Process. State funded schools should be required to admit residents overwhelmingly over foreign and alien students.

However the amount of funding the state contributes to the public university system has declined sharply. The only way colleges can offer financial aid to needy in state students is to admit more out of state and international students who pay higher tuition.

Years ago UC Berkeley admitted about 5% out of state students. Now it is 23%.

I've been evaluating applications for Berkeley for over 10 years. This year there were 73,000 applications. The freshman class is somewhere between 4-5,000 students. It's probably one of the most competitive universities in the country.

my son is one of them, much to my dismay.

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/04/18/campus-releases-freshman-admission-data/

That's not the size of the freshman class. Not everyone who is admitted registers. 40% is about the percentage of students admitted who actually come.

Congrats on you son's acceptance. It was a very competitive pool this year.

I'm proud of my son for being admitted, but CAL was not my first choice for him. He turned down a full tuition offer at a private school (ranked in the top 50) that I would have preferred. He is very excited about going to CAL.

There's an interesting aspect of affirmative action here in CA in regards to education, so I see why Asians are fighting this. On a level playing field, Asians score better academically. So if admission is tied to merit only, then whites come in second. They're the ones who need affirmative action.

And it hasn't been to help white applicants. In fact, that was one of the widespread but rather subdued outcries in response to the geography-based approaches they tried at first: That policies that were supposed to help people of color disproportionately helped whites.

Of course, the entire problem was that East Asians weren't considered "people of color". SE Asians were a distinct enough cohort that they wanted, at least at the time, to be included under the affirmative-action umbrella. S. Asians were a small enough group as to not be very much present in the discussion.

In other news, many of those who were against affirmative action viewed the increase in East Asian admits as proper. They were better qualified under what were purported to be race-neutral policies, and in process-fair system of values that was an acceptable outcome. Sort of "may the best student win."

Don't know what happened under the "overcoming obstacles" way to have a covert affirmative action program.