@Gator88NE
I don’t think the UF system fits a school like Illinois that has departments ranked 5th in the country next to departments that… aren’t. Illinois admits to major (well, they might get away with admitting to College) because of this.
@YZamyatin Haha…I’m not saying UIUC should adapt UF’s method, only that it’s similar to the system described by Zinhead. My point is that a lot goes into how students are admitted to programs, including admissions and funding.
I would say that UF is ranked #14 (tied with PSU) for Public Universities, while UIUC is 11th (tied with UC-Irving). The schools are not that far apart.
Languages unite people. If the immigrants can still speak Chinese then they’ll fit right in with their native Chinese counterparts.
It does.
Last year at Berkeley-Hass the only transfer student who got in from our CC was a international student. I feel it’s unfair that as a California resident I am disadvantaged applying to my own public universities because an international student will pay more in tuition.
Tel itt to the Governor and state bomerr. They put UC in a $$$ hole.
@Gator88NE
No, you are correct, not far apart at all, but Illinois has less balance. UIUC without ENG would be ranked much lower in all likelihood. It is a big chunk of the school and considerably more selective than 7 of the 8 other Colleges (although this is greatly disguised by the fact that so many rejected by ENG count as accepted to the aforementioned DGS).
@bomerr: Different schools have different policies.
As for disadvantaged, life is not completely fair. You’d be even more disadvantaged if you lived in NV, say, and your in-state options were UNLV amd UNR. Compared to someone living in NV, you’re advantaged. Especially considering that the UC’s offer really good fin aid for a public system.
Plus which, you don’t actually know if the reason the international got in is because they are full-pay. It could simply be that they are the better candidate.
I agree about Kelley and UDub. Do most students know what they are getting in to though? It seems to me the situation is well advertised, but maybe that is just my exposure to CC talking.
The DGS scheme just seems a lot more, I dunno… sneaky.
If you search the Illinois/China stories that are out there, you see constant references to the “we accept just as many in state as we used to” meme. It’s just strikes me as dishonest, and not something people seem familiar with at all. They are not accepting as many in state as the used to, they are just soft-rejecting them to DGS, and throwing their hands up pretending not to know why yield is going down for in state students.
Again, I am not looking to protect in state percentages, although I would like to see a higher percentage of OOS come from domestic locals (because they will be more likely to stay in Illinois post graduation; sry if this offends anyone but I’m pretty sure this one is a fact). I would just like a little bit of full disclosure. There is no way in heck my son attends DGS, not even for free, but clearly he is the exception as the department is huge.
@Gator88NE - Florida’s system is mandated by the state to support the community college system and it works pretty well. The system, at least when I attended, requires all schools (Universities and Community Colleges), to grant two year Associate degree, after which the student applies to their university and major of choice. It fosters community college grads access to all of the universities in the state system. If an undergrad at UF doesn’t do well enough to get accepted into a high demand major at UF, they can always transfer to the same major at a lower tier school like Florida State, or UCF/USF. At the same time, someone at the less rigorous schools in the system can use the opportunity to transfer up into UF if they do well.
The system works because there is a close enough gradient between UF, FSU, UCF/USF and the other universities that students can find their natural place in the system. It also allows students who did not mature fully in high school a second chance in community college, and the community college students have a real pathway to getting a degree, even at the top school in the system.
In contrast, Illinois has a top 10 university in UIUC, and then a large gulf between the flagship and the other in-state universities. There are no mid-tier public universities in Illinois like FSU, UCF or USF that serve students in that 25 to 30 ACT range, so for them it either UIUC, out-of-state or private.
It interesting that at our high school in Illinois, the two most popular choices of schools after UIUC are IU-Bloomington and Iowa. They fill the gap that FSU and USF/UCF do in Florida.
@PurpleTitan
Maybe you are missing the point. The UCs are CA publics and are supposed to give preference for CA residents; especially ones who cannot pay for a private education. So even if an intl is a better candidate, they should not get in. On a side-note I know the guy and he can barely speak English. He worked as a tutor and could barely tutor anyone because of the language barrier. His papers stats are great but IRL not so much.
Which leads me to another interesting point, The UCs don’t require SAT/ACT for transfers. So they are allowing the floodgates on CC-intl transfer as compared to privates. This is further compounded by the fact that full-pay CA resident is still less than full-pay international; unlike at privates.
Lastly on the side of fin aid. It’s really great for URMs, for other races it’s okay.
@bomerr: CA is still supporting the UC’s financially to a greater extent than most states do their publics, so you have a valid point, but as CA funding becomes a smaller percentage of the budget at UC’s, your point becomes less and less valid. Like it or not, higher education in this country is slowly privatizing.
Also, the elite privates provide great fin aid. Granted, only a fortunate few can get in to them.
@Zinhead, I agree that IL lacks the equivalent of a MSU. They want UIC to rise up and fill that role, but that will be a challenging undertaking.
@YZamyatin, it depends on your goals.
If it is CS, among the top 5, Stanford, MIT, SCS@CMU, and CS in CoE@UIUC are very tough to get in to. EECS at Cal has an extremely low acceptance rate after you start at Cal. Compared to those, declaring for one of the CS+X majors at UIUC from DGS seems relatively easy. I believe that is true for CS in L&S@Cal, though @ucbalumnus can confirm.
Going down the list, Cornell, Princeton, CalTech, directly in to CS at UDub, and OOS to UT-Austin for CS are all tough or very tough to enter. I don’t know what it’s like to declar for CS at GTech, but the acceptance rate has dropped like a rock there as well. So you have to go down to UW-Madison to find a school highly rated in CS that allows you to declare for CS pretty easily. Not sure how they will control for the massive number of kids interested in CS these days. Give out only a limited number of A’s/B’s in those weedout/gatekeeper classes? Tough luck if you can’t register for classes?
