Californian parents justified feeling bitter their kids are shutout of the UC System?

Parents Forum
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@Fisherman99

At UCSC, my friend’s daughter can see the Pacific Ocean from her dorm room. Hardly what I would call a less-than-ideal location. I would say what turned off many of the students that I know from UCSC is its old reputation as a “stoner” campus. UCD, which is inland and gets super hot in the summer, got 95,207 apps for the 2018 year. It’s definitely not a lower tier UC. Plus, being less than an hour away from the Bay Area and just minutes away from Sacramento gives UCD students tons to do when they don’t want to be in their quaint college town.

UCR is growing by leaps and bounds. UCM - yes, that is in a less than desired area. Even the UCM campus is separate from the town of Merced, just surrounded by acres of land. I imagine a student without transportation could get really bored at UCM, as you can’t even walk to town. I understand that the UC regents wanted a town that served students from that area of California when they created UCM, but I think even a town like Modesto would have even been better choice.

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I’m not from CA. What is the problem with a campus being inland? Don’t they have shuttles or buses into town?

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It is really hot.

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If a kid is a high acheiver and has put in the time and effort to earn the stats to be competetive for admission to a selective school how is that entitled and why should they be satisfied to go to community college where anyone with a pulse is accepted? Where is the reward for the effort? I don’t think anyone these days feels enttled to an education at places like UCLA or UCB but the reality is that even the CSU’s and state schools are not a given anymore, not even if they have the stats.

What is wrong with caring where you go to college? Location IS a factor for many and that doesn’t make them spoiled or entitled. We viisited many campuses and some are not a fit. Mine disliked UCSC but loved Davis. We felt that same way about UC Santa Cruz as the poster above. The campus was gorgeous but the culture was distinctive and not remotely a fit for her. Culture fit and location does matter and not wanting to go to college in the middle of nowhere like Merced or Riverside doesn’t make someone entitled.

I am bitter. Yes. We don’t feel “entitled” to anything. I watched my D sacrifice and work her tail off for the last 4 years becuase she is acheivment oriented. She did everything right and possible and is highly qualified for many schools yet was turned down by schools thats stats showed she had an 80% chance of acceptance like Univ of Washington. With 13 applications to a mix of stretch, match and safety schools we cannot fathom getting turned down even from safety/ match with average stats well below those she worked so very hard to earn but that is what happened.

Personally, I don’t care where my kid goes to college. I just want her to be happy and thrive. If she was a so so student or didn’t push herself so hard it would be different but we can’t make any sense of the selection process.

A driven and success oreinted person wants to be challenged and surrounded with others of like minds. Where you go to college does matter, geographically, socially and academically.

If going to a UC is the priority then yes, all campuses are equal, but that’s not the only factor.

We see so many kids with lower grades and test scores, fewer EC’s and leadership getting into UCs. Mine got into none of the 5 she applied to. She also didn’t get into SLO. Mine got into 0 out of 6 in-state schools applied to. Had we known she’d have applied to more schools but didn’t think that would be necessary based on her stats and the schools stats. How many should they apply to? Heaven knows it wasn’t about the effort that went into the application or preparation. We had tutors and an excellent college prep coach. He tells us that this year was the most difficult that anyone has ever experienced.

Not sure but it may be related to the high school. We are at an incredibly competetive school where the majority of the kids have over 4.0 GPAs. They are competing against each other. I thought we were helping by giving her a great education but now I wonder if we ddin’t handicap her. Being disappointed and frustrated is not the same as entitled.

1 Like
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Agree with just about everything you said Vineyardview. UCSC is an excellent location although I’ve heard some say it is quite isolated. Davis not “low tier” but some still put off by inland “rural” location like Riverside and Merced. There would definitely be more to do in Modesto area but I’m sure Merced will be growing rapidly soon along with the city.

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@Sdsmile I see the same happening in our Ca high school too. Here is a NYTimes article that may help to shed some light on the process:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-the-veil-on-the-holistic-process-at-the-university-of-california-berkeley.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&&mtrref=undefined

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We visited UC Santa Cruz on a Sunday, so didn’t have a tour. We found an unlocked door in an engineering building. The senior project posters were on the walls in the hall. They were quite impressive. Lots of impressive work and collaboration with Silicon Valley companies. Those posters along with UCSC’s impressive astrophysics department at the graduate level convinced use that UCSC should be on DS’s list. (Oh, and the beautiful redwood forest.)

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The problem is, after UCSC there are no more UC’s in the Top 100 schools (and certainly no CSU schools at all). You end up with a mismatched students (some high achievers, some not, many in between) and that doesn’t make for a good experience for those high stat kids who wanted to be surrounded by peers of equal caliber.

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If starting at a community college is not the desirable safety plan, then the student should apply to a list of four year schools that included actual safeties that s/he likes. An all-reach list that results in a shutout, or admission only to a “safety” that is not really a safety because the student does not want to attend, is a poorly made application list.

