What was your UC score?
@proudparent26 Well, I dunno. a 2190 is 98th %, 750M 97% 710R 96th % 730WR 98%
From the UCI website: “In fall 2015, the Samueli School enrolled 672 freshmen. As a class, they had the highest-ever average GPA of 4.09 and an average SAT score of 1,799. Forty-eight percent are first-generation college students and 35 percent are from low-income families. This past year, the school granted 642 bachelor’s degrees, 324 master’s degrees and 89 doctorates.” http://engineering.uci.edu/about/facts-and-figures
So, she has 390 points ABOVE the SAMUELI SAT average - not the whole school. The engineering school. Now, there are some structural problem to the UC engineering that give them great leeway in screwing over students when they want. Irvine has relatively few ME slots - 112 or so. EE was her second choice - and they have the same 111 or so. Unlike many schools where you apply to engineering then chose a major (or even UWash which will admit a certain number of kids, like my D, directly to the major and put a certain number of others in a pool that has to apply in - and therefore get good grades for the more competitive majors.
But at the end of the day the fact is UC Irvine Samueli passed over a resident kid with an SAT score almost 400 pts above their average. A kids with extremely strong ECs and a clear, demonstrated passion for engineering. And, by the way, UCI Samueli has only 744 female undergrads to 2362 Male undergrads… I mean, it kinda makes you wonder if they don’t actually discriminate against women, doesn’t it… I mean, they aren’t by law allowed to look at gender, but maybe her membership in SWE is considered a “fluff” EC or something by the “serious” engineers over there.
Look, I have no idea why they would pass over an in state student like my D - and it’s clear from this thread she’s not the only one - but Irvine has recently said: “UC Irvine spokeswoman Cathy Lawhon said that there is room on campus for more students but state funding won’t accommodate more Californians. The higher tuition nonresidents pay more fully covers costs. “Even if we took no more out-of-state and international students, we would not be able to take more Californians,” she said.” You draw your own conclusions. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-me-ln-uc-admit-20150702-story.html
Last year 424 engineering undergrads were OOS out of 3122 students. (btw, in 2015 241,533 kids took SAT, assuming the % values hold for CA, that means a max 7200 kids scored better in a single sitting than my D. Even assuming every one of them applied to UC engineering (which means not a Math, Physics, Bio, or Lit major in the bunch.) there are 3150 enroll in UCB COE, UCLA Sam has 2750, UCSB Jacobs, 6677… so right there we are over 10,000 engineering admits. And that’s admits - those 3 schools accept what? 1.5x the number who SIR?
UCSB’s only admits 350 or so engineering but the SAT averages for 15-16 Engineering: 616R 697M 326WR (that must be a typo - probably 626) GPA: 4.12 http://bap.ucsb.edu/institutional.research/campus.profiles/campus.profiles.2015.16.pdf My kid is 100 pts. higher on R. 50 pts higher M, 100 pts higher WR.
I mean, the more I dig into this the more I just go ■■■. The UC’s really are an unsolvable mess. Wow.
Oh well, I’m sure every school will get a Dean of Domestic Enrollment next year, with a new house and a new car.
CaliDad:
My guess is that it was her UC essays, which as you know are much different than the other schools to which she applied. Academics/grades are only one part in the holistic admissions process. Being privileged enough to attend/participate in a JHU program is not necessarily seen as a positive to UC. 
Re: http://collegemeasures.org/4-year_colleges/state/ca/compare-colleges/cost-per-student/
Something is a little odd about the UCs listed in the link above. Why is UCLA so much more expensive than every other UC in terms of cost to educate a student? Unless there is an accounting oddity or inconsistency, it seems hard to believe that UCLA should cost nearly twice as much as UCB or UCI and three times as much as UCR, UCSB, or UCSC to educate a student (the latter three cost not much more than the in-state tuition amount, if the numbers are to be believed). UCD and UCSD are also somewhat higher cost than UCB or UCI, but much lower than UCLA. UCM is not listed for some reason.
The CSUs appear to be far more consistent in their reported costs. The outlier, CMA seems explainable by its small size and curricular focus. Two other more expensive ones, CSUCI and CSUMB, are small newer campuses.
Not that I have a dog in this fight, but why reject UCSC out of hand? While Riverside is located in armpitsville and Merced is California’s UTEP, Santa Cruz is close to the ocean, Silicon Valley and appears to be a decent choice for engineering unless civil or mechanical are your thing.
Given the difference in cost between this and your other options, it wouldn’t be a terrible choice.
@CaliDad2020, I’m close to certain that McGill won’t cost an extra $100K more than in-state UC costs. I think McGill would cost barely more, if any.
And if she gets the Bachelor of Arts & Science degree there, it would be even cheaper. In fact, that may be even cheaper than in-state at a UC.
McGill tuition and fees for international engineering undergraduate students are about C$38,000 per year, which converts to about US$29,000 per year, not including living expenses.
