“Perhaps your father thinks of USC as the one he attended, when it had unflattering reputations back then.”
@ucbalumnus …very true…and knew how solid academics are at ALL UC’s at such a better price (although pretty high now compared to back in the day)!
@ProfessorPlum168 I believe UCB and UCLA also look at uncapped wGPA. Lots of CA schools don’t have the plethora of AP classes on offer that the wealthy suburbs have.
@Twoin18 I didn’t mean to imply that it is an autoadmit type of situation by any means. But the fact that there are literally 3Xs the number of applicants now, and that admission rates used to be around 35% and are now at 15% isn’t completely representative of what is going on. Mostly - MOSTLY - its a result of tons more applicants (the great majority of which probably shouldn’t be applying to UCLA and Berkeley, but do so now because it is relatively easy to “give it a shot”)
“at least in my community, I know many more kids going to private colleges (top ones), mid-ranked ones, and also OOS flagships (like U Michigan)”
Almost certainly a well-off one.
“And yes, there is a brain drain here, since most of these kids are great students and very strong applicants.”
Again, CA pulls in college grads from all over. Look big picture.
CA is 14th in percentage of the population who have a bachelor’s degree and also 14th in percentage of the population who have an advanced degree despite being dead last in percentage who graduated from HS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_educational_attainment
There’s no brain drain out of CA.
"And some were concerned about huge class sizes and having trouble getting into the classes they might need. "
And thus. . . UMich and other OOS flagships?
“This seems to be supported by the fact that the kids we know who stayed at UCs or CSUs seem to need to take classes over their summers in order to keep to a 4-year plan”
The odd thing about that is that the UC’s are very generous with AP credit. Though it could be due to major switching as different majors may require different pre-major courses.
“The complaints I hear is about UCs selling seats to OOS kids and International ones (and this is where Asia comes into the conversation). It’s not about race, it’s about keeping seats for those kids in CA whose families have paid taxes.”
Not enough, though. Or at least those taxes aren’t going to the UC’s enough. Per-student funding from the CA state government to the UC’s has dropped tremendously over the past few decades. Given that fact, I don’t see how you can expect the UC’s to not pursuing OOS/International revenue streams.
Admissions readers should see three variants of recalculated GPA: unweighted, weighted-capped, weighted-uncapped. They also see all of the courses and grades that were reported on the application.
@Fisherman99 when citing US News rankings you need to remember that the
list you shared is only ranking for large national universities (311 colleges only). For example, Santa Clara Univesity isn’t even on the list unless you go to the regional rankings (West) in which they are ranked #2 and College Niche has them ranked #102 of the Best Colleges in America.
Another example is Williams College is not on your list either but it’s ranked by US News as the #1 Best Liberal Arts College in the U.S. and #49 by College Niche.
I don’t think anyone would confuse the reputation of Williams with that of UC Merced.
Just point of information:
In the past, ELC candidates have had an additional advantage of an uncapped UW GPA.
With regard to my ultimate perspective on UC admissions today, relative to its evolution or devolution, depending on your point of view, the situation on the ground is thus:
@ucbalumnus if the reviewers see all 3 GPAs, what is the purpose of the UC GPA then? Doesn’t seem to serve much of a purpose. The main problem with the UC GPA calculation: a normal good student, taking 6 classes a semester, with 8 semesters of AP/honors/college classes, can get a max GPA of 4.33. However, what if you take 33 semesters, like my kid did? The max goes down to 4.24. If you could somehow only take 5 classes a semester, the max UC GPA would go up to 4.40. This GPA serves as a disincentive to take more classes.
Furthermore, having a community college class, an honors class and a AP class have the same extra point weight boost when calculating the UC GPA also makes zero sense. AP classes are way harder than honors classes, and a good number of community college classes are probably at the same difficulty as a regular level HS class. So the second problem with the UC GPA is that it a disincentive for kids to take more than a couple AP classes when an honors class or a community college class has the same weight.
@socaldad2002 …US News seems to be the goto ranking source for a lot but definitely many others out there with varying characteristics.
All the UC schools will keep getting tougher to get into until more are built. The supply and demand principle at work.
