Is it Worth Applying to the UC System - If Out of State?

College Search & Selection
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<p>Being from California, the feeling here is that the system is going down hill, the question is just how long will the schools stay superb? </p>

<p>Some of us don’t think its worth applying at all. that being said, One of my closest friends, and probably the smartest person out of the class of '10, is going to Cal. </p>

<p>For some inside info, I think UC Davis will emerge as a top tier UC in the near future. Its applicant pool is becoming more and more competitive, and it has the resources.</p>

<p>In my personal opinion, they should just open a new campus, or convert a CSU to a UC. it will ease the competition on the better UCs and give them a new campus with 5,000 new customers a year for the state to draw money from. I doubt its going to happen though.</p>

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<p>Yet Berkeley’s number of applicants keeps on rising every year. Not only that, the quality of the applicants has been improving as well.</p>

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<p>SOME of us</p>

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<p>And they should put it in Merced too. :rolleyes:</p>

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<p>The reason UC Merced didn’t do the trick is because of where it is (and I say this as a traveler of California) Maybe UC SLO or UC SJ (San Jose) would work</p>

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Your friend is obviously very wise. :p</p>

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Politics got involved in selecting a new UC campus location…administrators and legislators wanted the campus to help fulfill the need of a underpriviliged and rapidly growing population in the central valley.</p>

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<p>@RML, did you read what I wrote? You’re setting up a comparison between UCB and some highly-ranked but not top-prestige private schools. In that case, I would say that the two are equally bad bargains (Payscale is bogus), except for engineering where Berkeley is better. IMO it is very difficult to argue for a $50k+ education vs. merit aid at an in-state flagship from an ROI perspective. The exception is for a few elite fields that confer significant recruitment advantages on grads of a small number of schools.</p>

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<p>It depends on the other options. If you live in a state with strong publics (Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia, Georgia, Texas etc.), I don’t think it’s worth $35000/year in tuition instead of $10000. Then again, I don’t think that’s any different for private schools, except maybe the very top few, and getting into Berkeley OOS is still much easier than those, especially in terms of ECs/randomness.</p>

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<p>I love how many claims are being thrown around without the slightest scrap of support. Berkeley is more selective than Duke. Duke is more selective than Berkeley. Berkeley graduates make more than Emory and Rice graduates combined. Students get no attention at large publics. If we clap our hands and believe really hard, the UC system actually isn’t having any financial difficulties.</p>

<p>These claims are useless without stats - especially when much of the data is so easy to find. Here’s some admissions data, for instance.</p>

<p>OOS Berkeley engineering
Mean CR SAT admitted: 724
Mean W SAT admitted: 727
Mean M SAT admitted: 765
Mean ACT: 33.5
% admitted: 15%</p>

<p>Duke engineering
CR SAT: 690-770
W SAT: 690-770
M SAT: 750-800
ACT: 33-35
% admitted: 24%</p>

<p>I’m not interested enough to calculate all of the data for the other colleges, but it’s interesting to note that arts & sciences is much less selective at Berkeley than engineering - and probably a bit less selective than most of the top universities. The mean admitted SAT for OOS, for instance, is in the 2130-2190 range, and 22-25% of applicants are admitted. For non-engineers, at least, it seems that the admissions difficulty of Berkeley for OOS applicants is exaggerated.</p>

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You’re from Texas. I doubt there’s much any of the UCs do that UT Austin can’t do (nearly) as well. Why bother?</p>

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<p>Noimag,
College education is typically expensive, regardless of where one might attend. You have to look at it and compare colleges from a marginal cost standpoint. If an instate option costs $30k (all in) and a comparable level private costs $50k, then one would need to be pretty confident of the tangible and intangible benefits that one might get for the extra costs during the undergraduate years… and in the many decades that follow. </p>

<p>A comparison based on the undergraduate years and pathway to initial post-grad opportunities is important and sometimes critical, eg, in terms of placement opportunities into various industries and/or positioning for graduate school. This is fairly easily quantified and differences net of financial aid can be significant. Nonetheless, I think the intangible values can sometimes be even greater and more consequential. </p>

<p>As is continuously demonstrated on these boards, college affiliation is a very big deal to a lot of people and it’s a label that you will carry for the rest of your life. In many cases, this labeling is unimportant and/or declines over time, but for others, the attachment is strong and even grows over time as college friendships/networks perpetuate the connection, to saying nothing of experiences such as when one returns to recruit and/or send children back to the ole alma mater. Can you put a pricetag on that? I can’t. </p>

<p>Warblers,
I think that the yield numbers might have some value in this comparison of UC Berkeley and Duke</p>

<p>42% UC Berkeley IS
28% UC Berkeley OOS</p>

<p>40% Duke</p>

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And it’s even more credible when you post links to official sources…</p>

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<p>RML, I’m not trying to necessarily counter what you’re saying, but when you say that Cal grads’ salaries – per Payscale’s website surveying college graduates with just baccalaureates wrt their salaries, say, 10 years into their careers – beats those of many private universites, you have to remember that there are many factors why this might be so. </p>

<p>One of the most important is the predominant (or dominant) location of a university’s grads in the workforce. A lot of Cal grads work and live in the Bay Area, but we know that Bay Area firms have to pony up larger salaries (greater than 10% over the rest of CA) to both starting and experienced prospective employees to entice them work there. This is of course because the housing costs in SF, Silicon Valley, Marin, and even the East Bay, are at a much higher level than the rest of CA.</p>

