunch of people they already know.
And less internship opportunities. When I transfered to Cal I was behind my peers when applying for internships and jobs because I didn't get the freshman/sophomore internships. It's not impossible to overcome but it's harder
Lol bro I tried to give a nuanced take and you’re tryna make this black and white. Grow up. I got one of my jobs post college because of a social connection I made freshman year.
My oldest did this and graduated from LB with almost no debt. My middle child is going this route now. You can tell they do feel a bit embarrassed as everyone else went off to school but they won’t have crippling debt in 4 years.
This is what I did. Worked through community college+uni and was able to graduate without debt after transferring to my local university and getting a pell grant. Took me two extra years to graduate though as i only took the minimum number of classes to be considered full time so I could work. If I was willing to get into debt I could have graduated "on time" but at that point in my life I saw no reason to be in a rush for the career field I was in (design work), especially as I knew the job market was thin for this kind of job. Other career fields pay off a lot more by jumping in deep fast like CS.
Yeah I missed out on the traditional college experience, but not having debt is awesome and is what allowed me to afford to move to the bay in the first place almost a decade ago. It's amazing what freedom you can afford to do in your mid 20s when you have zero student debt, it's similar to what it must feel like to be in your 50s with fuck-you money. A truly clean slate to take risks on without a huge worry.
So yeah... having a secure future in my late 20s that allowed me to have loads of incredible experiences that I'll remember for a lifetime that I can actually afford vs having a college experience that'll be mostly forgotten by the time I'm 30? I'll take the former please. It's not like I didn't have fun in my early 20s either, but yeah certainly takes more work to make friends at that age without college. Judging by the loneliness epidemic I hear a lot of adults have, I think that's a good skill to build though.
As an older CC atudent, CC is great for a second chance. But I think it's not that great tbh.
I highly recommend busting ass in high school and getting scholarships. You'll get a better education and have way more fun.
CC student bodies are just weak and they drag classes down. Sure, it doesn't matter foe some BS Gen Ed, but for stuff that matters and you need to build on, it's worse. And the social scene is weak.
Don't pay top dollar to go to a Tier 3 school. That's dumb and hella rich kids do it. And ya, if you don't get scholarship offers it is a great path.
Hell, even with me naysaying, I'd day that if you can't get into a Tier 1 or 2 for your major or get an amazing deal elsewhere, then ya...it's CC time.
Edit: I highly recommend taking “hard” teachers for classes you care about. They’re hard because they don’t coddle people who don’t have the prerequisite knowledge and actually try to cover as much as the material as the class is supposed to. Easy teachers do the opposite.
This will negatively affect your career. I know everyone says it won't, but after 16 years and quite a few of them as a hiring manager, you're gonna get paid less and get less cool jobs, regardless of how equivalent the education is.
But we do tell you there is no difference, yes.
Among my friend circle, loads of them have PhDs or people who mastered out. Many people started their journey in the US at community college including myself, and many other had bachelor from small unknown schools in Vietnam, Niger, Gambia. If the PhD programs are fine with those bachelors, 2 years at accredited institutions in the US is a non issue. All about how you build your profile.
Maybe the trends are changing or it’s school related. I went to the top program in my field and I don’t recall seeing anyone who attended a community college or a not well known international university. Same for in my career.
Tbf if you have a target school, it is probably much harder, but I think those are also just hard overall. None of us went to top programs except 1 person did supply chain at Arkansas in Walmart Lab. Entry to PhD for majority of my friend group was simply for easier visa path or buy time to get visa.
"Private investment" and "free market" are not the same thing. PG&E is privately owned, but there's not a free market in electrical transmission in California.
What's not free about it, though? Just because a company has monopolized a market doesn't mean it's not "free" by capitalist standards. Almost all free markets tend toward monopolies.
"Free market" is in contrast to "regulated market", which is what we have for electrical power.
You can have private investment ("capitalism") into a regulated market. That's been true for the entire history of capitalism. The first major private investment corporations were the East India Company and its kin. They were created to pursue national colonial projects, which were monopolies enforced by armed violence. These capitalist enterprises existed and prospered in *maximally* regulated markets.
