UCLA had 119,000 people apply this year, the top 1.5% get invited to apply for the UCLA Regents scholarship. My son got invited to apply meaning he is in the top 1.5%. He only was offered the Deans Scholarship at Northeastern. Northeastern is a great school and everyone accepted there should be excited to be going, however, it us ranked about 20 spots below UCLA on USNWR. How can you be top 1.5% at UCLA and only a Deans scholar at NU? Just shows how random this process is. Northeastern didn’t offer enough money and their actual EFC was over $10,000/year more than their net calculator estimated so my son won’t be attending. Anyways, congratulations to all who got accepted.
I don’t get the point in this post? The nature of college admissions is holistic at best, random at worst. Everyone already knows that. Congrats on UCLA.
That’s all it was, was just a commentary on the randomness of college admissions. It just makes me scratch my head. Don’t read too much into it.
@Mysonsdad Public school admissions is just also a different animal than private school admissions. Northeastern has much higher SAT/ACT scores than UCLA does for enrolled students. I imagine that was part of the scholarship difference:
25%-75% Math SAT:
UCLA: 600-750
NU: 680-760
25%-75% Critical Reading SAT:
UCLA: 570-710
NU: 660-740
25%-75% Writing SAT:
UCLA: 590-730
NU: 640-730
ACT:
UCLA: 25-32
NU: 31-33
*Using College Data information, which is a year behind
Getting a merit scholarship means that you were in the top 25% of admitted students. I’m sure the Dean’s scholarship could be an even more selective group than that.
“Only” dean’s scholarship is kind of odd, since that’s the top scholarship short of Scholars. Once you get to that range of the top ~2%, it’s kind of a crapshoot. That goes for university admissions, scholarships, and even prestigious fellowships. (I had someone on the Marshall committee admit that there’s a huge amount of luck involved in just making the cutoff or not.)
Between the two schools, UCLA emphasizes GPA more while Northeastern emphasizes test scores more.
Saying that the process is random without actually knowing what happens behind closed doors isn’t the most rational thing to do. Like UCLA, Northeastern invited the top 1-2% of the students to the Honors program. I’m sure your son is brilliant, but not all schools are going to evaluate him in the same way. If all the schools did, that’d be nightmarish, wouldn’t it?
Anyways, congrats to your son! UCLA is a great school! 