@youcee Thats not what I see in our high school.
The pressure to get perfect grades in places like Palo Alto is so high that students are killing themselves.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/
I’m sure there are high pressure high schools. But we’re talking about the outliers, and families where success is measured by the college kids go to. There are families – even in the Bay Area! – that manage to avoid that pitfall. If you make it clear that Merced or Riverside or Cal States are fine schools you’d be happy your children attended, your kids will experience college applications differently.
Oh, and re-read post #367. Here’s someone who understands the system and has made it work for his high achieving child.
Is the problem that there aren’t enough seats in CA colleges for state residents, or there aren’t enough seats at the most popular/highly ranked campuses? Between the UCs, CSUs, and cc’s it seems like CA families have a lot of choices. High stats students aren’t being accepted to any of them?
We’re in the Bay Area. My D feels the pressure, my S not so much.
@katliamom There are certainly tiger parents out there fanning this mess, but Its not all coming from the parents. The kids are picking up signals from the media, the culture and their peers that if they don’t go to a top school they have no future and the only way to go to a top school is to be perfect all the time. A lot of us, parents, spend a good deal of time and effort on counter programming.
@gallentjill Yes, exactly.
@gallentjill forgive me, but what you’re describing is really a first world “problem” of privilege. It’s hard for me to take it seriously in the same way that it would be hard for me to take seriously you trying to tell your kiddo that it’s OK that he’s driving a Toyota even though everyone around him drives Beemers.
@austinmshauri I think there are probably enough seats in the system, it just can be hard to predict where your child’s seat is. For example, here are the middle (25%-75%) admissions stats for UCSB and UC Davis:
GPA
Davis - 3.95-4.25
UCSB - 3.96-4.25
SAT EBWR
Davis - 590-680
UCSB - 610-700
SAT Math
Davis - 600-750
UCSB - 600-750
Nearly identical. A couple of years ago I think the SAT was even a little closer. If a kid is a Regents scholar at one (~top 2%), you’d think they’d at least get in to the other, but that’s not always the case. So the guess work comes when you have to decide how many UCs do you have to apply to in order to get at least 1 acceptance and how many CSU schools (probably not Cal Poly because that is as hard to get into as a UC) you need to apply to in order to assure something.
Probably the latter. There seem to be many students who feel better going to the first or second flagship like ASU (in Arizona) than to the eighth most selective UC, even though UCR is more selective than ASU.
@youcee:
“So the guess work comes when you have to decide how many UCs do you have to apply to in order to get at least 1 acceptance”
All of them.
The UC’s should just set one application fee for applications to all UC’s.
@yousee – but why would parents or students assume that a similar statistical range would make admissions more predictable? Obviously, by law, all students within the top 9% of their high school graduating class are guaranteed admssion to the UC’s — but they can’t all go to Berkeley. And one could say the same thing about stat range for all the Ivies … but that doesn’t mean that every student admitted to Yale should also be admitted to Brown if they apply.
The problem is the same: the same high state students are applying to the same set of highly selective colleges all at the same time – and if the colleges admitted students based on similar objective standards, then you would have a small cohort of students with multiple admissions, humongous waitlists, and plummeting yield rates, because of course each student can attend only one school.
That’s why I have been advocating going back to a system where each student submits one appllication, but lists different campuses in order of preference. Then, after elimination of applicants who did not meet requisite qualifications — it would be very quickly apparent how many students overall needed to be accommodated. I actually think that under that type of students, more students would get into their top choices, because that would eliminate problem of overlapping admissons. So even at the top, a student could list Berkeley or UCLA as a top choice, but not both - so that would reduced the overall size of applicant pool for each.
What are you having trouble taking seriously? The stress that kids in high pressure environments suffer? Is the anxiety and depression of a kid in a high performing suburban school somehow not worthy of consideration?
You called this a first world problem. Well, yes. We live in the first world. These are the problems that come from living in a particular type of society, with a particular economy, culture and social pressures. The fact that these kids are not fleeing from war or facing famine does not make their pain unworthy of concern.
How many kids come on these boards panicked and miserable because they don’t feel they can live up to the expectations of their families or their communities. How many kids feel desperate because everyone expected them to go to Stanford? Of course, we, as adults, know these are not dire consequences. But kids sometimes fail to realize that. Perspective is not something all adolescents are blessed with. Meanwhile, the pain they feel is real and is worthy of our attention.
It is so screamingly clear that there are insufficient freshman seats for the amazingly qualified pool of in-state CA applicants, that I don’t even know why this is being seriously discussed. This has been building, but residents of CA have had blinders on.
Let me explain something. There is one point of agreement I have with a recent post of @calmom . In that post she pointed out that “being in the middle of nowhere” is a lame complaint. No kidding. Here’s the problem with CA residents. They have grown complacent and therefore over-expectant, with regard to UC’s. Quite recently, students and their parents regarded UC Berkeley, yes Berkeley, as a “safety.” Typically, the very accomplished student would apply to many reachy schools in the NE and MW, + Stanford, and consider Berkeley, UCLA, and USC “safeties.” The in-state option was always there in his or her mind, but also always, Berkeley or LA. In fact, many even regarded the College of Engineering at Berkeley to be a match at “worst,” even if not explicitly a safety. Part of this was insularity (ignorance with regard to the growing trend within CA – the failure to recognize that inevitable trend and population pressure, even aside from Napolitano, even aside from political agendas concerning admission policies).