What major was she applying to? What was her UC weighted-capped GPA?

There are great students who start at community colleges. For example:

From community college to UCB:
http://www.dailycal.org/2011/05/25/benavidez/ and http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/05/10/medalist2011/

And then on to PhD study:
https://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/aaron-benavidez

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I don’t see how there will be a ‘brain drain’ if the California schools are still full of California kids. If an ACT 30/GPA 4.0 kid is being chased away from UCLA, some other California kid with a 32/4.1 if taking that spot. While a few schools are 50% OOS, many of the UC and CSU are full of Californians.

Rural? How about Cornell, Middlebury, Penn State? Want an exciting urban school like UCLA or Cal? Then Princeton might not be for you.

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About going to those CA CCs where they admit anyone with a pulse - My NMF son has taken some 30-odd units worth of courses split between two CC campuses. The quality of the offerings has been anywhere from perfectly adequate to quite good to outstanding.

Yes, he’s brighter and/or better prepared than some of his classmates, but not all of them, and it’s not some big glaring thing. There are others in his classes who are around his same level. What has it gotten him? A year’s worth of free college classes (DE is free here), a 4.0 college GPA, and lots of attention from his professors is what it’s gotten him.

I’ve attended and / or taught at several CCs and universities in this country, ranging from podunk directionals to top 25 universities and LACs. Guess what? The quality of the courses ranged from perfectly adequate to quite good to outstanding at all of them. There were outstanding professors and outstanding students at all of them, even the lowest ranked podunk. There were also incompetent professors and struggling students at all of them, even the most elite.

California’s community colleges are recognized across the country as being generally excellent. When kids ask about DE here, and people tell them that DE is crap for rigor, their answer always changes when California is mentioned. “Oh, wait, CA? That’s different. Go right ahead.”

I posted earlier that we couldn’t afford the UCs. Finishing a transfer plan with another year at CC has always been my son’s backup plan in case NMF didn’t happen. There really isn’t much to object to when it comes to educational quality. What I hear some people objecting to has to do with people. Specifically “lesser” people. It starts to sound like “Not our kind of people, darling,” and yes, it does start to sound elitist and/or entitled.

There aren’t many real-world environments where a person will only be surrounded by their intellectual peers. Not at work, not at the grocery store, not at the dentist or or doctor’s office, not in the movie theater or on California’s freeways. Learning to interact in a diverse society where people have different ethnic or cultural backgrounds, different values, different personalities and ability levels, etc. is a valuable life skill, and to my mind, a necessary one.

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What’s the definition of high stat, and how many high stat kids are there in the class of 2018?

Back of the envelope, there are about 3.5 million kids in the class of 2018 nationwide. The top 10% is 350,000. If we try to fit them in 100 top schools, we see that we need 3500 per school, but most schools don’t have a freshman class of 3500. So, we shouldn’t expect all high stat kids to be going to top 100 schools, however you define top 100.

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As an example of how California has shorted its population of quality schools take a look at Colorado. It has 1/8 the population and 2 public schools in the top 100. California would have to have 16 schools in the top 100 to be equivalent. It currently has 7.

If you don’t think that this is a real and growing problem just look at all the high stat CA students on the outside looking in.

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C’mon. Comparing UC Merced to Cornell or Middlebury just because they’re rural? Those schools are worlds apart in many ways. And Penn State’s hometown of State College is consistently ranked one of the top college towns in the US. While Merced is a fine town, I have heard several people whose kids have gone to UCM complain that the town of Merced actually seems ambivalent towards the UCM students. Maybe one day Merced will be a fun college town like Davis or Chico, but right now, I think a kid with similar stats to get into UCM would probably chose the college town. At least in my neck of the woods, there is no opinion that a UCM degree is any more valuable than a place like Chico State.

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@twoinanddone wrote: “I don’t see how there will be a ‘brain drain’ if the California schools are still full of California kids. If an ACT 30/GPA 4.0 kid is being chased away from UCLA, some other California kid with a 32/4.1 if taking that spot. While a few schools are 50% OOS, many of the UC and CSU are full of Californians.”

I don’t think you’re understanding the situation in California. The example of a student you gave would have a very slim chance of getting into UCLA (minus being a recruited athlete or first generation student.) Again, my D with a 4.0/4.8, 1580 SAT got waitlisted to UCLA–with terrific essays and extracurriculars. (And also again, she’s thrilled with where she’s going to college, so it’s not an issue for her.) I see it as a function of the number of applications the UCs are getting and the number of terrifically high stat kids who live in state. There’s a reason the SI cutoff is so high in California for National Merit.

Bottom line, there are a lot of disappointed kids who feel shut out from many of the UCs, They’ve worked their tails off and the system isn’t working well for many of them right now. The Cal States are swamped with applicants as well–check out the Inside Higher Education story. There’s something off when a kid is denied from a Cal State and accepted at Cornell.

