I live in CA and im wondering if living in the same state helps me get into a UC? If so, how much does it help me by?
<p>yes it does</p>
<p>Yes it does, and by quite a bit. By law, the UC's must provide quite strong preference to in-state residents.</p>
<p>You bet it does.</p>
<p>So suppose me and a out of state person applie to UCR and my g.p.a is 3.3 while he has a 3.6, do i still have a better shot then him? (support our classes and everything else is identical)</p>
<p>Yes you do.</p>
<p>yes x10000000</p>
<p>More then anything else I can think of.</p>
<p>well suppose my g.p.a was 3.0 and his was 3.8, would i still have the advantage because im in CA?</p>
<p>Not that I am complaining or anything, but why must most public schools give preference to in-state residents? Is it because they pay state taxes and some of their money goes toward the college?</p>
<p>Yes, it's because the schools are supported by our state taxes.</p>
<p>The short answer is what bettina said - the public schools are supported by state taxes, and hence the quid-pro-quo to taking state tax money is to provide easier admission to in-state residents.</p>
<p>The longer answer is that it really all boils down to politics. Every school, public or private, is supported, to some extent by state taxes, either directly or indirectly. Caltech, for example, is private, but still gets millions of dollars from the state of California in the form of research grants, special tax exemptions, state-sponsored joint-ventures and other state treasury transfer payments. Sure, maybe that money isn't in the form of a direct appropriation, but who really cares what form it is? At the end of the day, it's still money. Heck, considering just how small the student population is at Caltech (only 900 undergrads and 1200 graduate students - a lot of high schools have bigger populations than Caltech), I wouldn't be surprised if I found that the amount of per-student money that Caltech gets from the state is actually greater than the per-student state money that some of the CSU's get. Yet Caltech definitely gives no preference to in-state residents, and in fact, probably prefers not to have them, in the name of geographic diversity. Nor should Caltech be singled out as the only private school that does this. Stanford gets a big chunk of change from the state every year too. </p>
<p>What it really comes down to is that it's a political decision. Decisions were made decades, even centuries ago, that certain institutions would be 'public' and that the state would provide direct administration of and direct funding to develop and maintain those schools, in return for those schools offering easier admission and cheaper tuition to residents. Other schools, deemed 'private', decided to keep their administration to themselves, and take, on average, less state money than the public schools took, and by doing so, kept a free hand as to how they would choose to run themselves.</p>
<p>It counts a lot, and it's even better if you are a good student in a county with low uc attendance rates.</p>