Cool stats. Thanks Gumbymom!
I think more and more kids are shotgunning apps to a ton of schools, and now the schools are overwhelmed with apps. How does a school read and evaluate 120,000 applications?
The UCâs hire external readers whom go through bias training to help out with the applications.
Based on what I and my UC forum Champion @lkg4answers are seeing in regards to high stat applicants for impacted majors especially CS/Engineering, many waitlists and denials across the UC system. So a 4.0 unweighted UC GPA applicant with 8-10 APâs, great ECâs and essays are not getting acceptances.
Take UCLA for example, I am sure they could fill their Freshman class 10 times over with very qualified students, but with so many of these students applying to the same competitive majors, there is just not enough spots. For 2021, the majority of admit rates for the Engineering majors at UCLA were below 10% and a couple at or below 5% (CS and Computer Eng). This pattern is not exclusive to UCLA.
Make sure your students have 2 solid safety/Likely schools when applying to these competitive majors.
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LA Times published an article about UC admissions last year. If you didnât look at the date, you would assume it was just written. The original article is behind a paywall but you can read it for free on Yahoo.
For those of you reading through the admissions threads, there are a couple of points to highlight.
Majors matter, they say. At UC Irvine, admissions officers had to review a record 108,000 applications for freshmen spots. Almost half of the students applied to just six of 85 majors â with biological sciences the top choice, selected by nearly 12,000 applicants. Other popular majors were business administration, nursing science, computer science and psychology.
Dale Leaman, UC Irvineâs executive director of undergraduate admissions, said Irvine probably couldnât accommodate more than 10% of biological sciences applicants. Less popular majors would probably have a higher admission rate, he said. He added, however, that students shouldnât try to game the system by applying to less selective majors, because they might not be able to change them under the strict rules for doing so.
And
UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.
âThe thing I take the most pride in with the UC is that itâs all about achievement within context,â said Michelle Whittingham, UC Santa Cruz associate vice chancellor of enrollment management. âWe get these calls: âMy kid got this GPA.â But at that particular school, it could be average or below average.â
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My cousin is a trained Berkeley reader (sheâs an alum) and I can validate what GumbyMom just shared. I didnât ask how much time they spent reading essays but itâs not a long time. Theyâre trained and calibrated.
I read scholarship apps for my foundation. Three of us decide on each app before we reco for full Committee. We review financial docs, LORs, transcripts, and personal statements. I got it down to about 5 min. per application on average. Itâs doable. When we convene in our group of threeâs, typically we would get about a 3-5% discrepancy on our ranking, which we talk it out with the full committee.
The thing with the UCs is I think all their AOâs have to be knowledgeable for CA. I heard on a podcast where Gary Clark (Dean of UCLA) said that a high school could have 500 apps. They canât just assign a hs to one AO. Itâs spread across.
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I have been watching the UC admissions also its bit scary and hard on the kids. So many kids who would have gotten with similar stats before are not getting in now. I am preparing myself and S24 to look at more privates and OOS.
Glad your UCLA streak is alive. Can you share some stats on who got in vs who did not.
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If you are applying to CA schools, I have two pieces of advice.
- Apply to plenty of safeties, including several CSUs.
- Easier said than done but do not let your student become emotionally attached or fall in love with a school. Stay away from labeling any as âdream schools.â
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We are in CA yes so will apply to safeties for sure. We will apply for SJSU, SDSU and may be few others need to more research. (we will be local to SJSU so should give a bit of boost here).
On the dream school topic so far he says he wants big city but nothing other than that for now.
Itâs long but providing what I know so that we all can share and maybe reapply any anecdotal stories we observe. The kiddo who got in has 4.0 UW and I believe 4.4 full GPA. I canât recall the UC weighted. Course rigor was there but wasnât too crazy like my son. He didnât take AP World. Eagle Scout, tons of community service, works part time, founded a substantial club at school but not a ton of clubs. Not relevant to UC but he got a 1560 SAT (still waiting for Ivies and Cal). Got in everywhere so far, including UCSB today but WL at UCSD. Hard physical sci major. Essays were great once we adjusted his approach. Prob one of the best writers Iâve worked with. Also, Caucasian male.
A couple of others Asian females, males. One has pretty low grades but first Gen and limited ECs. I was trying to help him understand how he can present himself. His mom is single and has no idea how college app works so this was a project full of love and sweat for me. Got into UC Riverside and Merced for biz or Engr. Rejected elsewhere. I have to check about CSUs. GPA was 3.6/3.9 but some Câs in core classes so this was a tough sell and I was hoping UCs could see his personal story and family story that is unique to him.