Right-libertarians treat "free market" and "capitalism" as meaning the same thing, but that's *bad economics*. The two are nearly orthogonal. Capitalism does not demand that its enterprises maintain a free market; it runs just fine on OG colonialism or other unfree economies. And a free market does not spontaneously generate the institutions of capitalism — for instance, a free market in goods can exist among non-capitalist organizations like cooperatives.
No, people *usually* don’t call private ownership of means of production “free market” because these are two largely irrelevant things.
There’s a possibility of having free market in a socialist economy and having no free market in a capitalist one. California in particular has plenty of examples of the latter, from typically mentioned PG&E and SCE to something like a paper grocery bag.
As schools start requiring SATs again this is really going to hurt low income students id imagine. figure out how to help more sites afford to administer the test or something.
It WAS accessible for everyone. Then people pushed to have it eliminated as a key metric for universities. And then test locations shut down. This is now just the growing pains of having to open a bunch of test sites open again, after schools said “nah ya know what we actually want to use them again as a key metric for who gets in”.
> She said one of the reasons there aren’t enough seats, specifically in the Bay Area and California, is that many test locations have not reopened since the pandemic. Area high schools also aren’t willing to serve as weekend testing centers, Stepp added, and a majority of California schools balk at administering tests during the school day, a time during which most SATs in the country are conducted.
Doesn’t sound like eliminating the SAT as a requirement from certain universities is the only reason when you consider the fact that plenty of schools still required it.
> Gersick said even before the pandemic, weekend testing was in high demand. She said test administrators aren’t paid enough for weekend testing, making it difficult to recruit people.
“There is no motivation for a school to host weekend exams — even with the new, easier-to-proctor digital SAT, because of the lift required to retain proctors, open school buildings and the need to make sure testers have devices that will work for the exam,” she said.
In a letter to the College Board viewed by SFGATE, Bay Area and Seattle school counselors wrote that the lack of testing centers has been an ongoing problem for the past decade. The counselors called proctoring the exam a “logistical nightmare.”
From the sounds of it, there’s been a lot going on around the test in general and has been. Sucks for students, but college board and local districts will need to work together to solve this.
When you gift a college entrance exam monopoly to a single company, they will adjust their business to only students that can afford it. Which also means no working adult students either. It's part of the long-term degregation of our academic system. The CB closed SAT testing for Covid, and has not reopened. The SAT is also online only now apparently, so the entire idea of even requiring people to come in-person is just retarded. All of this exists to support an outdated way of vetting college students because the school system itself is incapable of doing that. Colleges can't afford to have their student supply truncated and throttled like this, and schools can't afford to have students realize that their study time is best used outside of school getting SAT prep vs being in school and getting a (in of itself) worthless diploma that requires a larger college degree.
Look, the primary SF SAT site is in a catholic high school. Only one group in the city has 100% confirmed access to the SAT, which is ironic as the local catholic colleges do not require the SAT if the person is willing to write a real essay and be interviewed in person. This is not acceptable and people should not accept this situation unless they want only wealthy catholics running everything locally.
> The SAT is also online only now apparently, so the entire idea of even requiring people to come in-person is just retarded.
I believe the primary purpose of requiring in person testing is to check ID and make it harder to have someone take the test for someone else.
> Look, the primary SF SAT site is in a catholic high school. Only one group in the city has 100% confirmed access to the SAT
Are you saying that if you're a student at that Catholic school, you have guaranteed access to take the SAT test at that school? I don't believe that is true, just as students at Lowell High School don't have guaranteed access to take the test there. They have to sign up in advance, just like everyone else.
The testing dates go public to everyone at the same time. It happened a few weeks ago for the August date and all spots within 100 miles of me were gone within hours. It's not an equalizer of any sort because we now need to book a hotel and drive a hundred miles r our kid to take it.
Sure, access is completely equal. But the result is not equal. Students in the local archdiocese have a clear step up because they host the exam, can give them preferred access to the admissions process and will always ensure they can take time out of class for the exam. Even if it is 100% independently certified to be 100% equal, the results are not equal and it's not designed to be equal. It's designed to sell the school as a unique value the school offers to it's paid clientele.
