- Rejected EVERYWHERE
@CaliDad2020, say did D try for CalPoly-SLO?
Don’t know about ME, but for CS, many people seem to think well of it (same with SJSU).
I can see the concern about McGill.
@ethellou I had lower stats, no hook, and needed financial and I was accepted by all five of my UCs (UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UCSC, Cal). I suspect it was something about your essays. Were you asked to submit recs?
Btw I got dinged by a music school. I can only conclude they took someone who played better, which is unfair to those of us whose musical ability is challenged.
@CaliDad2020
You have distilled the frustration of many Californians in your posts. Please use excerpts from your posts to send a letter to the auditor who drafted the original report critical of the current situation. They meet with UC officials on Wednesday April 6. I think the list of your daughter’s acceptances juxtaposed with her UC rejections says it all. For convenience, you can use this form letter provided by Pres. Napolitano’s assistant. Just change the subject and replace the form letter with your own words. http://www.uc4ca.org/take-action.html
Or just use the contact information to send the message separately. Who knows, it might land in the right inbox.
Did your daughter appeal any of the decisions? Success is not high, but sometimes it works.
Well see, here’s the thing: you have to play the UC holistic admissions game. UC admissions readers look for different stuff in the essays than say, Michigan, which is much more numbers-oriented than UC.
Also, among the numbers, UCs appear to weight grades/GPA much more heavily, and test scores much less heavily, than what most people assume or what most other schools probably weight them. So the test-score-heavy applicants (who seem to be most of the ones complaining about rejections or waitlists at UCs that they thought they should have gotten into) should not assume that test scores much higher than typical will make up for GPA that is below typical (or in the typical range when applying to an oversubscribed major like engineering or CS where one needs significantly higher credentials than usual).
@bluebayou, I would not say that UMich is more numbers-oriented these days. Plenty of OOS kids with super-high stats get rejected there these days.
What they seem to be is more class-composition-oriented. In admissions, they behave almost like a private nowadays in that they want to get a certain number of various demographics (including female engineers) and do well in the metrics that USN measures by (which includes a high yield rate and hifh test scores).
If anything, it’s the top UCs who seem to be more formulaic, where GPA, class rank, demographic (region, first-gen, etc. but not race and probably not gender), and essay can explain a lot on chances.
The lower UC’s do some strange things that certainly look like yield-protection.
To the point on the UC’s GPA focus, has anyone found examples of kids who are in the top 1 percentile by the UC GPA calcs who did not get in to one of Cal/UCLA/UCSD?
If not, then it seems that there is a clear path to the top UC’s for CA residents: just get in the top 1% by UC GPA.
There are probably some that are not too hard to find, particularly among those applying to highly popular majors (e.g. engineering majors). For those majors at UCB/UCLA, when there are so many applicants pressed up against the maximum possible GPA, things like essays and other subjectively graded (and often non-observable from the outside) criteria increase in importance. Also, test scores do count some, even though they count less than most people seem to think.
The website breaks down costs/student and UCLA has significantly higher instruction cost per student and academic support cost per student. Several things may be contributing to this. First, UCLA faculty are experts at extracting over-scale pay for their positions. It’s common practice to go on job interviews and use offers from other institutions to leverage a pay raise at the home institution. The data must be out there somewhere, average UCLA faculty salaries compared to other campuses.
Second, the dirty little not-so-secret of all the UC campuses is that they admit a huge number of students who are frankly just not prepared to attend college. UC admits students in the top 10% of all high schools, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some high schools in LA and surrounds that award A’s for nice well behaved kids who show up every day and try hard. That is why there is such a disconnect between the SAT scores and grades, and why UC favors grades. Since affirmative action was disallowed they have to find some way to offer a chance to kids from failing school systems. But these kids are overwhelmed when they get to campus and find themselves competing with kids from top high schools. They end up in remedial courses with intensive (and costly) personal tutoring. The LA Times had a poignant write-up on such a student that ended up struggling at Berkeley. Bringing ill-prepared kids up to the level needed to receive a diploma from UCLA probably drives up academic support costs, but it’s not clear how UCR, which has an even higher number of unprepared kids, does this more cheaply.
@ucbalumnus, UC’s don’t allow a second choice major?
@momsquad Thanks for that. I appreciate that folks are being proactive. She is appealing, but I’m afraid she has made the mental adjustment.
Again, she will be fine, we’ll find the money, but everyone needs to know that -
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the UCs are not serious about fixing the gender and URM disparity in engineering. They will hide behind 209 but there is a culture there that is similar to Med school in the 50s “women and ‘others’ aren’t cut out for engineering.” It is changing, but the UCs will be at the back of the wave, not the front.
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The President, Regents, Chancellors and Deans are playing chicken with your kids. They think if they force this to a crisis by claiming they can’t afford more CA kids (but can afford more Deans, mansion renovations and low OOS tuition for OOS applicants) that the legislature will have to give them more money (for more Deans, mansion renovations and low OOS tuitons.) But as the LA Times reported the UC admin pool is twice as deep if not more than many privates.
So taxpayer beware. Being a “9%” is only enough to get you in to the last school on your kid’s list - if that. The best slots are being sold to less capable OOS and foreign students and many of your kids will be SOL rather than SLO…
@purpletitan She looked very closely at SLO but was slammed with midterms and her other apps at the time it was due and we just decided we had to put a limit. Frankly, we had looked at things like UCI’s 1799 SAT average for engineering and just never imagined she would not get in there and/or Davis. We, obviously, were naive.
Live and learn.
@bluebayou Ok. So what is the “game?” What is it that she should have written that would make her more attractive than her stats, ECs, commitment to science and engineering? How is it that 400 or 600 words or whatever is going to make UC Irvine suddenly find her 4.3 compared to their 4.09 average and 2190 compared to their average of 1799 more compelling?
What is it the UC’s look for in an essay that U Washington, or NYU-Tandon or UC Santa Cruz doesn’t?
It sort of beggars the imagination, really, that her essays were so poor as to cause a 300 point “deflation” of her scores. If that is the case, then “holistic” is a synonym for “whatever we feel like at the moment.”
Re #170
But can differences in faculty pay rates really account for UCLA costing twice as much as UCB (and three times as much as UCSB) for instruction costs?
Also, the 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. UCs do not have local area admissions like CSUs.
@momsquad I remember reading that story last year. It’s was pretty heartbreaking. I was sure the student profiled wouldn’t last another year, but I just did a little googling and it seems like he’s still at Cal and will be graduating next year (looks like he’s majoring in theater). Here’s the story if anyone’s interested:
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-c1-cal-freshmen-20130816-dto-htmlstory.html
@ucbalumnus except, of course, her GPA and SAT scores are BOTH higher than the UCI engineering average.
So there seems to be no real explanation for that one…
“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.”
Her GPA is also higher than the Davis average GPA, as well as the Davis average SAT.
Sorry, try again… Maybe we go back to the essay theory?
Re #171
Second choice major policy varies by campus. UCB and UCLA do not consider alternate majors, but other campuses “may” do so.
@CaliDad2020 Have you considered appealing any of the UC rejections?