Wealthy families do have those other options of the privates, OOS, and other options for sure.
As someone watching this thread from the Northeast, I’m a little baffled by all the talk of a brain drain. At least around here, its assumed that many kids will want to travel to other states for college, part of the experience. In fact, its the kids that want to stay close to home that are the exception. I never hear anyone worrying about a brain drain.
With the UC colleges being more selective, have their statuses been going up in the USNWR rankings?
@gallentjill California is huge. Take, for example, a student from San Diego that wants to go to Humboldt State; the distance is 771 miles. If, for example, a student from Chicago wants to go to the University of Alabama, the distance is actually shorter, at 718 miles. I’m sure the kid from Chicago would be seen as someone who does not want to stay close to home. Not wanting to leave the state does not mean that Californian students don’t want to go far from home.
This goes back to points A and B in reply #301 ( http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21414633/#Comment_21414633 ). Basically, students believe that their “true intellectual peers” are only at schools that are admission reaches for themselves, rather than schools that are more realistic (admission match or safety) for themselves.
But if the “top 7” UCs are so overflowing with top-end students that many students are “pushed down” to UCR and UCM, wouldn’t those students at UCR and UCM be “true intellectual peers” of each other?
If the goal is to transfer to UC, starting at a California community college is generally preferable to starting at a CSU or other 4-year school.
Probably has to do with some older UC research suggesting that unweighted HS GPA had better predictive value than weighted HS GPA for predicting college grades. Fully weighted GPA may also be more reflective of how many honors and AP courses the high school offers (i.e. what opportunities are available), at least when comparing students across different high schools. It would not be surprising if weighted capped GPA was used as a compromise between giving some incentive to take harder courses, but not overly advantage students who happened to be at high schools that offer AP everything compared to those who happened to be at high schools that offer only a few.
For college courses, they have to be UC transferable to get the weighting.
Regarding AP versus honors courses, note that not all AP courses are generally considered hard. E.g. human geography. Also, the common case is that the AP course is the honors option for a high enough level course. E.g. in honors math sequences, they are all labeled “honors” until one gets to calculus, which is labeled “AP”.
“But if the “top 7” UCs are so overflowing with top-end students that many students are “pushed down” to UCR and UCM, wouldn’t those students at UCR and UCM be “true intellectual peers” of each other?”
Well, they may go OOS.
Just as the Midwestern publics in states surrounding IL price OOS tuition and give merit money to be competitive with UIUC (and be more attractive than the other IL publics), publics in other western states will price OOS tuition and give merit money to be competitive with mid-level UC’s and be more attractive than lower UC’s.
@gallentjill, I think the point about the brain drain is that many of the best students in CA-the ones that the UC system should want to retain and who would enrich the schools-don’t stay in state for their education. Whether they come back to the state afterwards is a different question.
The thing that’s so odd to me is the casual dismissal of high achieving students from strong high schools. Someone, way upthread, commented that of course the campuses don’t want to fill their ranks with kids from Palo Alto. But…why not? If these kids have shown themselves to be prepared for rigorous study, if they have the qualities the schools want, shouldn’t they be welcomed into the UC system? And if there’s some sort of unofficial quota, where are those kids expected to go? If you look at UVA, the ranks are filled with TJ grads. If you look at UMD, their honors colleges are filled with Blair grads. SUNY takes as many high achieving kids as it can get; even back in the old days they were quite happy to fill their ranks with downstate kids if that’s who qualified for admission. (Disclaimer: I do not live in or near Palo Alto and my kid goes to school on the opposite coast so this is not defensive or personal.)
I’ve already seen people dismiss a population because it was “well off.” That one always gets under my skin. There are people who are most assuredly not well off, who live or work or enroll their children in schools in areas that are “well off.” Then there are schools that are most definitely mixed with economic extremes. It’s a disservice to the kids in these schools to write them off without knowing more. I hate to think that any public school system judges an applicant based on its zip code.
I’m sure there are those who would say well, there’s always Merced. I don’t know enough about the campus to comment with full knowledge but from what I’ve read on this thread, it sounds as if the quality of education is not comparable to what some of the other UCs offer. That has nothing at all to do with prestige and everything to do with the level of teaching and level of peer group.