The couple of other females were kinda typical premed/life sci majors. Solid grades with 3.9/4.4 GPAs. Okay ECs but when I step back and look at their app package vs S21 and his friends and in this yearâs environment, I can see why so far itâs UCDavis, either in or waitlisted at UCI/UCSD combo. They didnât apply to UCR or UCSC, which are also great schools if they could handle the locations. Rejected from UCLA.
The kid who got into UCLA, I think his academics may not be as rigorous as S21 and his friends but his ECs had depth. I feel like itâs a combo of rigor, great essays, and great ECs. You need 2/3 to be amazing and the third one could be âaverageâ top 5% and the students have a great shot. My theory still is that UCLAâs entry ticket is 3.9+ UW GPA. And maybe Eagle Scout since both last yearâs kiddo and this yearâs kiddo are both Eagle Scouts 
Hubbyâs friends kids are mostly from that school mentioned in Try Harder in SF. I donât think they realized course rigor (like real course rigor in the core classes) is a thing for UCs and that it seems like in any given year, you can be perfect or near perfect and itâs still random. Their ECs arenât great and whatever ECs they had, half was summer program paid for by parents. And if you canât talk about why you joined those programs and insights about you and impact those programs have on your passion, I swear colleges will think itâs another privileged kid. Thatâs my extrapolation after reading a couple of their essays. They also werenât coachable with my input, either so I stayed away and focused on the kids who needed my mentoring.
Itâs all anecdotal but Iâm sharing my gut reaction and from my corner of the universe.
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You might bookmark this Impaction | Admissions
And this Freshmen Impaction Results | Admissions
Since I see a bunch of comments on the CSUs and UCs here, Iâll do a summary of DS22âs current acceptance rate and stats.
He applied to computer science (so crazy competitive) and we applied him to a bunch of the CSUs and UCs (more than we should have, but I also got paranoid right before the apps were due and added a few.)
DSâs stats:
4.0uw/4.29W
Heâs a CA 9% student
Took extra A-G classes which watered down his GPA.
AP Comp Sci Prin (5), AP Comp Sci A (4), College Comp Programming (A), AP Physics 1 (5), AP Calc A/B & B/C, College Intro to Eng, Lots of good work experience (21 hrs a week and major-related) and ECs (15 hrs a week. cyber security team (student leader), student CS rep to district CTE board, varsity tennis, CSF, and a few more minor things.)
Accepted:
*Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
*Cal Poly Pomona
*San Diego State
*CSU Long Beach
*CSU Fullerton
Accepted, but not into his applied-for major:
*UC Santa Barbara - accepted to undecided in College of Arts and Science
(his step-cousin with a higher GPA than his was accepted the same way instead of in ME)
Wait-Listed
*UC San Diego
*UC Santa Cruz
Rejected:
*San Jose state
(required a 4.35 GPA for CS this year. Last year it was a 4.25. SE was a 4.1 this year.)
Still Pending:
*UC Berkeley
*UC Riverside
DS will go to SLO. But honesty, Iâm still shocked he got accepted there with CS this year. This year was nuts. He didnât get into some schools that Iâm pretty confident heâd have gotten into last year. SJSU is one of them. His GPA was high enough to have been an acceptance last year.
So when you apply, make sure you do your homework and have plenty of true safeties and matches in the list. There have been a few folks on the SLO thread miffed that their âsafetyâ (meaning SLO) has probably rejected them. Iâve watched GumbyMom let folks know that SLO is a safety for almost no one (and those are only local students applying to the very few high-acceptance majors)
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Thanks for taking the time to share so many details.
on UCLA I agree that you need higher GPA with very good ECs. Friends daughter who got into UCLA last year also had great 3.94 GPA with 4.5+ UC GPA and had great ECâs (including leadership and community service) so I think UCLA looks for leadership and may be eagle scouts is one way of showing this and dedication to an EC.
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Iâve seen quite a few kids get wait-listed at UCSD and UCSC who got into UCLA this year. Itâs crazy how many applications theyâve all received. It can feel like a UC lottery for the kids above a 4.0.
yes I have seen this also and its very strange and some times hard to explain. Thatâs why people keep applying to more and more universities every year.
