Thanks. Do you know if SLO typically awards much aid to low income students from under resourced communities, or is the financial aid reliant on your Cal Grant and Pell Grant awards.
Cal Poly SLO offers need-based aid to students through Federal Grants (Pell Grants, FSEOG and Work study), State Grants (Cal Grant and Middle Class scholarship) and Cal Poly Grants (State University Grants (SUG), State Education Opp. Program (EOP).
Also students may receive Merit scholarships and Federal student loans are available.
Was the student able to find their FA package information?
Cal Poly like all the CSU’s do not claim to meet full-need.
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Thank you. I’m in the process of working with her but like many students, she’s a little intimidated by the system. Since her parents are non-English speakers, I’m trying to simplify it as much as possible to make it easier to translate. I appreciate your precise info. It will really help.
To be honest, they offer minimal financial aid, so there will be a gap in the cost of attendance.
They have Cal Poly Scholars, EOP and Trio Achievers programs to help low-income students.
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I couldn’t agree with Sushiritto more and disagree with london3 less. CP has many great majors, and further, companies recognize the value of a CP education. My daughter graduated in 2022 as a Journalism major with a minor in Business Sales from the business school. She quickly had 2 great job offers December of her Senior year, and is now working at one of them in tech sales doing fabulously!
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Not sure if these are included in the examples others provided, but I have also seen Institutional Grants this year for Health Services Fee, Campus Fee, Housing, and Mustang Success.
eta: these appear on the same page as Cal Grant, Pell Grant, SEOG, Cal Poly Scholars, etc.
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3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Cal Poly SLO Freshman Class of 2027 Waitlist Discussion
I read something on the CalPoly SLO reddit about the calendar moving to year-round even after the decision to switch to semesters, because they can’t deal with demand. Does anyone know if this is true?
Parents received this email earlier today:
April 4, 2023
To the Cal Poly Community:
Welcome to spring quarter! Our final 10 weeks always feel like a sprint, so I hope everyone had a chance to rest and refresh over the break.
My messages to the community this year have frequently mentioned the need for Cal Poly to grow. There are many kinds of growth, but for a university the central form is increasing the number of students we serve.
There are two main reasons why Cal Poly needs more students: (1) every year we turn away enough exceptionally qualified applicants to fill every seat on campus, and there are new incentives from the CSU and the governor to graduate more students, as well as consistent demand from employers for Cal Poly graduates; and (2) one of the few avenues to increase revenue on campus, without asking students to pay more, is to increase enrollment—and we need that additional revenue to achieve important goals.
One of those goals is ensuring that we grow sustainably. That means that classes must be available when students need them, that we continue to fund the enhanced financial aid that is helping Cal Poly better reflect the diversity of California, and that we don’t overburden our physical or human resources.
A second important goal is raising employee compensation to be both competitive with salaries at peer schools and adequate to meet the Central Coast’s high cost of living. The fact that Cal Poly has such exceptional faculty and staff is a testament to the dedication of those individuals, rather than to the excellence of their compensation. That must change, and as soon as possible, or we risk losing and not being able to replace the very people who make Cal Poly what it is.
Another goal is upgrading and expanding facilities on campus to better educate our students and better support faculty and staff. Like many institutions, universities face a classic chicken-and-egg problem: We can’t expand enrollment until we grow our facilities, but we can’t grow until we expand. Such problems are solved through changes and economies that make modest expansion possible and then using new revenue to fund additional changes necessary for further growth.
For example, there are many non-academic staff offices on campus that do absolutely essential work but don’t really need to be on campus to do it (a valuable lesson from the pandemic). So, we are in the process of finding lower-cost, off-campus space for them to relocate into, thereby freeing up higher-cost space on campus for academic purposes. More details will be shared soon on this initiative.
As well, we have several transformative building projects ready to start on campus in coming months, including the long-awaited library renovation, construction of hundreds of new student housing units, and groundbreaking on a second, much-needed faculty and staff housing complex. We are also excited that the William and Linda Frost Center for Research and Innovation is open this quarter. These projects will lay some of the groundwork for expanding the student body without overusing our existing facilities. And some of these projects will play more than one role, such as the use of alternative space on campus for vital library services during the renovation, which will then become flex space to accommodate other temporary dislocations during future building projects once the library transformation is complete.