<p>This is why Payscale reports Santa Clara Universities’ grads at a high 50% median salary; I think it was even higher than Cal’s. I’m sure SJSU’s grads with bacs, make more than Cal State Northridge’s.</p>

<p>And, too, I question the validity of the site because the information is solely dependent (methinks) on the person surveyed, and doesn’t include verification of salary through tax returns, etc. I could be wrong wrt this aspect.</p>

<p>SCLindsey, I’m not sure why you want to add another UC campus. The system already has ~ 200K undergrads.</p>

<p>Wrt your UC Davis ascending remark… I agree it’s a good school. But even though it’s seen its apps rise significantly lately, a fact that can at least be attributable to the echo baby-boom, its yield is pretty bad. I haven’t looked at the numbers, but I imagine UCD has to accept > 20,000, maybe 25,000 students to yield a frosh class of, say, 4,500. That’s a yield in the 20%’s maybe less.</p>

<p>And your remark about the shortfall of state funds for undergrad education would apply less to UCLA and Cal. If my numbers are correct, Cal admitted 27% from outside of CA, and UCLA, 24% for their 2010 frosh classes. The yield will be much lower for Non-CA residents, certainly, but both schools are looking to just about double the amount of international and oos students in their student bodies. I think Cal is looking for around 18%, and UCLA would be a few % below that.</p>

<p>None of the other UC schools have the international or oos rep to yield a great deal of full-paying, non-state-supported-tuition students.</p>

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I’m going to have to disagree with you. Most of the top private schools guarantee to meet the full financial need of all students, whereas Berkeley doesn’t. Berkeley admits typically have the stats to get into comparable universities and pay less, so undoubtedly at least some of them do.</p>

<p>The average income for a male Berkeley OOS student, for example, is $170,864 – well above the CA student body average, which is $110,521. The average income for female OOS students ($153,858) is similarly higher than that of female CA students ($97,250). </p>

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Duke’s admissions stats are on its admissions [url=<a href=“http://www.admissions.duke.edu/jump/applying/who_2013profile.html]website[/url”>http://www.admissions.duke.edu/jump/applying/who_2013profile.html]website[/url</a>]. Berkeley has all sorts of fun stats on its planning & analysis [url=<a href=“http://opa.berkeley.edu/institutionaldata/data.aspx]website[/url”>http://opa.berkeley.edu/institutionaldata/data.aspx]website[/url</a>], most of which involve making your own charts from selected data points.</p>

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<p>^ Like I said…LINKS!</p>

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<p>Wasn’t the question whether or not to apply to the UC’s from out of state? It wasn’t about the selectivity of the UC’s for out of state applicants or whether Cal if better than Duke. To answer the question, I would apply to Cal for engineering from out of state. As to whether or not I would pay full price to go there, I don’t know. It depends on a lot of factors, but I would definitely apply.</p>

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<p>You can’t really link to a lot of the data on UC Statfinder</p>

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Your argument for intangible attachment, while valid, is not relevant in a general sense because it will vary on a completely individual level. I know people from diehard Aggie families who would never want to go anywhere but Texas A&M. The intangible value of the school is huge for them but does not apply to anyone else. The OP did not say that they have a major personal attachment to UCB or UCLA.</p>

<p>When we look at the more factual information available, I am not convinced that UCB would warrant the additional cost for the OP, who has an excellent in-state flagship available, or even for anyone with stats capable of earning merit scholarships from OOS at such schools. For RML’s benefit, I will say that the same reasoning applies to the private schools he mentioned. The only case in which I see the additional money paying off is for a few status-centric fields (IBanking, top-level management consulting) that recruit most heavily at a very small list of elites. Since UT-Austin actually does receive some attention from that set, it would seem to me that only the very highest status schools in those areas (HYPSM, Wharton, Columbia, Dartmouth, perhaps a few others) stand a chance of coming out favorably on the ROI calculation.</p>

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<p>Warblers, I really like you, but you know that those “statistics” would make Lee Stetson, Penn’s former master manipulator, applaud gleefully! </p>

<p>Simply stated, those numbers are whatever Mr. Good Day wants them to be, and are not relevant. In this case, it does not even matter that Duke does not make its CDS data available, the statistics for ADMITTED STUDENTS mean … nothing in a world that publishes statistics about ENROLLED STUDENTS. </p>

<p>However, is there a real reason to waste our time in debating if attending Cal as an OOS is worth the money. Of course it is! Why would someone deprive him or herself of the great opportunity to, upon graduation, spend a lot of time on CC to share the good words. The bandwagon is almost moving! If attending is so appealing, applying must be a no-brainer. Of course, the decision to attend is always predicated on the available choices, and it a given that for most of the Cal students attending the school was the very best option available to them.</p>

<p>Can’t beat that modest proposal!</p>

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xiggi, I am one of the few actual Cal alumni on this board that stands up to some misrepresentations of my alma mater. I welcome future voices of truth. :)</p>

<p>You can post enrolled stats for Cal engineering, but you can’t for Duke. I doubt Duke’s enrolled engineering stats are that strong since Duke isn’t exactly a powerhouse engineering program.</p>

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<p>Why do you think Duke decides to post THOSE numbers and obfuscate the ones that matter? And then there is this pesky yield number. It’s not hard to imagine where some of those admitted students end up!</p>