@fragbot I actually asked her if I could take her slot at Santa Cruz. I’d love to go there. We have a good friend whose daughter is there and enjoying. My D just didn’t respond to the campus or location (but her outlook might have been colored by preconceived notions. I thought it was awesome.) McGill is a bit cheaper, as is UWash, but 30k tuition and Montreal winters is still not 13K and La Jolla, or Westwood, or Isla…
@purpletitan She loves Montreal, and is almost bilingual in French, but it’s a long way to go, they have drastically increased the “out of Canada” tuition (a friend of ours went there 7 or 8 years ago and it was 15k Canadian, it’s gone way up recently) and a few of our engineering friends have cautioned that the alumni networking is not close to what UMich, SC or UWash (or UC’s…) could give if she returns to the west, so it might not be worth the short term savings in the long run.
But she hasn’t made any decisions yet. We told her to relax, surf the school’s sites and talk to folks for a week or so before she makes up her mind.
@ethellou I don’t think UC score is used for admissions outside of guaranteed acceptance to the “lowest” UC (Merced in this case)
Wait, UW is cheaper than UCSC? That’s a surprise. UW is a good choice with one caveat: did she get direct admission to her preferred major? If she didn’t and she’s into, say, CS or bioengineering, there’s a modicum of risk in a year or two.
We don’t have the concept of impacted majors but all UW STEM majors are competitive except for physics.
Note that UCs do have a reputation of strongly favoring first generation to college students and those from low income families. They also have a reputation of weighing test scores less heavily than what many expect.
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/freshman-admissions-summary indicates that, last year, UCI applicants with 3.80-4.19 GPA had only a 57% admission rate. While your kid had a GPA in the upper part of this range and higher than typical test scores, she also applied to a presumably more popular / impacted major than the school overall (i.e. higher admission threshold). So It was hardly a slam-dunk admission for her, and perhaps the admission readers did not like her essays (evaluation of essays tends to be the most opaque aspect of college admission from an outside observer’s point of view).
@bluebayou well, I’m not sure what’s so “privileged” about attending the Hopkins Engineering Innovations (in LA, btw - they run them all over the country) aside from getting accepted to the class - which is not a sure thing - and paying just a bit more than a 5 unit UCLA summer school course. And when you look at UCB and UCLA and see they want a “demonstrated commitment” to engineering, well, you can go build your own skyscraper in the Vet Cemetery or you can take a freshman engineering course and see if you really are going to want to devote 5 years of your life to it. She took an college level summer art course at UCLA too - to see if she was more into that.
Of course it “could” be her essays. But her essays got her into a number of other schools - and each of them wanted their own special essays. And the reality is, if it was her essays it is because they are looking for an excuse to keep her out. They are not looking at a dedicated women in engineering with very strong scores, a deep and interesting commitment to science lab work, engineering, design, as well as sports (6 varsity letters), volunteer work (2 years of tutoring foster kids, which she is still doing even after the school acceptances are done), great recs etc.
This is really the thing. If it was her “essays” at 6 campuses (and UCB did ask her for more info and she sent a great letter from the Phd student she is working with at Cal Tech as well as the director of her tutoring.) then something is seriously messed up in the essay reading and “holistic” admissions. And then what is the thing with UC Santa Cruz? Her essay somehow sparked their particular vibe?
And here in lies the problem. Who knows? No one. The process is so fraught with “holistic” BS that in the end it keeps the % of women in engineering (and URMs, btw - that number is really tragic) nearly exactly the same. So what is the point? Why bother to tell Cal women that “yes, we really want to increase our gender diversity…” but we don’t want to add more women? I stumbled across the UCSD GPAs for undergrads. Every year since 2002 or something like, save 1, women engineering undergrads at UCSD have had better GPAs than men. EVERY YEAR!
I mean, these guys are engineers. Are you telling me you couldn’t take those top GPA applicants (which would be at least 50% and probably higher % of women) break down their applications. Write criteria that reflected the commonalities in those applications that have nothing to do with gender and reverse engineer that into the selection process. Bingo! More higher GPA students and, by default, more women in engineering, most likely.
But instead they will “holistically” read essays. We’ve all seen this article, right? http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-the-veil-on-the-holistic-process-at-the-university-of-california-berkeley.html?_r=0
Shrug. I really don’t know. I have no other answer than “starve the beast.” It’s time to defund and save our tax dollars for privates.
If there aren’t enough money to support Cali students, shouldn’t someone petition to the governor of California to increase fundings? I recently saw on the news that fundings for UCs were being reduced. That makes them have to take in more OOS.
That is one admission reader’s incomplete viewpoint. The actual process is described in much more detail in the Hout report at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/05/16_houtreport.pdf (although thresholds and such could have been very different ten or so years ago).
UCSC was also reported to short-cut the process by taking admissions reading scores from UCB and/or UCLA for applicants who applied to those campuses. However, UCSC is less selective and admits at generally lower thresholds of admissions reading scores than UCB and UCLA do. So, on a 1-5 scale (1 = best), the student’s application may have been scored 2 at UCB and UCLA, and would not have been enough if the threshold were 1.5 there. But if UCSC took the score of 2 but had a threshold of 2.5, the student would be admitted there.