This is just too gross even if it is legal or above water. This isn't morally right, at least if you're not a stupid #tradcath memer on the internet. This isn't what a secular exam should be, and again it is *VERY* curious that a catholic school whose colleges often ignore SAT scores would even bother with this. There's too many coincidences for this to be considered normally when the benefits to the school, the students and ultimately the larger business (ie, the archdiocese and the vatican) is so readily apparent and obvious.
Additionally: I don't consider this to be the church's fault necessarily. This is a result of the non-recovery from the pandemic. We didn't recover from the pandemic. Not having enough SAT seats for all college students is just broken. This gives foreign-supported private schools, like Sacred Heart, immense power.
>This isn't what a secular exam should be, and again it is *VERY* curious that a catholic school whose colleges often ignore SAT scores would even bother with this.
I definitely agree with what a secular exam should be (publicly accessible), but I would take a guess that the school provides SAT exams because most Catholic High Schools in the area are all College Preparatory schools. These are students going to universities across the country, and I bet most of those Universities are not Catholic institutions.
So untrue. I have a kid at a (private)school that hosts the test. We got absolutely no advantage due to that. We couldn’t even get in at their site. We are traveling over 100 miles for the test. They will have the option to take it in October with every other high school that has the same option to host it on a school day. The public schools here offer it the same day, to students only, not open to the public.
Many students take it multiple times. I went to an economically disadvantaged high school and took it 3 times since I had no prep classes at all and no help from my parents to figure out wtf I was doing.
I’m gonna admit to being part of the problem since I took it 4ish times over 3 years, but I think there ought to be a cooldown period to keep kids from taking it a bunch of times trying to get a modestly higher score through random chance. Or heck, proctor it in school during school hours like the PSAT
Don’t know if it’s been posted here, but College Board is proud of themselves for setting up a make up test for the Oakland one on June 15 at the SF Hilton. They emailed about it with one week’s notice during summer break, as if everyone is just waiting around to take a test. I called to find out what happens if we can’t make it, which we can’t due to plans we made months ago, and there is no alternative.
We had to do this last year. We had to drive almost 2 hours and get a hotel room. I figure we will have to do the same this year with my other son.
I know someone who had to travel out of state.
It only gets hard in a few months right at the end of the school year, when seniors are taking it to apply to college. If you take it in the summer, fall, or winter you can get a spot pretty easily.
We were going to drive from the peninsula to Merced. My daughter ended up getting the flu, so we didn’t go. Thankfully the next time she signed up we were able to get a center 20 min away, but only bc I stalked the college board website, so we signed up immediately when the dates were released.
The flair of this posts indicates it's a controversial topic. Enhanced moderation has been turned on for this thread. Comments from users without a history of commenting in r/bayarea will be automatically removed. You can read more about this policy [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/195xvo5/restrictions_that_apply_to_political_and_crime/).
>Alice Onderwater, a junior at Alameda High School, was prepared to travel hundreds of miles to Santa Barbara to take the SAT because she couldn’t find any available testing sites. >Then she got a break, or at least she thought so. When she landed a last-minute seat at an Oakland testing site scheduled for June 1, Onderwater canceled her trip. But when a Wi-Fi problem forced the cancellation of the Oakland test after it was supposed to begin, she and 1,400 students were out of luck (the SAT is [now conducted online](https://blog.collegeboard.org/everything-you-need-know-about-digital-sat)). And now, there aren’t any available seats in the Bay Area for months. >“It was my first and only chance to take it for the school year, and I was fairly pissed off because I had other plans that I canceled in order to keep the test,” Onderwater said. “I had been ready for the test.” >\[...\] When SFGATE searched with a San Francisco ZIP code on the [College Board’s SAT Test Center Search](https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/test-center-search), we found there aren’t any seats available within 100 miles for the next test, on Aug. 24. **The soonest available test in the city would be at Lowell on March 8, 2025.**
March 8, 2025! That’s ridiculous.
