I’m a sophomore at a small school in Texas- and it’s REALLY competitive. UCLA is my dream school but my GPA was like 3.3 unweighted freshman year and I’m trying for an upward trend but it’s so hard, I’m constantly stressed about my grades and even though I’m trying harder, there’s barely progress. I have the chance to transfer to a school in California because my dad lives there, but I don’t know if it’ll look bad if I suddenly get better grades after moving to a lesser ranked school. I know I sound crazy but I’ve been stressing about this forever. Any advice? Also, does anyone know what’ll happen to my older soph year grades if I move?
UC’s do not use Freshman grades in their GPA calculation however, they will look at your Freshman grades to make sure you pass any UC a-g courses. If you UCLA is your “dream school” and you have a chance of establishing residency in California, it could be a good move especially in regards to affordability. In-state tuition/room/board etc… will run around $30K/year vs. an out of state student would be paying $60K/year.
If you can still take a rigorous HS course schedule at a “less ranked” school then it should not make a difference as long as you challenge yourself.
UC’s do not use class rank for admission purposes like Texas schools although for a top UC like UCLA, you would need to be in the top 10% of class to be competitive.
Your Texas HS grades/transcript mostly likely would be re-evaluated by your new HS.
It’s a bit of a tradeoff. As in-state for UCLA, you’d save 30k/yr as mentioned. However admission rates for OOS are higher, so your chances of getting into UCLA would be better as OOS. I believe UCLA and UCB have the highest percentage of OOS admits, so the odds are definitely skewed for those two schools.
Another interesting point is that the California community colleges are feeder systems for the UC’s. So even if you don’t get into UCLA as a freshman admit, you’d have the backup option of attending CC then having good odds of getting into a UC campus (one of the campuses, not necessarily UCLA) after 2 years of CC - assuming you did well.
Either way you have to look at the money thing first. If your parents don’t have 250k to drop on your college expenses, then attending UCLA as OOS is not an option. The UC’s don’t offer financial aid to OOS. 250k is equivalent to some of the best private schools in the country, so you’d have to really, really want to attend UCLA for the same price as Stanford or Harvard.
For Fall 2016, the UCLA admission rate was 17.7% for instate and 22.2% for domestic OOS (not including internationals). The OOS admit rate is higher because (1) OOS applicants tend to have better stats, and (2) OOS admits are much less likely to actually enroll (instate yield is 46.8%, OOS yield is 20.3%),
http://www.admission.ucla.edu/Prospect/Adm_fr/Frosh_Prof16.htm
So the admission rate is low either way, and high GPAs are expected either way. Unweighted GPAs were 3.85-4.00 for instate and 3.87-4.00 for OOS.
The alternative route to a UC is to perform well at a California Community College, and then transfer. Most UCs have transfer acceptance rates of at least 50% for California residents from CCCs, although the rate was only 29% at UCLA for 2016. Santa Monica College is particularly known as a “feeder” to UCLA.
@Corbett Wasn’t there a bit of a kerfuffle this year about the UC’s admitting lesser-qualified OOS candidates vs in-state? I don’t remember the details though, and certainly the UCLA stats you linked show the opposite.
Found the article, which still doesn’t jibe with the UCLA admitted-students stats. Here it is though:
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/03/29/state-audit-university-of-california-lowered-admission-standards-for-out-of-state-students/
@anomander Yes, there was a “bit of a kerfuffle”, but look at the dates. The article that you cited was published in March 2016. The audit that it discusses looked at data through the 2014-15 academic year.
Since then, the State of California agreed to increase funding to the UCs, to reduce the need for out-of-state tuition revenue. In return, the UCs agreed to increase in-state enrollment (which means that in-state admissions got easier), while capping non-resident enrollment (which means that non-resident admissions got harder). It’s not the same ball game now.
Ah, thanks for clearing that up. I’m glad to see the UC’s are doing better for their state residents and that the state also stepped up with increased funding. Certainly looks like there’s no longer much of an OOS advantage.
Not at UCLA, and probably not at Berkeley, San Diego, and Irvine either, since all of these campuses have hit their OOS enrollment caps. These are the most urban UCs, and have historically been the most popular with OOS students. Now that the caps are in effect, it seems likely that OOS admissions at these campuses will only become more competitive in the future.
However, there is another aspect to the enrollment caps. Every UC campus got one, including the less urban campuses of Davis, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Riverside, and Merced, which have historically been less attractive to OOS applicants. But these campuses are currently below their caps – in some cases, way below. Ironically, the caps may have given the less urban campuses a “green light” to add more OOS students, in contrast to the “red light” at the more urban schools.
So there might be an OOS advantage at Davis, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Riverside, and Merced, as long as those campuses remain below their caps. I wouldn’t be surprised if Davis and Santa Barbara run up against their caps soon though.