There were several moments in Josue Gil-Silva’s high school career when he knew he had a knack for engineering. One was at a robotics competition, when a person walked up to the chaperoning teacher and asked, “So what private school are you from?”
Gil-Silva and his parents deduced that because of the level of competition, and because his team had won first place, a stranger would assume that he and his team were from a well-funded niche private school, maybe one with an emphasis on science and math. But that’s not the case.
Gil-Silva is a senior at Alisal High School, a public high school in Salinas. He’s currently the valedictorian with a 4.643 GPA, an award-winning basketball player and the co-founder of an on-campus Chicano activism club called MEChA. This fall, he’s Stanford-bound, with plans to study engineering.
Gil-Silva could be labeled as an over-achiever, but the soft-spoken 17-year-old says he works on what he loves – and does exceedingly well. “I like to solve problems that matter,” he says.
When he talks about the activities he’s engaged in, he’s single-minded in explaining why he loves it, but doesn’t brag. He talks with equal enthusiasm about what a robotic arm is capable of or how basketball is the ultimate stress reliever. When it comes to his accolades, his parents are more likely to talk than he is.
“As parents, we both pushed effort over everything,” says his mom, Eva Silva. “As long as he did his best, we were OK,” his dad and coach Jose Gil adds. “We never forced him to become a valedictorian, but when he started doing really well we were like, ‘Oh, this is happening.’”
Gil-Silva isn’t just a product of dedicated parenting and a preternatural drive. He’s also a product of Salinas Union High School District’s efforts to get more students to apply to college.
That push comes from a practical standpoint. As a Bureau of Labor and Statistics puts it on their career outlook webpage: “More education leads to better prospects for earnings and employment.” This push has been internalized countywide from the Monterey Peninsula, where Marina High School’s curriculum is designed around an early college and career philosophy, to the Salinas Valley, where Salinas and South County students have been promised free tuition for first-time, full-time students at Hartnell College.
College-forward philosophies have long been incorporated at consistently high-performing schools like Carmel High, as well. The school has for several years had a nearly 100-hundred percent graduation rate and hovers around 75 percent of seniors qualifying for UCs and CSUs.
Monterey County schools have made big strides in producing the right students for California’s higher education system. According to the California Department of Education, 26.3 percent of high school graduates in Monterey County were meeting University of California and California State University requirements in 2008. In 2018, that jumped to 44.4 percent.
But more qualified graduating seniors and more college-bound students mean there is more competition than ever. As it’s gotten tougher to get into respected colleges and universities, some high-profile celebrity parents have been criminally charged for outright bribing their kids’ way into select schools.
Even without going so far as to commit a crime, some parents shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for extra tutoring, test prep courses and college admission essay editing, attempting to differentiate themselves. As public school districts have leveled the playing field and created more qualified students than universities can accept, students, families and school administrators are left wondering how they can hack the system. For his part, Gil-Silva thinks getting good test scores and grades is just part of it: “You have to be a go-getter.”
JUST HOW GOOD IS CARMEL HIGH SCHOOL’S COLLEGE PIPELINE? In 17-year-old Zeke Spooner’s eyes, maybe a little too good. “There’s like 15 valedictorians at our school,” says Spooner who, as of mid-May, is vying to keep his spot as one of them.
That’s because to be a valedictorian at Carmel High, students need to have maintained all As for all four years and take at least 13 Advanced Placement classes. Most countywide schools will go off of GPA – maybe two students at most will share the title.
But Carmel High is not like other public schools.
For about a decade, Carmel Unified School District has been priming it’s students to go from high school to college. The efforts show results. U.S. News and World Report has ranked Carmel High as the 43rd best public high school statewide and 330th nationally. But being on top has had side effects: students describe a high-pressure environment and parents are spending extra time and money to help their kids stay ahead of the competition.
Carmel Unified has poured resources into its College and Career Center; they pay for AP tests, offer some 16 AP classes each year, bring students on college visits, provide informational workshops, push dual-enrollment with Monterey Peninsula College and, until recently, offered SAT prep classes (most kids at Carmel High take the ACT).
Data from the California Department of Education shows Carmel Unified allocates about $22,504 per student annually, while Salinas Union allocates about $14,571 per student.
On top of that, Carmel High has involved parents who are well-acquainted with the higher education system. According to 2017 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 39 percent of Carmel residents ages 25 and over had a bachelor’s degree, while 26 percent had a graduate degree or other professional degree. That’s compared to Salinas’ 9 percent and 3 percent, respectively.
That means a lot of Carmel parents have a good understanding of what factors can increase their child’s chances of getting into what Spooner calls “reach” schools – those that are competitive to get into, like Stanford, UC Berkeley or the Ivy League.
