From way back at post #147 (I’m still catching up!)-
It seems to me it’s a bit greedy to complain about not having enough high quality colleges for your kids when your state holds 6 out of the top 12 spots on the USNWR ranking of public colleges and universities.
If you live in Maine your state flagship is #97 and no other state schools are even nationally ranked. UC Merced, which everyone here seems to see as the garbage can of the UC system, is ranked #87 and San Diego State is #68.
University of Washington has its own problems in that many of its departments are undersized relative to student demand for their majors (CS and engineering majors being the most obvious examples), so that gaining direct admission to CS (for example) is quite difficult, and admission to CS (for example) after enrolling as undeclared is highly competitive. The grass is not always greener elsewhere.
The on the spot test is actually what they do at Cambridge University. You show up, get interviewed by senior faculty, then sit down for a two-hour test in your proposed major.
“So, the message then is that future prospective UC applicants had better follow at least some of the points on VickiSoCal’s list if they want a top-tier UC?”
No, that’s not necessary. They had better be really smart, work hard, be committed to their ECs and write good essays. Being self-motivated is hugely important, many kids are not, and that’s where all of those helicopter parenting/tiger mom points seem to come from. I see lots of kids who are self-motivated about sports, but its perfectly possible to be self-motivated about academics and ECs instead. And it helps a lot to not just focus on CS/Eng (I get told repeatedly that kids need to study something practical in college, which I find bizarre for very smart kids whose careers will rely more on their intelligence than on what they learn in college). Why not do math instead (as an example of an L&S course that can provide good potential opportunities at top companies)?
My twins (incidentally white, not Asian, not that it makes a difference) did precisely zero of the things on that list (no tutors, self-prepped for tests with Khan Academy, single sitting for SAT/ACT, no Bs to worry about as they monitored grades themselves and took up any concerns with the teacher, no music, no “academic” ECs). But they are great self-motivated kids and both got into all the UCs they applied to, including Berkeley and UCLA. Yes good fortune played a role. But not helicopter parenting.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending how you look at it, yes, at least to some extend. As a parent, I didn’t do all the points in @VickiSoCal 's list. But I don’t see anything wrong with doing some of them.
Isn’t real life like that? People competing Olympics do that. If one wants to get into the NBA, he’ll have to do that.
When I first came to the US, I worked from 3:30 - 7:30 am everyday (3:30 - 9:30 am on Sundays), 365 days a year. Then I got home (an apartment shared with others in similar situation), packed lunch (and most of the time also dinner), and got to school and didn’t come home until late, took a quick shower, then went to bed, woke up at 3:00 am, … I lived like that until 3 days before I started a job as a design engineer at a local firm.
If one doesn’t want to play that game, fine. But don’t complain too much.
They need the OOS kids to find the schools, but they definitely take spots away from qualified in state students. GC says for some publics like VA, UNC, an OOS applicant needs higher stats, but at UCLA, since there are so many CA applicants, those accepted from OOS can get by with lower stats than the in state kids. If I was in CA, that might piss me off
Current objective verifiable reality is that CA has cut funding for the UC system from 23k per student to 8k per student. When you pay for a smaller pie, you get a smaller pie.
The UC’s are using OOS students to give CA residents a bigger pie than they’re paying for. Cut the OOS students and you’d also have to cut the IS students that are being subsidized by those big OOS tuition bills.
The 91%-er does not have more of a “right” to it than the 99%-er.
My students don’t care about class and ethnicity, but academic quality. It is simply naive to assume that the same opportunities exist in all campuses equally; they do not. What you’re saying or implying is that the 91%'ers should be given greater access than the 99%'ers.
At earlier points in UC history, opportunities could be given to some less high-performing students without reducing access to the higher performers. That is no longer true, so UC is choosing this practice at its peril. So students, keep voting with your feet.
It’s also quite naive to assume that all high-performing students are of a higher class than lower-performing students. Untrue, and that is one reason why – many years ago – the first ELC policy and practice were put into place. High performers do not correlate neatly with income. My Questbridge student this year was one casualty of the messed-up admissions practices under Napolitano. Her priority is NOT ethnic and class “equality.” Her priority is budget. She couldn’t care less about the attrition that causes.
“Isn’t real life like that? People competing Olympics do that. If one wants to get into the NBA, he’ll have to do that.”
No, people who want to be in the Olympics or NBA have to be self-motivated. Helicopter parenting won’t get them there.
But I don’t know how you persuade a kid to be self-motivated about academics if he or she doesn’t want to be.
Not so.
Please see http://www.admission.ucla.edu/Prospect/Adm_fr/Frosh_Prof17.htm
OOS stats are actually slightly higher than In-state stats.
@epiphany - are you at a public or private school?
To clarify, there are some top students who don’t get into the UCs. There are a good many students who aren’t eligible for the “top 9%” of students including homeschooled, charter-schooled and some private schooled kids. I know several students who didn’t get into UCSD, UCD, UCSB, (and of course UCLA and UCB) whose test scores and UC gpa’s were very high. (1530 SAT, UC capped gpa; normal weighted gpa is 4.8) No rhyme or reason that I can see.