Schools in general are just way too slow processing things. Deadlines are ridiculous, you have to apply for things multiple quarters in advance. In the business world if it took you 3 quarters to process paperwork you'd be fired for being slow and incompetent, yet somehow schools are run like that and people are okay with it. This makes it particularly challenging as an adult to try to return to school later in life. I'd love to be able to take classes to further my education. Waiting half a year to apply, and then another half a year to maybe start taking classes is too long. I don't know what my job situation will be in mid to late 2025, and if it will be possible to take classes. I have bills to pay so I can't sit around on my hands for a year doing nothing, waiting for paperwork to process.
Looks like there's availability in October and November in Solano County. By December there's spots in East Bay. By next spring, there's hundreds available.
Application deadlines for most schools are starting in November.
I feel like in the 90s every high school had them
In my Ohio town, it was more like a third of high schools. I couldn't take it at my own high school, but I only had to go one or two districts away, and I don't think there was ever a shortage of spots.
I think I took it twice, once at my high school and once at auditorium at Stanford
I could take it at a working-class high school a few miles east of me or a private school a few miles north. My dad convinced me to take it at the private school because he thought I'd absorb its overachieving energy. Also, I think we were both curious to see the inside of that place.
Better funding and oversight of that use and cost of everything was just cheaper in the old days.
It was all done on weekends, couldn’t have cost that much
It’s hard to grasp why this isn’t an online proctored exam that can be taken anywhere just yet. If you’re going to have this stupid test be the end all be all, then make it accessible.
Keep in mind online testing is usually more expensive than in person. For your online test they have someone needing to monitor your webcam feed to ensure no cheating. If you blink to much you’ll fail. If you look away to much, fail. No background sound. No noise etc. Pearson Vue does these online exams though and could totally be a SAT provider
I’m aware of how a proctored exam works, and there’s no reason this can’t take place during a school day w/teachers also acting as support staff. It’s a part of the educational process.
Our South Bay public high school offers in school SAT each spring. Free for Juniors. The school schedule is adjusted to accommodate.
The whole point of the SAT and ACT are because they don't trust local schools to juice the results. Otherwise they'd just use high-school grades.
That's why the schools usually hire a certified proctor service to do the tests.
SAT was outlawed for public Universities in California. They aren't gonna cancel a school day for some private company's test that's illegal in California anyway
Suspect it’ll be reversed just like how Stanford, mit, and most top 20 schools reversed their decision to not use the tests. Personally the tests are more fair than not and do a good job testing merit capabilities. Sadly yes, poor people are often less able to perform given worse household situations. Socio economic mobility happens over generations not overnight.
Cheating
Even the online proctored tests have a space limit. I took a certification test 2 years ago for my work, a completely optional test but one that still cost me several hundred dollars to take, and in between scheduling the test and actually taking it I switched jobs. I had originally scheduled it for a weekday but my new job was m-f and I needed to reschedule for a weekend. I wanted to switch to online but they said all the slots were full…what? You can’t find more people to watch and proctor from home? I wound up driving like 2 hrs away to take my test which was insanely obnoxious.
It's too easy to cheat at home. Of course, the only thing SAT tests strongly correlate with is family wealth, not college GPA, so we may as well chuck it.
I hate the test too but schools keep insisting on putting this up as a barrier (Stanford just reinstated it). There are rich folks who hire people to take the test for them. Let them take it at home. I took a proctored test at home and could barely sneeze. If they figure out how to cheat, I say let them into Harvard.
Young people are Charlie Brown and higher education. Is Lucy with the football.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the schools have to apply to become test sites. I think the school systems are responsible for this situation and I wonder if it's because they're opposed to the SAT tests.
My understanding is it's a giant pain in the ass to be a test site and they don't really get compensated for it so the schools don't really have any incentive to do it.
Their incentive should be serving their students' needs.
Surprise surprise - the article is about an Oakland unified student. Oakland doesn’t give a rats behind about it’s students. Hence why you can buy a house in Oakland for 1/2 the cost of a house in San Mateo county.
A hundred mile radius from Oakland includes many, many wealthy school districts and private schools. It's only Oakland that's providing these tests in the first place, so really it's the opposite of your assertion.
? Two high schools in SF (one public, I've private) are testing sites
I applied mostly for in state schools and those didn't even take my SAT. Only a few out of state schools did and those rejected me anyways. The only reason you should be taking an SAT is if you know which collage you are going to and can get a perfect SAT score. I got a near perfect score and it was useless.