It is already being starved. But starving it more won’t save you much in the way of taxes, since much of the budget is already mandatory (K-12 education) or forced by other factors (prisons, MediCal). Higher education (UC, CSU, and community colleges) is only 12% of the state budget, although that is probably about half of the discretionary budget that gets squeezed to a small slice by the mandatory and forced parts of the budget (and will be squeezed smaller again in the next recession).
@ucbalumnus But still, at the end of the day, if, say, UCSD or UCI is not admitting a female engineering student with a UC 4.13, W 4.3, 2190, 750 MathI, 720 MathII, deep engineering and science ECs, AP scholar with distinction etc. - basically 4 years + of dedicated academic work of very high quality for a 14 - 18 year old, because of two essays they were given 5 months to work on, and a few hundred words to jam into…
Well, then the system is so thoroughly broken we have no choice but to dismantle and start over.
We need to get rid of Napolitano, who is a cynical, dishonest bureaucrat-for-life. Get rid of the Dean Sastry’s of the world who claim repeatedly they will address things like gender and URM under-representation, then do nothing. Get rid of the Choudrys and their Larry Summers 19th century stalker attitude, dump the Katehi carpetbagging klepto-Chancellory and do what state colleges are supposed to do: educate the resident students.
The reality is these folks don’t care at all about California, save as a cash source for their educational fiefdoms. They changed the Dean at UCLA Samueli (and the admissions Dean) and the change they brought was…? New boss, same as the old boss.
So if, indeed, it was two essays written by a kid whose 10 - 12 other essays were ok for UMich, UWash, USC, NYU-Tandon, among others, that outweighed her other stats that are professionally monitored. I dunno. You tell me how that makes for a good educational system.
I now support starving it to death. Sell them and let them be the privates their deans and chancellors want them to be.
UC GPA of 4.13 is probably unweighted 3.7-3.8, right? Yes, it has gotten that competitive, particularly with the very heavy GPA emphasis at UC (versus lighter test score emphasis).
NYU Tandon is probably not that selective, as it is the old Polytechnic Institute/University that was not that selective. USC seems to favor test scores more than UCs. Of course, if you are cynical about it, perhaps Michigan and Washington are doing the same thing, looking at your kid as a source of out-of-state tuition money to counterbalance declining state funding. So you will support them now?
I have no dog in this fight but I must agree with @CaliDad2020.
The UC must stop this BS holistic admission. It started with UCLA couple years ago. Now UCB, UCI, UCSD, follow that bad practice. Not only that, they also have the Tufts syndrome. They have an antagonist attitude towards middle class and upper middle class parents who pay their salaries.
Getting rid of the application readers will save a lot of money for the UC.
I have been supporting the UC but I am getting tired.
@ucbalumus Maybe I should try UCD again. If Katehi can job the U of I admissions maybe she can job my kid into UCD. My D has a 3.8 at a top 10% HS. She has a 98% single sitting SAT (2190) She has a 98% SAT writing score (730). She has a 97% SAT Math I score (750). She is an AP Scholar with distinction. She got an A/4 in AP AB Calc. She got an A/5 in AP Bio. She got an A in AP Physics Mech and is now in AP Physics Elec. She has an A in AP BC calc. She has an A- in AP Comp Sci. She has won language awards, finished 3 years of French with near fluency and is now studying Japanese on-line. She got the 2nd highest lab score in the JHU Frosh engineering course she took out here. Has taken design courses at the Art Institute and UCLA. 6 Varsity letters. Medalled at science olympiad. Spent 2 + years doing lab work at cal tech as part of the SHARK/SEAL program - one of two students in her class selected. Peer mentor.
And you have the gall to play games with her credentials. Really. You cherrypicked Tandon because it’s the only school to fit your game? Perhaps you and Choudry hang together. There is no point debating this with folks who have clear agendas. The numbers are plain to see. The UCI average SAT is under 1800. Do you really want me to look up the GPAs at UCI and UCD?
My D was offered a scholarship that is offered to less than 500 students in the entire university. UMich is #5 in the country for ME according to USNews. It has a < 30% acceptance rate for the entire school - not just engineering (versus close be 45% for UCI and 40% for UCD) It has its pick of students it can get income from. USC acceptance rate is 18% and it is ranked 23rd in the country by USNEWS. That’s not just Viterbi. McGill: “The mechanical engineering admissions standard at McGill University is among the five toughest among all undergraduate programs in Canada. The rankings, based on acceptance rates and entrance averages, come from University Hub and were published online by Yahoo Canada. The article indicates that the minimum entrance averages for McGill undergraduate programs may collectively be the highest in Canada but that the standard for mechanical engineering is especially high at 95 percent.”
@ucbalumnus I noticed the same strange UCLA cost. I’ve found it in other sources, and it’s consistent from year to year. I’m also thinking it has something to do with an accounting quirk at UCLA. Some expense is being allocated to “instructional cost”. Perhaps real estate?
Grades were meh, but 35 ACT and 800 math level 2. Nobody in California wanted to take a gamble.