We also need to make the most efficient use possible of the resources and facilities we do have. As a residential, Learn by Doing campus with high demand for enrollment and for graduates, it is a question of when, not whether, we will shift to a year-round calendar under which students would study on campus for one or two summers and off campus for one or two typical academic terms. This will allow us to expand enrollment and have a larger total student body without increasing our numbers excessively during any given term. We won’t be able to put this fully into effect until after the Quarter-to-Semester transition is complete, but we can’t wait for Quarters-to-Semesters to finish before we start discussing and planning for other needed changes. Meanwhile, we can gather valuable data through pilot projects.
Finally, I would simply like to thank you for reading through this message. I feel it is important to share my thinking with the campus community, so that we can move forward in a spirit of dialogue and collaboration.
Best wishes for a successful spring quarter.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey D. Armstrong
President
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I believe Cal Poly offers $3,000 merit to a national scholar.
The rests are need-based aid like grants.
Wow, there is a lot of change brewing at CP! Thanks for sharing.
Thank you. wow. A very long winded way of saying they are making more changes to the schedule.
It sounds like one or two forced summer terms and one or two forced fully remote in order to handle all the students.
Edit: I used the term ‘forced’ to apply only to those students already attending who do not appear to like the idea. I’ve read online and heard some personal feedback that made it sound like quite an unpopular change.
Anyone going into the university from this year forward will do so with their eyes wide open.
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I have no idea what the final calendar will look like eventually, but we’re talking about 2026-2027 for the quarter-to-semester change and then they’ll probably implement the year round academic year post-quarter-to-semester change, maybe a year or two or more later. Just a guess.
Two things.
- I’d say there are already schools like Dartmouth that run year around, where students can pursue internships during any season of the year, which could be a huge competitive edge over students from most schools that only allow summer breaks for internships.
Someday, Cal Poly students will be able to schedule leave to undertake field research, internships, travel, work, or to just take a break any season of the year maybe.
- My D21 will likely be taking summer courses while she works this summer in SLO, and I don’t think that it’s all that rare amongst SLO students right now.
“Learn by doing,” right?
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Yep. I’m sure some students will think it’s fine. I haven’t heard any feedback like that yet - mostly it’s from students already studying there who do not like the changes.
Fully online was not popular anywhere during covid and I’m sure that’s where some of those feelings come from. I think families who depend on their student to return during the summer for whatever personal reasons they may have, will also not appreciate it.
My kids went to a year round elementary school for the exact same reason - too many students. I quite liked the flexibility of having a different schedule to the rest of the country!
Humans fear change. It’s normal.
I saw the Reddit posts. They just haven’t thought it through, mostly because it’s all just theoretical without any detail. I’ll bet the academic calendar will be flexible enough to accomodate families and I’m sure they’ll offer exemptions.
D21 has one GE class this quarter that’s fully remote. D had choices of in-person classes and doesn’t mind having one remote class, which is being held in the evenings.
Cal Poly will want to maintain their “preferred” standing amongst graduating HS seniors, but they’ll still have 9 UC’s and 23 CSU’s (and CC’s) to choose from.
Actually, I’ll bet some of the other CA publics may also want to increase their enrollment in the same fashion one day since some cannot increase their footprint.
At any rate, my D will have graduated before any of the changes.
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For those keeping track, after an excruciating wait, my D2 was accepting today to business administration. So for those that haven’t heard, don’t lose faith. We are US citizens living abroad. California natives but most of high school was completed in Texas. D1 is class of 2025 and having the time of her life!
SLO GPA (9-11th a-g courses with an 8 semester Honors point cap for 10-11th eligible classes): 3.38
Number of UC approved Honors/AP/IB or DE courses: a lot of honors, 8 AP
EC hours and with leadership or job related: worked throughout high school at an international fashion business.
Major: business administration
In-State/OOS/International: OOS/international
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*accepted
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This is my take too. Change is part of life and we always resist it. Cal Poly’s new plan (5+ years from now it looks like) is sensible and mimics what other universities such as Purdue and Northeastern do–offer studying abroad, etc to help with demand for housing, resources, etc. I’m NOT a fan of remote learning but I know many Cal State students this year (trained up on remote learning with covid) are content with taking the occasional remote class. I’ve heard it’s nice to take an occasional 8 am class online on a cold winter morning while still in PJs in bed.
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I know quite a few students at SLO now who take an online class amongst their in person classes. They all like it because it gives them more flexibility.
One class a quarter is completely doable and many actually seek it out to make a crazy schedule manageable.
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