<p>But yes, Cal is selective. Only a fraction of all of the universities in the U.S. admit less than 25% of their applicants. Just because other universities are more selective doesn’t mean that Berkeley’s isn’t selective.</p>
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<p>Some of the posters on this forum try to use facts like these, and others (e.g. lower student to faculty ratio), to pull down Berkeley and propel their own universities. Universities which many on this forum, including many non-Berkeley alums, would argue are in no way, shape or form, better universities than Berkeley.</p>
<p>Many posters on here go out of their way to defend their alma maters. What’s unusual about RML is that it isn’t his alma mater. That doesn’t matter that much at the end of the day however. I go out of my way to defend Caltech and I never went there. The alum. point is largely negligible.</p>
<p>^ Ah, okay. I stand corrected then. She just doesn’t like me, I guess, yet she’s following where I post. It feels like she’s always right behind my ass all the time. Seriously. And, she’s always out of topic.</p>
<p>I hope you could see how silly that comment is. Care to dig out posts that are anti Michigan and anti UVA? I once challenged our esteemed Alexandre to quote my anti Michigan posts, and we know how that ended up. Anti public? Ever read what I write about UT Austin and other public schools?</p>
<p>There is a world of difference between being anti Xyz school and placing the school in the correct context. Correct context that includes using correct numbers, I might say. </p>
<p>The reality is that you are consumed by having to bring up Cal in ANY conversation and display a genuine hatred for the private schools that are … ranked just above Cal. Vanderbilt versus Cal? How often do you get that irritating conversation started? </p>
<p>You are so transparent. Learn to handle the truth.</p>
<p>How is it in correct context then when you’re saying xyz schools are more selective than abc schools without backing that up? Like I said, if you continue producing accessible and verifiable data for admits to solidify your argument/claims, you may help us shed some lights. So far, all your posts were personal, and thus, unhelpful. And, xiggi, not that I dislike Filipinos, they’re fantastic, fun-loving people, but I am not Filipino. My wife is.</p>
<p>We need more analysts, and fewer raconteurs. <<<<</p>
<p>I doubt the poster understands how appropriate the comment. Hilariously appropriate. We do indeed have a raconteur extraordinaire among us. The same trite story over and over again. </p>
<p>RML, I have spent years correcting you and posting sources to verifiable data. That is what I have been done for close to a decade here. Did you forget the discussions about cross-admits? The links to the UCOP data? </p>
<p>I do not make up numbers. Never did and never will.</p>
<p>beyphy, thanks for posting that. I admit I used to think Berkeley is considerably more difficult to get into than UCLA, but the more time I spent on CC the more I’ve gotten to know and understand that the difference, if at all it existed, is not a big as I used to think. Maybe Berkeley is still more selective than UCLA - in general - but the gap - as I have seen it now - has really narrowed down.</p>
<p>I’ve helped international students gained entry to some of the finest schools in the US, (I actually still do that now, though only when time permits me), and from past experience, I can say it is much more difficult to gain entry to Berkeley than Emory, Rice, Georgetown, USC, Notre Dame and CMU. But I also know that Berkeley is a little lax for California applicants. How lax Berkeley is for them is what I want to establish in this thread. For the record, I do not think Berkeley is a top school for undergrad like I think HYPSM, Caltech, Wharton are. I am aware there’s a significant difference in terms of prestige between those schools and Berkeley. If that’s what pizzagirl wants to hear from me, then there I said it in this thread again.</p>
<p>Sometimes, those school data aren’t that helpful because admissions are subjective (holistic approach), thus I’m asking, do those students in NY find Berkeley easier to get into than schools like Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice or Notre Dame? Don’t they feel the hardness and meanness of Berkeley towards OOS applicants? Is there any difference in the level of difficulty applying to L&S and Engineering?</p>
<p>No, RML, I’m not interested in hearing you confirm the prestige differential between HYPSM and Berkeley. I’m interested in hearing why Berkeley’s excellence isn’t enough for you and why it’s so important to you to have other people confirm Berkeley’s greatness again and again and again. And I’m interested in hearing what goes through you emotionally when someone says “eh, I’d rather go to Vandy (or whatever) over Berkeley.” It seems to get under your skin that other people don’t always prefer Berkeley. Why is that? Is it possible for Berkeley to be a school that is simultaneously - 1) an excellent school and 2) not to everyone’s personal taste? Because that can be said of any school, even your revered HYPSM.</p>
<p>“Sometimes, those school data aren’t that helpful because admissions are subjective (holistic approach), thus I’m asking, do those students in NY find Berkeley easier to get into than schools like Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice or Notre Dame? Don’t they feel the hardness and meanness of Berkeley towards OOS applicants? Is there any difference in the level of difficulty applying to L&S and Engineering?”</p>
<p>Part of your answer is that they know that Berkeley is rough for OOS students --and they know it’s dominated by Californians, which is unappealing to many. (Yes, I know it’s not unappealing to you. But you aren’t everybody.)</p>
