Exactly in the same boat with both of my high achieving kids. So very disappointing…wish the UCs would work together and spread the acceptances around rather than accepting 1 kid to multiple schools!!! Ultimately they can only attend 1 so why wouldn’t they spread the love around???
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I totally see how your daughter feels that way. My daughter has nearly identical stats and has so far been waitlisted at every UC she applied to (SC, LA, SD). She was admitted at Northeastern (NU Bound), Oberlin (with merit $), and Cal Poly SLO. I think she wants to go to SLO for many reasons, and she is embracing that acceptance. Not to diminish that enthusiasm for her or anyone else, but the lack of UC acceptances is dumbfounding for a kid with her hard work, diverse presentation, and genuine love of learning that earned her straight A’s in the hardest classes and spot 9 in a class of 500! I worry for my younger child, for all of our younger children.
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northeastern was uber competitive this year with over 90000 applicants and if she as national merit sat scores its a full ride i believe. many of the students at my daughters high school were rejected by northeastern and accepted by a couple of UC schools. so you should be very happy with northeastern. i understand the lack of UC schools but northeatern is sooo competitive.
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slo competitive too. a few years ago my son was accepted to ucla and berkeley but waitlisterd by slo.
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Thank you. Yes, I will edit my post. She was accepted to the NU Bound program which means the first year at another campus. I believe the acceptance rate for that program is higher, and for her, unfortunately it means the first year in the SF Bay Area, where we live, not London because she’s too young. 
And that’s a full pay program.
thats still great. you don’t need to edit i just think sometimes we forgot to value what we do have and focus on what we dont congrats to your daughter but i do understand frustration as well but i think everyone experiences it in some way or another. also uc do depend on major engineering is uber compeitive
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Admissions are not even close to meritocratic these days… ECs are way easier to do when you have a higher income and more connections. GPA varies so much school to school, and ECs and essays can be gamed. SAT was very far from perfect, but it was the best we had with the subject tests and all. Wonder what college admissions will be in 20 years…
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True! And there was no way my daughter was going to embellish not even 1 hour or any detail on her ECs. #rulefollower #proudmama
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May I know the number of applicants that applied to Berkeley this year?
128,000 I believe 
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Do you think UC has time to read every single essay considering Berkeley has 128,000 applicants and UCLA has over 149,000 this year?
I am not at all qualified to answer this but I think they do. Even if it’s not an AO, they have an outside reader read it at the very least. They prolly identify the rejects pretty quickly is my guess but I have no clue.
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My son is in a similar situation. 4.0/4.3/4.5 GPA, 12 AP/Honors classes, good essays (we think - hard to know for sure), etc. Waitlisted at UCSC, UCD, UCSD, UCI. Rejected at UCLA. Waiting on UCB, UCSB, and SLO but not that optimistic at this point. Looks like he’ll have to go OOS. Accepted at UMD, UW, CU Boulder, and Northeastern (NU Bound). Glad he applied OOS, or he potentially would have ended up with no options.
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Yes, they read every application and essay. Usually twice and there are Internal readers and External readers.
Any idea on how many Indians/South Asians were accepted last year?
I did not submit any SAT subject tests or APs, will this affect my chances? I applied to L&S and I was rejected at UCLA for engineering 
Don’t think this will matter for admissions nor is it available 
I am Indian myself
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UCB will not consider any SAT subject test scores in the application review. Did you self report your AP scores? They will ask for an official AP score report upon enrolling.
AP scores are considered for UCB’s application review so it could be a negative if you did not at least report on the application.
If things don’t change soon, you will have kids submitting 50+ applications to get into competitive majors like Computer Science. It means more revenue for the schools but I sense they are ill equipped to handle the excess load with holistic reviews.
We contemplated doing a mass application spree for another 10+ schools at the very end but were fortunate to get a decision from my son’s top choice (with his major) a day before we were to hit the submit button on the additional applications. These days you have to assume that the whole process is a lottery. It already is for competitive majors like my son’s (Computer Science) at schools that are even below T20.
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It will be a lottery!
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