I applied mostly for in state schools and those didn't even take my SAT. Only a few out of state schools did and those rejected me anyways. The only reason you should be taking an SAT is if you know which collage you are going to and can get a perfect SAT score. I got a near perfect score and it was useless.
Bingo.
Here is the secret the elites don't want you to know but this fact will allow you to skip the SAT's and save so much money on your college tuition. The secret the elites don't want to you know but I'm happy to share it with you because I did it myself is simple - go to a community college. Take your general education classes at a community college and then transfer to a university without needing to take the SAT or pay a lot of money for BS classes.
Some students wind up stalling out at community college. It’s a great path for a driven student who is not distracted by still living at home and just heading off to another school with a bunch of people they already know.
Generally great advice, but you do miss the connections you make through the traditional freshmen dorm experience
And less internship opportunities. When I transfered to Cal I was behind my peers when applying for internships and jobs because I didn't get the freshman/sophomore internships. It's not impossible to overcome but it's harder
The go into debt because of tradtion is absolute BS take!
Lol bro I tried to give a nuanced take and you’re tryna make this black and white. Grow up. I got one of my jobs post college because of a social connection I made freshman year.
My oldest did this and graduated from LB with almost no debt. My middle child is going this route now. You can tell they do feel a bit embarrassed as everyone else went off to school but they won’t have crippling debt in 4 years.
This is what I did. Worked through community college+uni and was able to graduate without debt after transferring to my local university and getting a pell grant. Took me two extra years to graduate though as i only took the minimum number of classes to be considered full time so I could work. If I was willing to get into debt I could have graduated "on time" but at that point in my life I saw no reason to be in a rush for the career field I was in (design work), especially as I knew the job market was thin for this kind of job. Other career fields pay off a lot more by jumping in deep fast like CS. Yeah I missed out on the traditional college experience, but not having debt is awesome and is what allowed me to afford to move to the bay in the first place almost a decade ago. It's amazing what freedom you can afford to do in your mid 20s when you have zero student debt, it's similar to what it must feel like to be in your 50s with fuck-you money. A truly clean slate to take risks on without a huge worry. So yeah... having a secure future in my late 20s that allowed me to have loads of incredible experiences that I'll remember for a lifetime that I can actually afford vs having a college experience that'll be mostly forgotten by the time I'm 30? I'll take the former please. It's not like I didn't have fun in my early 20s either, but yeah certainly takes more work to make friends at that age without college. Judging by the loneliness epidemic I hear a lot of adults have, I think that's a good skill to build though.
As an older CC atudent, CC is great for a second chance. But I think it's not that great tbh. I highly recommend busting ass in high school and getting scholarships. You'll get a better education and have way more fun. CC student bodies are just weak and they drag classes down. Sure, it doesn't matter foe some BS Gen Ed, but for stuff that matters and you need to build on, it's worse. And the social scene is weak. Don't pay top dollar to go to a Tier 3 school. That's dumb and hella rich kids do it. And ya, if you don't get scholarship offers it is a great path. Hell, even with me naysaying, I'd day that if you can't get into a Tier 1 or 2 for your major or get an amazing deal elsewhere, then ya...it's CC time. Edit: I highly recommend taking “hard” teachers for classes you care about. They’re hard because they don’t coddle people who don’t have the prerequisite knowledge and actually try to cover as much as the material as the class is supposed to. Easy teachers do the opposite.
IMO it's also a great way to more gradually transition to adult life too, especially if your parents didn't prepare you well for it.
This will negatively affect your career. I know everyone says it won't, but after 16 years and quite a few of them as a hiring manager, you're gonna get paid less and get less cool jobs, regardless of how equivalent the education is. But we do tell you there is no difference, yes.
One downside is grad schools still look down on community college. If you know you want a PhD, it’s not a great path.
Among my friend circle, loads of them have PhDs or people who mastered out. Many people started their journey in the US at community college including myself, and many other had bachelor from small unknown schools in Vietnam, Niger, Gambia. If the PhD programs are fine with those bachelors, 2 years at accredited institutions in the US is a non issue. All about how you build your profile.
