Hey folks,
I am applying for Fall 2018 admission at the following schools: UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego, San Jose State, San Francisco State, USC, Stanford, and Santa Clara University. This upcoming school year is going to be my 3rd year at my cc. I decided to stay an extra year back due to a change of career plans and to better prepare myself for my major (Anthropology). My question is, should I explain in my applications why I stayed an extra year at my community college? How common is it for students to spend 3 years at a community college? Does this affect my chances of admission?
Thank you!
Some of the UCs won’t consider you if you have more than a certain number of credits (often above about 80 semester units, but it varies by campus). At others, they’ll consider you, but it will impact your admission chances.
For example, UC Davis talks about this on this page: http://catalog.ucdavis.edu/admission/transfer.html
And here you can see more on this:
http://www.sdmesa.edu/student-services/transfer-center/documents/uc-transfer-maximum-limitation-policy-chart.pdf
Go to the chart on page 2 of that second link, which shows which UCs admit high unit juniors at all. Some will admit “some”. Others admit none. So before you do ANYTHING, please speak to a transfer counselor at your community college, as this upcoming year may need to be managed very, very carefully re: credit load so you can keep your credits down to a level where you can still apply to your chosen UCs.
Awesome! I’m at 58 units right now and I’m not going to be full time for the spring semester so I’m glad I got to see that information! Thank you @RoaringMice
@RoaringMice What about for CSUs? Is the Unitcap pretty much just for UCs?
Not at all, I stayed 3 years in my CC and got accepted all the UCs.
Just keep up the good gpa and write a good essay then you should get into majority of the UCs. Also, it’s worthwhile to checkout the previous year’s UC admit because it shows the percentiles of students that were accepted. If you are above or within the 25th percentile of the admittance then I say you have a decent shot of getting into a school you want.
I also spent three years at CC for the same reason. I also stayed a while longer to finish my math units as well as extra science classes for my major. I don’t think this will hurt your chances as I was accepted into every UC I applied to. See if you can TAG to a university as well. It guarantees you admission as long as you complete all requirements.
Here’s some information:
http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/transfer/guarantee/index.html
I was at my CC for three years and I just transferred for Fall so it’s not uncommon. Having a full time job and only being able to go to school part time did play a part but also I had a change in major so that’s why it took longer than the average. My new school accepted 70 of my 79 units and didn’t say a peep about it. As long as the golden four, lower division GE’s and lower division requirements for your major are finished on time you should be okay.
I thought the upper limit to how many units you can have is 90 for CSU/UCs? But you can only actually transfer up to 60