Ramine Cromartie-Thornton is just the kind of student that UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau wants to attract to his campus to increase ethnic diversity: She is African American, has a grade point average of about 4.2, a 1310 SAT score and plans to major in engineering.
But eight other universities want her, too, including Harvard, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania. In the end, UC Berkeley wasn’t even in her top three.