@s318830 I have only helped one CS in the last two years. But I have been so intrigued by SJSU. I knew two who applied to SJSU. One valedictorian. The other one 3.6-3.7 ish unweighted and not a ton of APs or ECs. I think they mentioned some math-related input (maybe the classes?). The valedictorian took the max amount of Calc but the other kid didnât. Valedictorian got rejected for CS but the 3.6 GPA kid got in. Last year. Thereâs no essay so I assume itâs some sort of formula but still didnât make sense when I compared the two.
What major for the 3.6 kid? Iâm assuming not CS.
And CS doesnât do the math GPA I put the way the engineering classes do (that would have helped DS). Last yearâs CS GPA cutoff was 4.25. SJSU is almost entirely GPA with a few categories of program participation that can bump you up, but SJSU is just a numbers game. GumbyMom and a few others have some good posts on it. I did a Match Me thread last Sept or Oct and some knowledgeable folks taught me about it. So when SJSU announced an impact score that required a 4.35 and DS had a 4.29, I knew it was over before he got the rejection. It still took a couple days after the announcement to get the portal updated for him, but I still knew based just on numbers.
SJSU uses an impaction index to rank applicants and determine their threshold for admission. At or above the threshold, the student is admitted. The required CSU capped weighted GPA for this year was 4.35 for CS.
CS is not in the College of Engineering so Math GPA is not part of the impaction index (Only for Engineering).
| ### Impaction Consideration Factor | ### Impaction Point Calculation Value |
|---|---|
| A-G Grade Point Average (GPA) | 800 points x A-G Coursework GPA |
| Local Admission Area | 200 points |
| Eligible for Cal State Apply application fee waiver | 40 points |
| Military Status (Active Duty, Veteran, National Guard or Reserves) | 40 points |
| First Generation (Applicant is first generation of their family to earn a four-year college degree) | 40 points |
Local in-service area applicants get a 200 point bump towards the Impaction index.
Here is the link and 2022 thresholds for each major: Impaction | Admissions
I think that is great advice for any student. My S22 didnât (and doesnât) have a dream school and it has made the process much easier.
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Thatâs really interesting. I think a lot of well to do families think paid summer programming is a winning strategy - but I donât think it is necessarily true. I used to be impressed by kids who said they did research with professors and co-authored papers until I got an email from the head of our science department with a bunch of programs and realized that for a âmereâ $3,000 a program would hook your kiddo up with a professor to help them do research/author a paper that would âhelp in college admissionsâ.
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Now that campuses are opening back up, you may have the chance to attend in-person admissions info sessions. Several colleges also send their AO on the road and hold info sessions in local hotels/conference rooms. Two examples are Exploring College Options and Coast to Coast College Tour. Iâm sure many will hold virtual events but, in my experience, those are more scripted and I was able to glean more from the in-person sessions. In my opinion, it is best to attend these sessions junior year, before your student is in the throngs of essay writing.
For the UCs, all UCs review the same 13 factors but the weight they give to each and what they look for in applicants is different. Listen carefully to what school admissionâs officer focuses on and take notes about how they describe their campus as well as their mission and vision. Work your way through their website and note what they are looking for in applicants. Writing a list of adjectives that the schools use to describe themselves and their future students may help when it comes time for your student to write their 20 activities and 4 Personal Insight Questions.
For example, UCLA focuses on optimism (watch the âWhat is Optimismâ video here)The wording on their website mentions community, working together and interacting with others.
In contrast, Berkeley mentions taking initiative, independence and advocating for yourself. They link to this What Leadership Looks Like doc. Which links to this video on how to show leadership on your application. In the video, they use the words like initiative and persistence. In describing their selection process, they state, âno one piece of information is weighted more heavily over anotherâ
By creating a list of attributes that a school might tell a reader to look for, your student can make it easier for readers and incorporate âbuzz wordsâ into their application such as, âI am optimistic thatâŠâ or âI took initiative toâŠâ
If your son is in Scouts, you might check out how Berkeley highlighted their entering 2019 class here. Being an Eagle Scout was not only noted but was tallied as well.
At least 100 students who have performed at Carnegie Hall â either solo or as part of a group â and at least 170 students who participated in the Science Olympiad, a national science competition, are in the admitted class, which also boasts about 50 Eagle Scouts and at least 50 Girl Scout Gold Award winners.
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I donât think paid summer programs work at public schools because the schools are looking for socioeconomic diversity. A lot of need blind private schools are either neutral or love them because it telegraphs fullpay.