Spooner has also benefited from college-educated parents. They’ve reviewed his application materials and taken him on campus visits to UC Davis, UCLA, Stanford and UC Berkeley. He’s watched his peers’ parents invest in extracurricular college and test prep.
But that didn’t translate to acceptance letters at dream schools for his classmates. “It’s been a really bad year,” Spooner says. “All these really smart brilliant people are getting rejection letters.” Spooner himself applied to six schools; he was waitlisted at UCLA and UC Berkeley, and rejected by Stanford. He hasn’t heard of anyone in his graduating class getting accepted to an Ivy League yet. While competitive schools like Stanford and the Ivies have acceptance rates below 5 percent, Carmel High isn’t lacking for qualified students.
Spooner was realistic about his odds – “for Stanford, it was a Hail Mary,” he says – but he was surprised to be waitlisted at top UCs. He plans to attend UC Davis this fall and study environmental science.
Carmel Unified School District spokesperson Paul Behan says the district is in transition, moving away from creating academically competitive students and instead looking to create well-rounded students – kids who are college-ready but who can stay hungry to learn beyond college. It’s a lofty idea and even the administration doesn’t quite know what that looks like yet.
But it’s different than their (successful) goal of getting 75 percent of graduates to meet the UC and CSU requirements: “At some point we reached our goal,” Behan says. “Now we have to look beyond that.”
It might mean de-emphasizing the focus on UCs and Ivy Leagues and looking to smaller, out-of-state schools. It could mean changing classroom teaching styles to focus less on numbers and grades.
However that transition will go, Behan thinks too many students and their families are banking on the idea that getting into a competitive college is what it means to be successful. “College is such a short period of somebody’s entire life,” he says. “It’s ridiculous that we’re putting so much burden on kids who have much more ahead of them, not just college.”
IF THERE WAS EVER A STUDENT AT CARMEL HIGH WHO WOULD BENEFIT FROM THE DISTRICT’S PENDING TRANSITION, it would Luna Holmes, who agreed to speak to speak to theWeekly on the condition of anonymity, using an alias. She has a 3.8 GPA, is currently taking five AP classes, and is an experienced musical arranger. She was rejected or waitlisted at all colleges she applied for, a list that included reach names like Stanford, UC San Diego, Oberlin and Pomona College. It also included Reed and UC Santa Barbara.
She’s not alone. High-performing students who asked not to be named to avoid broadcasting their personal rejections also shared their stats. A Carmel High grad with a 4.1 GPA and nine AP classes was rejected by all four UCs and one of two CSUs she applied to. A Monterey High student with a 4.2 GPA who was active in the school band, several clubs and had an internship under his belt was rejected by UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz. He was eventually offered a spot at the less-competitive UC Merced, which he didn’t even apply to. A pair of graduating seniors at neighboring Pacific Grove High both had GPA over 4.4 and varied extracurricular accomplishments; they were waitlisted or rejected at a combined six of seven UCs to which they applied.
Being an A student is no longer a guarantee of getting into college – even based on those college’s own standards.
According to UC Admissions guidelines, California students need a GPA of 3.0 or higher. If students are rejected from all UC campuses they applied to but rank in the top 9 percent of their class, they’ll be offered automatic admission to another UC campus – whether they applied or not.
Holmes was surprised to get rejection letters from UCs – schools she thought she would for sure get into. “I definitely feel like I fell victim to the ‘elite’ culture that Carmel has,” she says. To her, competitive UCs like San Diego looked, wrongly, like safety schools.
It’s not that fewer graduates are getting accepted to college, but they’re not getting into top-tier schools as competition grows. In 2008, Alisal High saw a 73-percent acceptance rate to UC campuses out of 48 applicants. In the same year, Carmel High had an 85-percent acceptance rate out of 47 applicants. Ten years later, in 2018, both schools had lower odds: Alisal’s was 60 percent, and Carmel’s 55 percent. Over that same time period, the number of Alisal High seniors applying to UCs tripled, with 148 students applying.
“What we’re seeing here is that [SUHSD] is catching up,” says Sandra Echevarria, Josue Gil-Silva’s academic counselor. She says it’s not that students like Holmes aren’t competitive, it’s that the number of contenders for the same spots is growing.
Echevarria points to a major investment in building a college pipeline: corralling freshmen into mandatory career and college planning workshops, free AP tests and test prep classes, offering more AP classes and informational workshops for parents, many of who don’t come with prior knowledge of the higher education system.
Meanwhile, Echevarria notes Salinas Union puts an emphasis on more affordable and less competitive options. For example, fewer than five students from Carmel High applied to UC Merced in 2018. (The UC information center does not track data from schools with an applicant pool of five or less.) Alisal High students had 86 applicants for that campus.