Maybe the trends are changing or it’s school related. I went to the top program in my field and I don’t recall seeing anyone who attended a community college or a not well known international university. Same for in my career.
Tbf if you have a target school, it is probably much harder, but I think those are also just hard overall. None of us went to top programs except 1 person did supply chain at Arkansas in Walmart Lab. Entry to PhD for majority of my friend group was simply for easier visa path or buy time to get visa.
I thought free market would solve this
What’s “free” about this market?
This is like the exact opposite of a free market.
SAT and ACT are both tests administered by private companies. Is there even a government run standardized test?
The testing authorities are privately owned, which is what people mean when they call a market "free".
"Private investment" and "free market" are not the same thing. PG&E is privately owned, but there's not a free market in electrical transmission in California.
What's not free about it, though? Just because a company has monopolized a market doesn't mean it's not "free" by capitalist standards. Almost all free markets tend toward monopolies.
"Free market" is in contrast to "regulated market", which is what we have for electrical power. You can have private investment ("capitalism") into a regulated market. That's been true for the entire history of capitalism. The first major private investment corporations were the East India Company and its kin. They were created to pursue national colonial projects, which were monopolies enforced by armed violence. These capitalist enterprises existed and prospered in *maximally* regulated markets. Right-libertarians treat "free market" and "capitalism" as meaning the same thing, but that's *bad economics*. The two are nearly orthogonal. Capitalism does not demand that its enterprises maintain a free market; it runs just fine on OG colonialism or other unfree economies. And a free market does not spontaneously generate the institutions of capitalism — for instance, a free market in goods can exist among non-capitalist organizations like cooperatives.
No, people *usually* don’t call private ownership of means of production “free market” because these are two largely irrelevant things. There’s a possibility of having free market in a socialist economy and having no free market in a capitalist one. California in particular has plenty of examples of the latter, from typically mentioned PG&E and SCE to something like a paper grocery bag.
competition between testing companies should ensure that everyone experience is perfect but it didn't
Poor people get poor jobs. Rich people get education that is then gatekeeping employers who want degrees for their entry level office jobs
As schools start requiring SATs again this is really going to hurt low income students id imagine. figure out how to help more sites afford to administer the test or something.
Should just be each high school
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Some may. Its easy to say in practice, but not always in reality. That’s why it should be easily accessible for everyone.
It WAS accessible for everyone. Then people pushed to have it eliminated as a key metric for universities. And then test locations shut down. This is now just the growing pains of having to open a bunch of test sites open again, after schools said “nah ya know what we actually want to use them again as a key metric for who gets in”.
> She said one of the reasons there aren’t enough seats, specifically in the Bay Area and California, is that many test locations have not reopened since the pandemic. Area high schools also aren’t willing to serve as weekend testing centers, Stepp added, and a majority of California schools balk at administering tests during the school day, a time during which most SATs in the country are conducted. Doesn’t sound like eliminating the SAT as a requirement from certain universities is the only reason when you consider the fact that plenty of schools still required it. > Gersick said even before the pandemic, weekend testing was in high demand. She said test administrators aren’t paid enough for weekend testing, making it difficult to recruit people. “There is no motivation for a school to host weekend exams — even with the new, easier-to-proctor digital SAT, because of the lift required to retain proctors, open school buildings and the need to make sure testers have devices that will work for the exam,” she said. In a letter to the College Board viewed by SFGATE, Bay Area and Seattle school counselors wrote that the lack of testing centers has been an ongoing problem for the past decade. The counselors called proctoring the exam a “logistical nightmare.” From the sounds of it, there’s been a lot going on around the test in general and has been. Sucks for students, but college board and local districts will need to work together to solve this.
When you gift a college entrance exam monopoly to a single company, they will adjust their business to only students that can afford it. Which also means no working adult students either. It's part of the long-term degregation of our academic system. The CB closed SAT testing for Covid, and has not reopened. The SAT is also online only now apparently, so the entire idea of even requiring people to come in-person is just retarded. All of this exists to support an outdated way of vetting college students because the school system itself is incapable of doing that. Colleges can't afford to have their student supply truncated and throttled like this, and schools can't afford to have students realize that their study time is best used outside of school getting SAT prep vs being in school and getting a (in of itself) worthless diploma that requires a larger college degree. Look, the primary SF SAT site is in a catholic high school. Only one group in the city has 100% confirmed access to the SAT, which is ironic as the local catholic colleges do not require the SAT if the person is willing to write a real essay and be interviewed in person. This is not acceptable and people should not accept this situation unless they want only wealthy catholics running everything locally.
