Your daughter was accepted into Harvard and Dartmouth. I’m having trouble seeing the problem here. Is there a reason she can’t attend one of those excellent schools? How many acceptances does she need?
It seems to me that you have a great deal bending in your favor. You have an extremely talented, brilliant and accomplished daughter who is heading off to college to accomplish great things in the world. You are not unemployed or homeless. If you and your loved ones are healthy as well, you can consider yourself truly lucky.
At $70 per campus, students need to have a pretty clear preference by November of senior year as it is.
I don’t think a match system would be appropriated for CSU’s because they are more closely tied to their local communities, with large populations of commuter students. So that system work fine with the current system of geographic preference. They were conceived to primarily serve their regional populations rather than to draw from a statewide demographic.
That would be more true of the CSU’s then the state wide UC system. Students aren’t getting shut out of the UC’s… they just are being choosy about choice of campus – but every single UC campus is a “quality” school.
But the CSU’s in some areas are highly impacted, so it is true that students who are well qualified may not be able to get into the CSU in their region because there simply is no room for more students in their major.
Looks like my Asian kid was an outlier. No way was he going to go a UC school had he got in. I guess he had his own mindset-spent more time working on becoming an Eagle Scout than homework.
His school has a lot of kids going to the OOS publics. UDub, UIUC, Purdue, Minnesota, Arizona, and UT were the most popular destinations.
I guess if Mom and Dad were more tiger parents, he would have gotten a 4.0 unweighted and would have been rejected from all the UCs and Ivies. He is happy where he is and toasted ravioli and Ted Drewes tastes pretty good according to him.
This is all about supply and demand. California has 8 of the top 10 highest application colleges (BU and NYU also made list). Mid-tier UCs have become comparable to UCLA and Cal–eventually UCSC, Riverside, Merced will replace UCSB, UCD, UCI in selectivity. Cal States will also increase substantially in status, everyone just needs to relax and except this new reality. It’s apparent when you ask UC alumni…Could you get into the UC you graduated from today–most of the time the answer is “probably not”.
@1andonly I couldn’t agree more. So many of the schools that people are drooling over now were safeties not that long ago. NYU was where lackluster students who didn’t want to go to SUNY went.
@PurpleTitan if you want to see all California kids as stuck-up and unwilling to go to UC Merced that’s your choice. Merced is just newer and in another decade, it’ll be as frustrating as the other schools. It’s getting plenty of enrollment and denying their share too. Clearly, not everyone is above attending.
@ucbalumnus Yes, the UC’s do offer some Extra funds for housing to the most compromised but there are plenty of lower middle class students who don’t qualify and will struggle to pay.
The question was do Californians have a right to be bitter that they pay into a system their capable kids can’t attend schools they should qualify for. People can feel anyway they want. Especially when there seems to be less and less rhyme or reason to who will get accepted and who won’t. Californians pay heavily to be in California. It’s not just “luck.” We may benefit at having some nice colleges but we have plenty of suck that we have to deal with like everyone else.
@AboutTheSame my point is that you need a hook to be pulled out of the ocean of excellent candidates at Harvard, Stanford, etc. In your daughter’s case that was being a nationally ranked debater that the coaches “wanted”.
At Berkeley and UCLA I believe it’s still possible (although certainly not guaranteed) for an “average excellent” in-state kid to get in, as my twins did. Of course “average excellent” requires 4.0 UW GPA, top SAT/ACT scores, lots of APs and very good ECs. But it doesn’t require you to be (say) nationally ranked at something.
Supposedly there were some rumors about adding another UC in Silicon Valley akin to Georgia Tech or UM-Rolla. And of course nobody would apply to it since there is no prestige quite yet.
A match system for the CSUs could account for the local area preference, whether though extra points to the EI or through auto-admit of local applicants who meet the campus-defined threshold (depending on how the campus wants to do it). In such a system, there will probably be many CSU applicants who rank their local CSU(s) at the top of their lists, at least one of which will give them a local preference. It could still be a problem where the campus is so selective that even its local preference is not enough to make it broadly accessible (e.g. San Luis Obispo).
@CU123 – California does have enough slots at the UC’s.
Yes it does. There are 9 UC campuses that serve undegraduates. If you can count to 9 you will find that there is plenty of space for everyone. Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles & San Diego are at capacity. The other 5 have room…
“Whereas UC is projected to grow by 11,000 students between now and 2024–25, we estimate that it has capacity through existing and planned facilities to accommodate at least triple this number of students.”
That’s just not true - Merced is now used as the overflow campus where all eligible students who denied from other campuses are referred. The Legislative Analyst’s report I linked to above says Merced has capacity for +16,000 more students. If there are students applying to Merced and being denied admission, it is because they don’t meet admission criteria, not because the campus doesn’t have room for them.
San Jose or nearby would probably not be realistic even if the bill were passed. Land is too expensive there, and there will be political arguments about having any new campus located in an underserved part of the state (Stockton, Fairfield, Visalia, Redding, etc.) rather than where there are already existing state universities (SJSU and to some extent UCSC and CSUEB).
@chevychasemdmum – UC admissions to the most desired campus is not numbers based. Academic index is an important element, but all campuses employ holistic criteria as well.
Yes, taxes are high in CA, but… I would be curious to know roughly what percent of that tax contributes to the UC. I bet it is actually pretty darn small.
Using UCI’s NPC at https://www.ofas.uci.edu/content/Calculator_Dependent.aspx , it looks like the FA adjusts for the various living situations (on campus, off campus, with parents) to produce the same net price for each living situation up to parental income of $89,000 (married parents both earning money, no other assets or student income, 3 in household with 1 in college, California resident), which is about where the net price hits the commuter list price.
http://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-funding-in-california/ says that California spends about 12% of its General Fund on higher education. 60% of this spending goes to the 112 community colleges, while UC and CSU share the other 40% (so about 5% of the overall General Fund).
The state subsidy per student at UC is about $8,000 (down from $23,000* in 1976-1977); CSU about $9,000 (down from $11,000* in 1976-1977); and community colleges about $7,000.
“1) Paid test prep and other academic activities every single summer (she worked)
2) Multiple SAT takings with rewards for good scores and punishments for bad
3) Paid tutors for any class slipping in to B range.
4) Punishment for B’s (withholding meals, taking away phones, cars, taking away all non-academic social activity) until grades get up
5) Monetary rewards for good grades
6) Piano or violin from age 3 or 4
7) Chinese school every Saturday with extra academic help as well as language lessons
8) Aggressive pursuit of acceleration in math particularly
9) Aggressive pursuit by parents and kids to get every B moved up by any means needed (extra credit, requesting regrades, complaining higher up the chain)
10) Aggressive GPA manipulation by reducing all unweighted classes to a minimum and pursuing easier community college classes if a particular high school teacher was known to be hard
11) Requiring them to participate in an academic extracurricular
12) No sports unless you have shown promise to be a superstar, by high school this is known.”
Lot of stereotyping going on here, esp #4, withholding meals from children is considered a heinous sin in most parts of Asia. I’m going out on a limb on this - I probably know more Asian parents than you, and most if not all of them do not do more than 1 or 2 of what you claim. A lot of them are middle class and can’t afford all these tutors, bribes, and Saturday classes you mention. And a lot of white parents do many of those things as well. One of the more ignorant posts on CC, and that’s saying a lot.