Should you answer the UC application income questions?

FFormer UC Berkeley admissions readers say household size, parents' education and family income shape how a reader judges an applicant's record, yet parents filling out the UC application often treat those questions as optional. Many skip them out of privacy, or from a sense that the numbers can only hurt a student who already worries about looking ordinary.

The instinct is understandable, and it rests on a guess about what happens to those numbers once a reader sees them. Berkeley's own research, published in the 2005 Hout report, shows what readers were actually trained to look for, and it changes how a family should think about every field on that page, starting with what the reader can and cannot see.