“top 9% statewide or local eligibility will get the student into UCM, not UCLA, so any added support costs associated with students from weak high schools admitted under these schemes would be associated with UCM, not UCLA”
The point is that a 4.0 GPA does not represent the same level of preparedness from every school in CA. The critical reading score from the SAT is probably the best indicator of student preparedness, as it primarily reflects reading comprehension and ability to analyze new information. The UCLA 25-75 percentile spread for critical reading scores is 580-720; 25% of students entering as Freshmen have a critical reading score of 580 or less. If you eliminate the 30% of students who are OOS and are probably skewed to higher SAT scores (which is correlated to family wealth) the percent of Californians will low critical reading scores is even greater.
I could not find hard data on actual faculty salaries for each campus. Many analyses use generic salary at each rank, but many (most?) faculty at UCLA have negotiated salaries that are higher than the set pay for their level.
@anomander , Thank you for the update on the Cal student! There are many students like him whose stories don’t end so happily.
Her 4.13 GPA was essentially right in the middle versus UCI engineering 4.09 average. As anyone on these forums knows, just being in the range does not guarantee admission, particularly when subjectively graded criteria become important. Also, different engineering majors could have different thresholds. In addition, UCs are said to practice significant “SES affirmative action”, as it is much more politically acceptable than race-based affirmative action that was banned with proposition 209.
Berkeley is a great school. Common. It is very easy to get a high paid internship and job out of Berkeley Business, CS, or Engineering (personal info).
@PurpleTitan I think you have hit the nail on the head. I have talked to some folks who have more experience with this than us and they think she probably got caught between “yield protection” at UCI and UCD and perhaps even UCSD where her stats should have made her an automatic in the first two cases, and a likely in the second, and getting clobbered by the OOS/international tsunami at UCSB, UCB and UCLA. UCB and UCLA were always a coin toss at best anyway, but apparently some of the UC’s act just like privates in wanting to protect their yield numbers somewhat so if they judge your application to suggest you will not matriculate there, they will waitlist or bin you.
She is looking at appeal options. UCB had already asked for additional info and is probably not a strong candidate for an appeal anyway. LA, SD or SB make a bit of sense, esp SD.
We’ll see. The hard part, I think, for her is she has other schools hounding her daily with emails, letter, postcards and phonecalls about how cool they are and then we’re trying to get her to get excited to plead her case where she is not wanted. But that’s life - she’s got to figure it out sooner or later.
When she does appeal, we’ll let you all know how it turns out.
I remember being 18 once and forming impressions about colleges from the production values of their application forms.
Though learning to separate the glitter from the substance is part of growing up.
You could tell her that there are kids who’s best in-state options are the equivalent of CalStates and try to scheme to attend schools like UCSC (not hard to find, either; just have to look a little east and north).
That message may be more effective delivered by a peer, however.
@PurpleTitan Yeah, she didn’t love Santa Cruz when we were there, but it was one of those marine layer days, so I probably need to pop back up before June hits!
She has gotten a couple of good money offers and we have made a deal with her that she will have to find x number of dollars if she wants to attend a private. She’s been downloading scholarship applications left and right and has upped her tutoring hours. We’ll see how it plays out.
As we’ve also told her, “get used to it baby” - the world if full of obstacles. The prize goes to those that find solutions.
-The UC app contains personal statements, not essays. They should be quite different than the essays written for the Common App. Here is Berkeley’s list of what to include in the statements: http://admissions.berkeley.edu/personalinsightquestions
-The family income question on the UC app is optional, but is supposed to be one of the first things that the readers see when scoring the app. I would recommend not answering that question if family income is ~ $90k - $100k+.
@calidad2020 - I definitely understand your frustration.
However, I must say I am not totally shocked. (I am shocked that she did not get into Irvine or Davis)
I remember years ago (like 5), I read in some forum about this girl who wanted to major in molecular biology who applied to only 4 top UC’s, She had a 34 on ACT with boat-load of AP classes. However, because of the rigor of her classes, she has “only” a 3,8+ GPA (unweighted). She struck out on all 4 schools.
From what I have gathered, UCs really practice aggressive “SES affirmative action” - that means, GPA is heavily considered but not so much for SAT/ACT score because they are perceived to be “class-advanged”. It has also been noted that a student should not have too many AP’s since there is a risk of pulling down your GPA.