Holmes is enrolling in Monterey Peninsula College this fall, a decision that is difficult for her, as many of her peers “look down” at community college. “Man, I don’t know. I think it’s a Carmel thing,” she says.
This reaction is despite the fact she’ll start off better than many incoming freshmen at a four-year college: She’s coming to MPC with plans to major in microbiology and minor in music – and a clear plan to transfer, free tuition and a lot of scholarship money. “You only hear about the kids that go to the Ivy Leagues, but there are different ways of being successful,” she says. And she has a point.
THOUGH HOLMES DIDN’T GET INTO HER DREAM SCHOOLS THIS TIME AROUND, she plans on applying to four-year universities again after she finishes community college. There is good logic here: If there is too much competition in the freshman pool, she’ll take her competitive academic and musical talent to another smaller pool. If she maintains a certain GPA and takes specific courses at MPC, she should at least be accepted into CSU Monterey Bay and one of the six UC campuses that participate in the Transfer Admission Guarantee, an admission pathway for California community college students. (UC Berkeley and UCLA do not participate in this program.)
So can high performers game the system as transfer students? According to Hartnell College President Willard Lewallen: no.
As Lewallen explains, California’s public universities were built on a master plan that hasn’t changed much since the ’60s. UCs need accept the top 12.5 percent of high school students, the CSUs to take up the top third and community colleges take the rest.
Those target percentages haven’t changed. But the master plan wasn’t built for California’s population boom, and the amount of eligible freshmen has skyrocketed and is outpacing capacity across the board. “We’re operating on a broken system,” Lewallen says.
According to CSUMB’s Vice President of Admissions Ronnie Higgs, six CSUs out of 23 campuses have declared impaction to all majors – a formal way of saying the demand for seats outpaces capacity. That triggers popular campuses like SLO and Long Beach to prioritize enrolling qualified local students – meaning fewer spots for out-of-towners – while raising the standards for applicants from outside of their region.
CSUMB has declared impaction in five majors, without capacity to expand; Higgs estimates the school would need an additional $3 million to hire more faculty and build facilities to accommodate current demand.
“The unrealistic goal, if you will, is to accept all eligible applicants,” Higgs says.
Meanwhile UCs are on the hook from the state to accept more transfer students, with former Gov. Jerry Brown setting the ratio to two in-state freshmen for every in-state transfer student. However, that doesn’t mean transfer students are inundating campuses; according to 2017 report by the nonpartisan research nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California, out of all the community college students who planned to transfer in 2009, only 38 percent ended up doing so.
From 2012 to 2018, MPC transferred 58 students to UCs at its lowest year and 103 at its peak; Hartnell transferred 33 at its lowest and 83 at its highest.
Statewide, the growth of transfer student applicants is slower than the number of freshman applications: From 2009 to 2018, the transfer applicant pool to UCs increased by 11,798 students. In the same time period, freshman applicants rose by 83,925.
They don’t compete with each other,” Lewallen says. “They’re operating on completely different standards.”
IN THE PAST MONTH, MORE THAN A DOZEN PARENTS HAVE PLEADED GUILTY to charges of fraud in efforts to get their children accepted to elite schools. Their schemes, exposed by Operation Varsity Blues, range from bribing test proctors to bump their kids’ scores to working with graphic designers to invent phony evidence of their kids’ athletic achievements and paying coaches to recruit them.
Rick Singer allegedly made more than $25 million since 2011 from clients trying to pay their kids’ way into college. Singer agreed to partner with the FBI in hopes of a more lenient sentence. More than 50 people, including parents and Singer’s co-conspirators, from test proctors to coaches, were charged in March.
The scandal has exposed just how far monied parents are willing to go to get their kids into schools that represent status – for the parents.
Carmel High student Holmes has seen a similar type of expectation. “There are definitely kids who just go to top top colleges, just because it’s the next logical step,” she says, “just because their parents told them to. It’s sad to see these kids go to college and are just aimless. There is no passion. They don’t have a life past academia.”
Holmes herself says she tuned out advice from teachers who told her to adjust her expectations. “I think when all my science teachers were telling me that this school or that school is really hard to get into, I heard them, but I didn’t hear them,” she says. She applied anyway.
It does work for some students. Alisal’s Gil-Silva got college acceptance letters from Columbia, UCLA, Stanford and Cal Poly SLO.
“He’s earned everything that he has – his GPA, his SAT scores,” says his dad, Jose Gil.
Gil-Silva doesn’t know for sure what enabled him to get into top schools of his choice, but he attributes it to his personal statements. “I don’t think SAT scores or GPA measures your intelligence. It just shows how good you are at taking a test,” he says. “[The personal statement] is where I think I stood out. They could see I was passionate about these programs and about their schools.”