<p>A friend of mine was accepted into Berkeley School of Civil/Environmental Engineering, but was rejected from UCLA, UCSD, UCD, and even UCSB. How does something like that happen? It makes it seem like admissions are a complete crapshoot.</p>
<p>First of all why does it matter? Just pat your friend on the back for getting into one of the best engineering schools in the country.
To answer your second question: at this point no one has any clue. It could be that Berkeley’s “holistic” admissions process worked in your friend’s favor or the admissions committee may have just been in a really good mood when reading his file. Like you said, admissions can be really random sometimes. Just be grateful that the randomness ended up in your friend’s favor. </p>
<p>It just goes to show that one never knows what application will catch the eye of an admissions officer. But with such a nice outcome in this case, why worry about it?</p>
<p>I’m not worried, we were both just shocked. I was just curious if something like this is common.</p>
<p>Holistic admission. What are you shocked. UCB is well known for it.</p>
<p>Who cares? He would have picked Berkeley anyway, right? Maybe the other colleges could see that… don’t worry about it. What does it matter except to his ego whether he got in everyplace he applied?</p>
<p>Remember that Berkeley engineering frosh admissions selectivity depends on your major. And it may matter at those other campuses. Apparently counter-intuitive results may occur if the applied-to major is heavily impacted at the normally-less-selective campus but not so heavily impacted at the normally-more-selective campus.</p>
<p>My D’s best friend was rejected to UCI/UCSB/ucsd but accepted at UCLA. Her GPA is not that great about 3.8 W but this is due to her illness which she talked about it on her essay. Despite her illness though she has a lot of dancing awards at the state and national level. </p>
<p>Haven’t seen anything official on this, but I’ve heard rumors that it’s possible UC is restricting admission to only one or two campuses per student in order to maximize the number of students they can admit to the system. So rather than admit one student to five campuses, and let them pick, then have to go to the waitlist, they’ll make a solid offer to two or three students across those five campuses, expect a higher yield, and go to the waitlist less often. Nothing official, just a rumor in my world, but it makes sense.</p>
<p>@MrMom62 That’s an interesting theory and u wouldn’t be surprised if that indeed was true. The results were just sort of unbelievable when they came out. I don’t think he was overqualified for those other schools either because though he had good grades and etc. He wasn’t valedictorian or anything like that.</p>
<p>@MrMom62
My daughter applied to UCB/UCLA/UCSD/UCSB/UCI. Accepted to all. Regents @ UCLA.</p>
<p>^ This kind of thing seems like the norm to me. One of my friends knows someone who was rejected by every school they applied to except Harvard. A distant cousin of mine got rejected by every school he applied to in California except for Stanford. I got waitlisted by Boston College and rejected by Notre Dame, but then got into both campuses of Emory. I feel like at prestigious schools where almost all of the applicants are way to the right of the bell curve, and where schools know they’ll end up with a great student body regardless, it comes down to almost completely random selection.</p>
<p>Civil engineering does not appear to be that popular a major at Berkeley compared to other engineering majors, so it is entirely possible that the selection threshold for civil engineering at Berkeley is low enough to produce the results that you are seeing with this example. For example, EECS has about twice the faculty of civil engineering, but it serves four times as many undergraduates (including both EECS and L&S CS). Bioengineering has only about half the faculty of civil engineering to serve the same number of undergraduates.</p>
<p>Your friend must be very pleased about it. Berkeley’s admit rate for the College of Engineering is only 9% this year.</p>