I don’t know - perhaps these hearsay are not real but speak to my own prejudice. However, I do hear from many students at UC that the quality of students there are not very uniform. You will have a student like calidad2020’s kid with SAT around 2200 sitting next to others in the 1900’s range.
@furrydog Yeah, again, D always knew UCB COE, UCLA and even UCSD were certainly not a gimme and more like a “hope I might get in” especially in engineering. It was simply that she didn’t get accepted by any of the 6 that was a real shock. Her GPA is higher than the UC Irvine Samueli average for sure. As another poster noted, it might have been concern about yield.
Anyway, it seems to be hit-or-miss and it’s clear that the way the engineering schools accept students (applying to specific major vs. admit to school, etc.) works against the % of women applicants, which was my main concern.
4.20 average weighted GPA for residents, 4.18 for non-residents. So admitted residents have a higher weighted GPA.
So basically, we have two different statistics being looked at.
The more important thing that the report is showing is that standards appear to have decreased RELATIVE to where they were.
In other words, it was arguably previously harder for out-of-state students to get in than in-state students, but through time that differential has been relaxed. Seems to make sense to me - more out-of-state students being admitted means you will go deeper into that pool…
That said, as a neutral observer, I do have to note that in that report they don’t seem to have the average SAT scores for in- vs out-of-state students, perhaps because the data would look unflattering to the point they were trying to make.
(versus unweighted 3.90, 3.92, 3.91 for resident, non-resident domestic, and international admits mentioned previously)
Residents do get more possible courses counted as “honors” for UC-weighting purposes (non-residents can only use AP and IB courses, not some other honors courses as listed on the UC doorways site). However, it is likely that most applicants had more than enough AP or IB courses get the maximum honors points. Perhaps non-residents had more total courses on average, so that, with the cap on the honors points, their GPA bump for the same number of honors points was slightly smaller. But the differences were only 0.02 in either direction.
But then the mix of divisions and majors applied to may not necessarily be the same. Indeed, a proper analysis would look at each division/major admissions bucket. Actually, instead of looking at GPAs and other stats, doing the comparison by admission reading scores and seeing if there is a difference in resident / non-resident threshold reading score to be admitted in each admissions bucket would directly show what is being sought.
^^^ Agree more granular data to analyze would be better. Do we not agree, though, that the time-series based statistics in the report broadly show that it became relatively easier for out-of-state students to get admitted during the last 3 years or so? (Unless the composition of majors for in-state versus out-of-state students is jumping around each year.) Again, still harder for out-of-state residents, but not has hard as before.
Because it’s a zero sum game, relatively easier admission for non-residents means relatively harder admission for residents. Throw in an increasingly difficult admissions environment overall, and you will get unfortunate stories like CaliDad2020’s.
It looks like the difference between the auditor’s numbers and the Berkeley link is the year. The auditor’s report goes up to 2014. The Berkeley numbers are from 2015. So may there was a (very) recent swing in the other direction (higher scores for out of staters)?
The biggest item in the report is $6.5 B out of total $13 B budget (50%) was used for administrative support. This group received 64% increase in salary from 2006 to 2015. I wonder this can be trimmed.
@CaliDad2020 I really feel bad for you. She did the right things and is a great student, but doesn’t have the opportunities that you or I would have guessed for going to school in-state. But check this out:
Doesn’t that percentage of first generation college students quite high? Maybe that gave a very large boost this year relative to other criteria.
Fortunately she has some fantastic out-of-state options, albeit much more expensive.
@innOvBr Yeah, the thing that has become clear is the UCs need more engineering slots - they are waaaay oversubscribed. I’m new to the nuances of this stuff and those schools need to expand their undergrad admissions in all the engineering schools. It’s kind of important for the future of the state.
My D will do fine and we will find the money. It is galling, however, to see her do everything right, to watch people like Davis Chancellor Katehi continue to work/bilk the system, to hear we have no money and to watch OOS and international students with lesser stats get the plum slots.
Most importantly, however, the UC Engineering schools have to find ways to make good on their promises to address retention and yield for women and URM students. The top STEM women and URMs are going elsewhere and we are going to be left in the dust. We are exporting a lot of brain energy because our engineering departments are lost in the 50s.
No, sorry, I matched it up in my post above. In-state had higher weighted GPA for 2014-2015, and out-of-state had higher unweighted GPA for 2014-2015. UCBAlumnus gave some reasons why there may be the difference…