Me? I’d definitely be looking OOS for merit at other institutions. If a kid is high achieving, those options are out there. I believe that is the point the prior poster was making about brain drain and families looking beyond the UCs.
It’s more complex than building more UC’s. There’s a supply and demand crisis in housing, and it’s not getting better. Recently Silicon Valley industry grew by 29% while in the same period housing grew by 4%. This has been trending for very long, and the pressure is not subsiding. Traffic conditions have now exceeded the previously #1 Washington DC corridor. Developers in the area have now conceded that the only place to build is up. The area is becoming like Manhattan but without similar available public transportation. It takes 1.5 hours to travel 15 miles during many, many periods of the day except for a total of 4-5 hours (mid-day and mid-night).
The situation will not improve until technology companies make a decision to become responsible and move or expand OOS.
I’m sure some poster will sing the praises of the extreme southern and northern reaches of CA in which to build as “a solution.” Agreeing with what someone posted this morning and the vast area of the state, there are two different issues: one is staying within CA borders; the other is staying “close to home.”
What an utter myth. Clearly you are out of touch with the level of accomplishment of the majority of high-performing high school students, and the number of them, in the most dense population areas. NO, high performers are being routinely shut out of their MATCH schools, and I would know because I am current in the field, not retired. Agree with @3girls3cats . If my children were not already done with their undergrad degrees, I would definitely be looking OOS. And there WILL BE a brain drain. Some of the elites in the NE are alert to this and are capitalizing on it, actually. I don’t blame them.
Some people on this thread are living in another time period and referring to outdated realities and theoretical concepts that are not actually operative on the ground in 2018, and really haven’t been since easily 2012. High school students have no moral obligation to wait until CA industry, housing, transportation, and higher education get their act together. Life for a student is now and in the near future. As I said earlier, vote with your feet, students.
My son looked at OOS schools. Only Wyoming was cheaper than staying in state, and he’s headed to SLO for engineering, which reputationally was far stronger than any of the OOS schools we researched. Maybe for the tippy top students they have cheaper options OOS, but I certainly didn’t find that the case.
I looked at U of A as a safety for my D because they did offer juicy merit money, but I don’t believe she’d get the same quality of education as she is going to get at one of the mid-level UCs she is choosing from.
Students, especially well-off ones, choosing to study in another state is a trend nationwide, especially among larger, affluent states, according to:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/26/us/college-student-migration.html
The article is based on US Dept. of Education 2014 numbers.
California received 4,681 students from other states to attend public colleges. California sent 17,196 students to other states’ public schools.
This would seem to point to a massive brain drain – until you compare it to the numbers from other large, wealthy states such as Illinois, New Jersey and New York.
Illinois took in 2,117, sent out 16,461
New Jersey took in 914, sent out 11,813
New York took in 3623, sent out 10,230
I only glanced briefly at the article, didn’t read all. But it seems to me the smaller, poorer states are the ones who have a positive trade imbalance with other states when it comes to public colleges.
How is the alleged lack of capacity at the UCs for smart kids be compatible with the alleged mass exodus of smart students who choose to go elsewhere, sometimes bypassing application to UCs all together in favor of OOS or privates?
These two complaints cannot both be true at the same time. Or even if it is so, wouldn’t they cancel each other out over time?
Except that one can also look at it in a positive light. I have thought for years that it’s really artificial and unnatural, in a country this vast and with so many intellectual and material resources, for such “riches” to be located in such few areas as they have pretty much until now. Time to share the wealth. (Overdue, actually)
Now finishing the quoted sentence as you finished it, though: Ask yourself where possibly the favorite single destination of those IL, NJ, and NY students are. I’ll bet CA is high on the list, followed by Washington State. High schoolers are coming west for college; college grads are coming west for jobs – but both, often (ultimately) for jobs. But at the rate of CA’s popularity in the nation at large, life will become unlivable in the state unless the industries which are attracting these students decide to move or expand. And I am all for that, and not even primarily because of the quality of life in CA, but because redistribution is a win-win for the nation.