As a parent of an aspiring UC Comp Sci freshman applicant and a long-ago graduate of three great UCs (UCSD, UCSF, UCLA Anderson), partway through the month of March, I have concluded the following. This is only partially tongue in cheek:
A Perfect Storm, 2017 Edition
All parents who have no hope of financial aid and who are not independently wealthy have told their kids, "It's UC, CSU, or nothing." Privates at full retail are too expensive. Everyone just happened to notice this at the same time. That time is 2017.
STEM majors are now the only credential being sought. Especially CS and anything that says "Engineering."
Budget cuts year after year at UCs have left the schools way behind the demand curve. Thank you, California legislature. And they have been so busy giving away a third of enrollments to cash-and-carry OOS and international applicants, they just now noticed there is a problem. Thank you, UC Regents.
Top tier applicants have played the game exceedingly well. Some a little too well, if you know what I mean, but they haven't been caught. Yet.
Kids are now applying to 400 schools. Those 400 schools are accepting the exact same 10,000 top tier students, over and over. Everyone else gets an error message.
To fix this, we need a hard cap of 10 applications per kid. Or maybe a match, like we have for medical school. Rank 'em from top to bottom on school and applicant side, throw the whole hot mess into a supercomputer, and make the results binding. Just saying.
Nephew in California didn’t get great options from the UC system, ended up at Lehigh (a Patriot League school in the northeast, like BU). Kid loves it, is guaranteed the classes he needs to graduate in four years, and parents were stunned by the low housing costs in Bethlehem, PA. Kid moved off-campus with friends, pays <$400 month (including utilities) for a single room in a nice row house, located a 5-minute walk from campus.
For UCs, in-state tuition may be relatively low – but housing may end up costing more than the tuition. It’s worth checking out schools in the Rust Belt: tuition may not be cheap by UC standards, but housing certainly can be.
A year ago, we were making around $70k, so we were Blue & Gold eligible - free tuition at any UC, and S has the stats to be admitted at our local campus. Then DH got laid off not once but twice, and ended up with a spectacular new job 200 miles away (but still in CA) where we now make a smidge over $100k. Great, right? College should be no problem!!
Yeah, right. We’re full pay at the UCs now, and there’s no way in a great variety of very hot places that we can peel $35k/year out of cashflow. We can manage $10k/year for sure, maybe $15k. In addition, Gov. Brown will probably eliminate the Middle Class Scholarship that would have given us a 40% break on tuition. For us, the UCs went from a sure thing to an utter impossibility.
We should have been saving, right, so all of this is on us for being irresponsible? We did save, starting when my S was born. First we got hit by the dot.com bust, which wiped us out financially, then we got hit again by the real estate crash in '07. Even so, we’ve got about 10k in a 529 plan, and we’re still adding to it.
Fortunately for us, S will probably make National Merit, and that means he’ll be headed out of state to take advantage of one of several full ride / near full ride offers. And just in case National Merit didn’t materialize, S will have approx. three to four semesters of college credit already done by the time he graduates high school thanks to a combo of AP and (free!) dual enrollment credits.