So compared to other options, DGS at UIUC and declaring for a CS+X major may not be such a bad option.
Wow, defensive much? UIUC is a fine school. It also is in a location / town that doesn’t offer quite the charm and college-town feel and college-town amenities of many of the other B1G schools, in particular UW, IU and Michigan. What’s wrong with pointing that out?
I’m not following your logic. UCs are publics and setup to help the residents of CA. As funding is cut they increasingly focus on full-pay OSS and intl students. Thus CA residents, even ones who are full-pay, are disadvantages because they pay in-state tuition rates. Privates then become more fair to CA residents because they make no distinction between in-state and out-of-state.
In the end, this issue will spread to other publics that too differentiate between IS and OOS students. Thus the publics that are designed to aid their residents end up hurting them instead. It’s a completely broken system.
“Lastly on the side of fin aid. It’s really great for URMs, for other races it’s okay.”
Exactly where is your concrete evidence for that? Financial aid is based on the same criteria for all who apply; it is not race or ethnicity-differentiated. I would know. At least that’s true for U.C. Sometimes, for other systems and colleges, there are special, designated scholarships (opportunity, merit, and leadership scholarships) for students of minority origins, but at U.C. that is not true for strictly need-based aid whatsoever.
@bomerr, you seem to have many interesting conspiracy theories.
In any case, I do believe that states should ideally be able to provide everyone an affordable education at the level of UNLV, and CA does do that. Anything above that is gravy. It’s your dumb luck that you’re in CA instead of NV; you’re certainly not entitled to a Haas education, I hope you understand.
Also, I’m surprised that you can’t follow my logic. You say that publics were set up to help the residents of a state, but the residents of a state have to provide funding for publics for that logic to make sense, no? To take this to an extreme, if a state provides 0% funding to a college, why should that college be beholden to that state in any way?
@PurpleTitan
It’s not luck, I moved here.
And enrolling students that can barely speak English is your idea of an gravy education, okay X_x
If a state pays 0% funding then the college should go private to not discriminate against in-state applicants. That is the point I am making that you are failing to grasp.
EECS at Berkeley highly selective for frosh and transfer admission, and changing into once enrolled (particularly from outside the College of Engineering). L&S is not quite as selective; all frosh entering L&S are undeclared, and those wanting to major in L&S CS need to complete the prerequisites with a 3.0 GPA. Both EECS and L&S CS choose from the same CS courses, but EECS has more engineering-type requirements (physics/science courses, an extra math course, and an extra EE course) as well as the option to emphasize EE instead of CS.
@PurpleTitan
Outside of MIT/Stanford, my son is applying to most of those programs, you will have to take my word for it that I have done an insanely ridiculous (and probably mostly unnecessary) amount of research on the topic.
I don’t mean to be argumentative, and I can provide sources if I ever get to a desktop, but your perception of ease of transfer to CS+X at UIUC is not accurate as it currently stands (maybe two years ago, but not today). We are one year/transfer cycle away from there being no appreciable difference between ENG CS and CS+Math and CS+Stats. I would peg CS+other4 at two years away.
The number of apps is astronomical and essentially 100% of ENG CS apps are listing CS+X as 2nd choice major (I assume even more so this cycle as CE was not allowed as 2nd choice to ENG CS this year for the first time ever).
Here is the link; you will notice it was updated just this past October…
[Internal transfer in to CS at UIUC…](https://wiki.cites.illinois.edu/wiki/display/undergradProg/Transferring+Into+Undergraduate+Computer+Science+Majors+from+Other+UIUC+Departments)
Here is the relevant portion:
Enter DGS at your own risk if you have your heart set on CS. The requirement leave zero room for error; one B+ in a CS prereq and you are toast. Keep in mind that word is still spreading about the competition of entering this program. People on CC, for example, continue to ‘chance’ people as ‘match’ who are no way on earth a ‘match’ for the program. As word spreads, apps will quickly equalize the acceptance rate of ENG CS and LAS CS+X. As people do more research, they will learn that the department is pushing for a 'Department of Computer Science" ala CMU, at which time the pretense that LAS and ENG CS are different will evaporate.
@YZamyatin, you’re probably right. Entering DGS with the aim of transferring in to one of the CS programs at UIUC is definitely risky because they may change the ground rules at any time. So that avenue very well may close in the near future.
For a current student at UIUC, though, they’d just need a 3.2 in CS+math courses (that count towards the major) and an overall 3.2 GPA to get in to one of the CS+X majors.
Looking down the list, Columbia, UMich, Harvard, UPenn, and Brown are all tough to enter.
I don’t know how difficult it is to declare for CS at UCLA or UCSD (maybe @ucbalumnus can enlighten here as well?).
That means that of the colleges that Facebook recruits from (https://www.facebook.com/careers/university), UW-Madison is the only one that I know has ridiculously easy requirements to meet to declare for CS and isn’t really difficult to enter (setting aside the UC’s, which I don’t know too much about).
I’m really curious about how they will handle that (especially since both MN and WI are in-state for UW-Madison). Do they just have massive lecture halls? Weed students out through difficult classes/projects?
@ucbalumnus
Current declaration guidelines (into L&S CS) don’t look too ominous, but my kid still applied to EECS due to concern that declaration of L&S CS major by his sophomore year will become more difficult (even the best HS students stumble at times with the transition to college). It seems like CS demand is insatiable in recent years.
I understand declaration requirements were much higher during the dotcom craze, what do you think about the current environment? I have had a hard time getting feedback from the school. Illinois is also a bureaucracy, but I did not have so much trouble getting responses from profs and admins there.