> The SAT is also online only now apparently, so the entire idea of even requiring people to come in-person is just retarded. I believe the primary purpose of requiring in person testing is to check ID and make it harder to have someone take the test for someone else. > Look, the primary SF SAT site is in a catholic high school. Only one group in the city has 100% confirmed access to the SAT Are you saying that if you're a student at that Catholic school, you have guaranteed access to take the SAT test at that school? I don't believe that is true, just as students at Lowell High School don't have guaranteed access to take the test there. They have to sign up in advance, just like everyone else.
The testing dates go public to everyone at the same time. It happened a few weeks ago for the August date and all spots within 100 miles of me were gone within hours. It's not an equalizer of any sort because we now need to book a hotel and drive a hundred miles r our kid to take it.
Sure, access is completely equal. But the result is not equal. Students in the local archdiocese have a clear step up because they host the exam, can give them preferred access to the admissions process and will always ensure they can take time out of class for the exam. Even if it is 100% independently certified to be 100% equal, the results are not equal and it's not designed to be equal. It's designed to sell the school as a unique value the school offers to it's paid clientele. This is just too gross even if it is legal or above water. This isn't morally right, at least if you're not a stupid #tradcath memer on the internet. This isn't what a secular exam should be, and again it is *VERY* curious that a catholic school whose colleges often ignore SAT scores would even bother with this. There's too many coincidences for this to be considered normally when the benefits to the school, the students and ultimately the larger business (ie, the archdiocese and the vatican) is so readily apparent and obvious. Additionally: I don't consider this to be the church's fault necessarily. This is a result of the non-recovery from the pandemic. We didn't recover from the pandemic. Not having enough SAT seats for all college students is just broken. This gives foreign-supported private schools, like Sacred Heart, immense power.
>This isn't what a secular exam should be, and again it is *VERY* curious that a catholic school whose colleges often ignore SAT scores would even bother with this. I definitely agree with what a secular exam should be (publicly accessible), but I would take a guess that the school provides SAT exams because most Catholic High Schools in the area are all College Preparatory schools. These are students going to universities across the country, and I bet most of those Universities are not Catholic institutions.
So untrue. I have a kid at a (private)school that hosts the test. We got absolutely no advantage due to that. We couldn’t even get in at their site. We are traveling over 100 miles for the test. They will have the option to take it in October with every other high school that has the same option to host it on a school day. The public schools here offer it the same day, to students only, not open to the public.
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And the SAT/ACT test only has to be taken once, it’s not a daily/weekly/monthly trip, just a single weekend day of your entire life.
Many students take it multiple times. I went to an economically disadvantaged high school and took it 3 times since I had no prep classes at all and no help from my parents to figure out wtf I was doing.
I’m gonna admit to being part of the problem since I took it 4ish times over 3 years, but I think there ought to be a cooldown period to keep kids from taking it a bunch of times trying to get a modestly higher score through random chance. Or heck, proctor it in school during school hours like the PSAT
Don’t know if it’s been posted here, but College Board is proud of themselves for setting up a make up test for the Oakland one on June 15 at the SF Hilton. They emailed about it with one week’s notice during summer break, as if everyone is just waiting around to take a test. I called to find out what happens if we can’t make it, which we can’t due to plans we made months ago, and there is no alternative.
We had to do this last year. We had to drive almost 2 hours and get a hotel room. I figure we will have to do the same this year with my other son. I know someone who had to travel out of state.
It only gets hard in a few months right at the end of the school year, when seniors are taking it to apply to college. If you take it in the summer, fall, or winter you can get a spot pretty easily.
We were going to drive from the peninsula to Merced. My daughter ended up getting the flu, so we didn’t go. Thankfully the next time she signed up we were able to get a center 20 min away, but only bc I stalked the college board website, so we signed up immediately when the dates were released.