This year has been quite a roller coaster for some of these students.
Although I am happy with the choices my daughter might have through WUE, this forum makes me come back to my original question. If all of the UCs are supposedly equal, why not funnel the OOS students there? Well, obviously that’s a rhetorical question…it’s because they can pay to play. You OOS’er get LA or Santa Barbara…you kid from San Diego get the San Juaquin valley. In the meantime, CA students here are being compared to those competing in the Olympics or NBA to compete for UC slots. No wonder our kids are so freaking stressed out!
A high school’s weighted GPA is meaningless without knowing the weighting system; there is no standard way (other than perhaps the well known UC/CSU way) of calculating weighted GPA.
Seems that exaggerated high school weighted GPA may be inducing some students to overreach. E.g. they may look at the 4.4 weighted GPA on their high school report card and see how it is higher than the GPAs listed on UC admission stats, not realizing that their 4.4 weighted GPA comes from (for example) a 3.5 unweighted GPA that becomes a 3.8 UC weighted-capped GPA with the limit on honors +1 points.
There are plenty of chance and similar posts regarding the UCs and CSUs that do not (initially) include a UC/CSU weighted-capped GPA, but only mention a high school weighted GPA. So it seems that many students do not realize that to make a reasonable assessment of how one stands with UC/CSU admissions, they need to recalculate their GPAs instead of taking what their high schools give.
I think a lot has to so with what majors they apply for. Engineering and Stem majors are crazy competitive everywhere. In liberal arts we noticed that the kids who applied business or undeclared seemed to have more acceptances. Mine applied Sociology which I would not have thought would be as competitive but clearly we were wrong.
The new norm - at least in CA is that you must be high stats just to be in the game. Sports, EC’s, leadership, community service used to make a kid stand out. Now it’s just average and needed to even qualify for consideration.
Sadly, cheating is RAMPANT. At least where we live. Many of the rich and truly entitled kids will do anything to win including paying people to take their standardized tests and lying on applications. They say they are stressed and get extra time for their tests. Many take adderall before tests. We want to think that cheaters will get what they deserve but most don’t. They get what they want.
Much depends on the kid too. Some care deeply about their achievements reflecting their efforts (especially if they are kids who have to work at it) and others take a more casual or pragmatic view.
My personal belief is that in the end it really doesn’t matter where you go to college as much as what you make of that time.
For certain types of job opportunities perhaps, but for undergrad and grad, I doubt most STEM students feel it is important to come to CA. (In other words, from an OOS perspective, CA is not the be all, end all for education, even for Silicon Valley hopefuls.)
Whoa. Talk about snap judgments and lack of exposure:
You are unfamiliar with the direct experiences of my students on Merced & Riverside campuses. Overall, I have found your posts over the years to be quite valuable, but in this case, It is you who are making snap judgments about students who are complete strangers to you. The reality is that Latino K-12 education in CA is markedly uneven, and mostly on the compromised side, and I would know because as a teacher credentialed in CA public education, I have taught in these compromised schools, including quite recently.
Illiteracy abounds. That doesn’t mean that none of those students have proven themselves, but far fewer than all of them, including far fewer than the UC-admitted ones, have proven that they are UC-capable. Just one anecdote out of many: a couple of years ago, one of my Irvine admits was removed from the wait list after freshman housing was filled up, so she was assigned off campus to live with an undocumented immigrant who was completely illiterate and incompetent in writing. The other student ended up feeling pressured to help write her papers for her, so much so that it demoralized her and prevented her from benefiting from the range of opportunities available on campus. She ended up dropping out and taking a gap year. Only one of many examples.
I’m on record for 14 years on CC for being pro-AA, including in economic opportunity. But that means to students who are clearly UC-ready and not being admitted for blindly political reasons, which clearly has been happening too much in this state. The Latino enrollment is a mix of prepared and unprepared students. Any other understanding reveals great naivete.
It wouldn’t matter, since the out-of-state students probably have an even more hierarchical view of the UCs (if they are even aware of the less selective ones) than in-state students and are even less likely to want to enroll at UCR/UCM (i.e. UCR/UCM can admit all of the out-of-state students they want, but they probably won’t get many to matriculate).
But that’s a choice the family makes – although I think all charter schools would have to at least offer the a-g requirements, as they are still public schools funded by tax dollars.
I’d note that a lot of homeschoolers send their kids to community colleges as teenagers, so it is very possible that many of them can take advantage of the guaranteed transfer policies from community colleges into the UC’s. I’ll bet that among high achievers, there are probably quite a few entering UC’s at age 18 as tranfers with junior standing.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on this. If not “most,” certainly a large percentage can observe “where the action is” in many categories of STEM, and that doesn’t only mean CS, but many aspects of technology, engineering, and science. They certainly feel that including CA as an academic destination is a smart move, considering the abundance of opportunities/choices after graduation.