<p>^There’s also the pesky issue of California’s financial mess. For OOS families, $60K a year seems like a pretty big risk for a university that is part of a system plagued with worsening funding challenges. Of all the super-high-achieving kids in my son’s class (including the comfortably “full-pay” ones) I don’t know of any who are attending Berkeley. They ARE attending pretty much every Ivy, other top-tier state schools like Michigan and Wisconsin, and competitive LACs.</p>
<p>Being from NJ and knowing many high achieving students, I don’t know of any that would go to Berkeley over any Ivy or several other schools. My son and all his high achieving friends didn’t even apply to Berkeley. If they did it would be as a safety.You might not like it, it might not be “fair”, but it’s the real world in our area.</p>
<p>*Then we will see a few posts to defend the poor state universities that do not get the recognition some would like to see. Michigan and Alabama anyone? Oops, forgetting the Southern UC branch reps! *</p>
<p>xiggi… </p>
<p>If you’re referring to me, not only did I not mention Alabama, but that would be ridiculous. Cal is a top ranked university and deserves to be. Whether those who live in other parts of the country think so or not is fine. </p>
<p>My defense of Cal was based solely on California’s situation…a very large state with an excellent UC system that tries to include those who have “potential” but maybe didn’t have the best K-12 education (maybe coming from the disadvantaged parts of the LA region). </p>
<p>If Cal and UCLA treated test scores like the privates that they’re being compared to, then their middle quartiles would rise, but less instate kids would be accepted and very few kids from underprivileged K-12 areas would be accepted. And, if the UCs accepted superscoring like the privates, maybe that would also bump up the middle quartiles. </p>
<p>Cal (as well as UCLA) is very selective. Comparing things like “acceptance rate” with universities that are half or a quarter of the size is ridiculous.</p>
<p>rebel11. Unless you are a tippy top student, you don’t apply to Berkeley as a safety. That is ludicrous. You apply to any state school in NJ as a safety. Perhaps if virtually all of the public universities in the northeast weren’t so mediocre, your child might consider applying to them as well.</p>
<p>Hi RJK, I am refering to my son’s crowd who are all top 1-3 % scorers in the country. They are all freshman @ Yale,MIT, Princeton,Stanford, Brown,Harvard,Penn etc some are ED accepted for 2017 and some will find out in March.For the record my son had to drop all his other applications, he is now a Penn Quaker 2017. I don’t disagree with the Northeast mediocre publics.It’s a crime!!</p>
<p>Mom2collegekids, I posted a prediction of how this thread will end up. The state university versus private schools debate is highly predictable. I just looked at the early participants to grab an example. I expected the UCLA guy to show up. </p>
<p>The reality will espouse my predicted script. It has so far. :)</p>
<p>I do not think that Cal or the UC system needs to be defended. It is what it is. It operates according to its mission and does it reasonably well. The problem is that, for some, it is important to embellish the image and performance in a way that would make Aesop and his ox tale proud. </p>
<p>Berkeley is the most competitive and prestigious state school. Why it is important to relentlessly compare it to schools that recruit and enroll on a national basis as opposed to mostly local and regional is beyond me. They are different schools and end up with very different student bodies. </p>
<p>No wrong or right. Simply different mission and construction.</p>
<p>I went to a top public in NY that routinely sends kids to the Ivy League and other elite schools and almost nobody from my HS applies to the UCs. The only California schools that get 3+ students attending are Stanford and USC. There is a strong preference in my HS to attend private schools, and the only OOS publics that get 3+ students each year are UVA, UNC, and Michigan.</p>
<p>The most recent Common Data Set posted by UCB on its own site is the 2011-12 CDS. According to that document, Section C9, its SAT CR range was 600-720. That data is for freshmen entering in Fall 2011 (same as the USNWR data I cited above.) The average GPA reported in the same document (section C12) was 3.83. USNWR apparently rounded that down to 3.8. I mistakenly transposed the Vanderbilt (3.7) and Berkeley (3.8) GPAs in my earlier post. Sorry about that.
[UC</a> Berkeley Office of Planning & Analysis / Common Data Set](<a href=“http://opa.berkeley.edu/statistics/cds/index.html]UC”>Common Data Set | Office of Planning and Analysis)</p>
<p>Of course, you’ll see other numbers flying around. I prefer to go with the CDS (warts and all) because it is always dated, and it at least makes a pretense of applying standard methods to support apples-to-apples comparisons across schools.</p>
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<p>Again, I was looking at the USNWR numbers for 2011 admissions, which appear to correspond perfectly to UCB’s 2011-12 CDS (cited above). Section C1 reports 11,441 accepted from 52,966 applications, which does work out to 21.6%. That same number is cited on parchment.com and wikipedia. Now, if you have a more authoritative source than the UCB CDS, maybe you’d like to cite it. </p>
<p>Not that I’d be surprised to learn about discrepancies in any of this data. However, whether the admit rate is 21.6% or 25%, we’re still talking about one of the most selective universities in America. Unfortunately, the US News integer rankings express these comparisons with way more precision than the data really supports.</p>