But the second Elephant in the Room has been CA lifestyle. Families have been reluctant to own up honestly to their assumption that they are entitled to the comfortable CA lifestyle, including weather, amenities, cultural access, and what have you. They have been driven, overtly, by “wants.” You speak to them, and they say, “But my S/D really wants to stay here,” and in the same breath it has been obvious that they have assumed they could “stay here.” Hey, yeah: 10-12 years ago, students in the NE “just wanted to stay there,” too. But they were facing competition from equally capable echo-boomers on the opposite coast. Newsflash! Now the shoe is on the other foot.
There is no excuse, i.m.o., for Napolitano’s priorities or for admitting seriously under-qualified students to UC. But entirely eliminating over-admitted groups would still not make enough spaces for the UC-super-qualified students who are residents of CA. Not enough spaces, and families in CA are still largely, as I write this, utterly out of touch with The Math.
I remember a post I made, and a reply to it, from CC 1.0 back somewhere between 2004 and maybe 2010 or so. Some posters from the NE were going on and on about how Family X “just couldn’t” consider moving out of the NJ area because of his/her Italian relatives there and “needing to be close to them.” The implication, of course, that the “Want” justified a certain stubbornness on the part of the applicant and family. They couldn’t part with their local emotional comforts and conveniences and didn’t feel they should have to, yet they also couldn’t separate from their college goals.
CA residents have been living in a kind of educational and physical “paradise” for quite some time, to the point where the majority of them frankly feel entitled to both, especially those from the cosmopolitan areas (Berkeley, LA). I have zero patience with that sense of entitlement, and I feel embarrassed for students in the prime adventure period of their lives who are so little interested in exploring anything outside of their comfort zones. I do not think it speaks well of their character.
Look, if an urban environment is your priority, plan your college list accordingly: SF, LA, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, NYC, Atlanta, DC, whatever. But then location is your priority, not the college itself. So own your priorities and don’t think those entitle you to college offers which also happen to line up with location. Sorry for the rant. Have to leave for work.
@calmom I’d ask, why wouldn’t you assume that 2 UCs with nearly identical stats wouldn’t be fairly predictable for the extreme ends of the scale? I don’t see 2 public schools in the same system analogous to a comparison of 2 private schools such as Yale and Brown. SB admits nearly 27K kids and Davis over 30K. It’s hard for me to comprehend a kid considered to be in the top 500 admits at SB isn’t even in the bottom 29.5K at Davis. It’s not like there are different essays and applications for each school. Even if you narrow it down by major, it’s difficult for me to comprehend.
I too was in the generation where we submitted one application and ranked the UCs in the order that we wanted to attend them. That might not be a bad model to go back to.
“families in CA are still largely, as I write this, utterly out of touch with The Math.”
Yep, that is the biggest problem.
“I don’t see 2 public schools in the same system analogous to a comparison of 2 private schools such as Yale and Brown.”
Related.
The hard reality is that the top UC’s and even certain majors in some mid-level UC’s are now as competitive to get in to as the lower Ivies/equivalents (and certainly near-Ivies) yet Californians have not adjusted to that reality.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t enough spaces at the UC’s. Top kids can still get in to a UC, but just as top kids on the East Coast aiming for a LAC may now have to go to Kenyon or Kalamazoo (horrors!) rather than Colby or Middlebury (Kalamazoo actually gets a greater percentage of grads in to PhD programs than either Colby or Middlebury, BTW), Californians aiming for a UC may now have to go to UCSC or UCR rather than Cal/UCLA.
“How many kids come on these boards panicked and miserable because they don’t feel they can live up to the expectations of their families or their communities” – eliminate the former and that will ease the latter.
“How many kids feel desperate because everyone expected them to go to Stanford?” – on WHAT PLANET does “everyone” expect their kids to go to Stanford?
“Perspective is not something all adolescents are blessed with.” – Then it’s their parents’, teachers’ and counselors’ job to give it to them. If the “desperation” (your word) is really as widespread as you say it is, then these parents, teachers and counselors are all failing their children.
“Meanwhile, the pain they feel is real and is worthy of our attention.” – I suggest a visit to Merced, Riverside, San Jose State and the superb community colleges which boast PhDs from great schools and students who successfully transfer to, and graduate from, some of the best universities in the country.
@katliamom Actually, I agree with you. The antidote to show these kids the pathways to success in life, from so many different routes. The only thing I objected to in your post was your statement that you couldn’t take it seriously.
@yousee – the point is that all the SAME students are applying to MULTIPLE schools, and there are far more students within the stat range than there are spaces for. And the STATS are essentially the SAME across the board because of academic index requirements – at least for the top 9% that meet either statewide or local context eligibility requirements-- which is probably closer to 11% overall, given that some students will meet one measure but not the other. As things get more competitive it only increases the overlap – I limited my kids to 3 campuses each, with at lest one being a perceived safety - but these days it might be best for applicants to list every single campus they would be willing to attend.
Admission to UC’s employs holistic criteria. One huge limitation that applicants now face is that even though they have to pay a separate application fee for each campus, and each campus they list considers them separately, they still can submit only one set of essays - so no opportunity to tailor the essay to the particular campus. At least years ago when I applied to UCD I had a picture in mind of what that campus was and how I might fit into that world. UCD is a very different environment than UCSB – why on earth should they be admitting the same students?
With private admissions, I think students know to tailor their apps to each campus – certainly they don’t offer the same “why this college” answers to different colleges. (Some probably do write more generic answers, telling every college that they love the strength of offerings in their major — but that is not a well advised admission strategy)
I just have to say that I just spoke with my gardener who told me his son got into UCLA – with tears in his eyes he told me how neither he nor his wife attended college, and that it was their goal to have their son go to college. They worked very hard, and their son is an amazing student. I started crying too and I am so so happy for them!