Oh, and for the record, I’m one who thinks a student can get a terrific education even if a school isn’t ranked in the top 100.

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@VickiSoCal - Your list is interesting. So I used it for “examination of conscience.”

Background: VNese (I guess that’s qualified for “Asian”) parents, migrating to the US in the early 1980s, both parents attending a CA community college and transferring, 1 D homeschooled from 8 until entering UCB (EECS) at 16 and starting CS PhD at 19.

1) Paid test prep and other academic activities every single summer (she worked)
No paid test prep. We bought 2 books and had her going through the sample tests therein. Yes to (some) “academic activities every single summer.” Summers were mainly for traveling.

2) Multiple SAT takings with rewards for good scores and punishments for bad.
No. 1 ACT seating at 11 (scoring 31), 1 SAT seating at 12 (total 2200/2400), 1 SAT seating at 14 (total 2380/2400). The “rewards for good scores” were home-cooked meals with dishes of her choice. No “punishments for bad.”

3) Paid tutors for any class slipping in to B range.
No paid tutors.

4) Punishment for B’s (withholding meals, taking away phones, cars, taking away all non-academic social activity) until grades get up.
No punishment ever for low grades. D didn’t have cell phone until college, currently still no car. She was always encouraged to take part in non-academic social activities.

5) Monetary rewards for good grades.
No monetary rewards for anything. For good grades, the reward is most of the time a family activity that includes a meal at a nice restaurant.

6) Piano or violin from age 3 or 4
She started learning violin at 11 and piano at 20 (just like her parents: self-taught, no tutor)

7) Chinese school every Saturday with extra academic help as well as language lessons
No VNese (of course no Chinese) school. Dad (whose VNese is as good as, or better than, most VNese teachers) taught her at home.

8) Aggressive pursuit of acceleration in math particularly
Absolutely. Why not? She loves math and sciences. At 11, she thought that she would become a quantum physicist, but decided to major in theory computing when starting college.

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)
Yes to “extra credit.” No to “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.
Her parents didn’t know there was such a thing called “GPA manipulation” until they read about it here on CC. She twice dropped on-line classes at FLVS and took the same classes at Stanford EPYG because the former were “too easy.”

11) Requiring them to participate in an academic extracurricular
She had a bunch of “academic extracurricular” activities, including a 9-month research before college with a math professor at SLO. But none of these were “required.” She did them because she loved to.

12) No sports unless you have shown promise to be a superstar, by high school this is known.
Probably yes. No competitive sport. She did however swim 1 mile a day, 5 days a week at a local health club.

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For reference, here are the 2017 admission rates at UCs by GPA (as recalculated in weighted-capped form, not the often exaggerated weighted GPAs found at many high schools):


Campus  4.20-   3.80-   3.40-   3.00-
        higher  4.19    3.79    3.39
UCB     43%     13%      2%      1%
UCLA    47%     12%      2%      1%
UCSD    84%     39%      7%      1%
UCSB    82%     45%     10%      1%
UCI     94%     52%     11%      3%
UCD     90%     56%     17%      4% 
UCSC    93%     76%     44%     14%
UCR     98%     90%     63%     23%
UCM     98%     96%     89%     57%

Note also that these are not division or major specific. Students who applied to more competitive divisions or majors (including CS and engineering at most campuses) were presumably admitted at lower rates for their GPA bands than the overall admission rates.

The 3.80-4.19 band is probably the “UC disappointment” band, with students believing that they have a good chance at UCSD/UCSB/UCI/UCD, but not as good as they believe (especially for CS or engineering applicants), while thinking that UCSC/UCR/UCM are “beneath” them. Some may be misled by their exaggerated high school weighted GPA of 4.4 or 4.5 or so, even though their UC weighted-capped GPA is more like 4.0 (from an unweighted 3.6-3.7 GPA).

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What is the obsession with top 100 schools? Whose ranking are we using anyway? USNWR? They use meaningless statistics like percent of students in the top of the class, and how many students a college rejects. How are either of these statistics indicative of how good the school is? If the school has the classes, the facilities, the professors and access to opportunities for internships and work experiences, its good. Rankings are seriously flawed.

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@Sdsmile

“We see so many kids with lower grades and test scores, fewer EC’s and leadership getting into UCs.”

Sdsmile, why do you think this happens? How did these kids with lower everything get into UCs the top kids didn’t? I thought the UCs were all about the stats…

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An occasional exceptional case (often with incomplete information) that stokes anger tends to be remembered much better than the overall trend.

But also, admission by division or major means that, for example, a slightly lower-stat applicant to UCB L&S (intending L&S CS, though that is not direct admission) may have better chances than a slightly higher-stat applicant to UCB EECS (which is direct admission and admits by major).